Authors and genocide

In October 1941, two international gatherings took place in and around the German city of Weimar.

One had its photograph taken in front of the Goethe and Schiller monument in Weimar's old town and visited Tiefurt Castle, where the two, along with other poets of Weimar Classicism, had met for a number of years. The other was barely 10 kilometres away, north-west of Weimar, on the slopes of the Große Ettersburg; a ridge that Goethe is said to have climbed to work under one of the many beech trees that covered the slope before much of this beech forest - Buchenwald in German - was destroyed in 1937 to make way for a camp system that grew steadily larger over the next eight years. (Goethe's Beech was the only tree in the main camp area that the camp administration did not cut down. However, it was hit by Allied bombs in 1944 and only the stump was saved).

One of the assemblies consisted of some 37 writers from German-occupied and allied European countries. Many of them had previously been on a poets' tour of the so-called 'new Germany', paid for by the German Ministry of Propaganda. They were all guests of honour at a major congress for German writers, where the host of the congress, Third Reich Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, addressed them and their German colleagues in the Neue Sachlichkeit-influenced Weimarhalle. The second assembly consisted of the significant number of prisoners of war from Buchenwald concentration camp who had been transported there in the early years of the war from German-occupied European countries, particularly Poland and the Netherlands, as well as a large number of Soviet prisoners of war.

At the congress, some of the writers assembled also signed a founding document formalising the establishment of the European Writers' Association, an association whose first meeting took place a year later, when many of the writers and some of their colleagues returned to Weimar. According to the historian Benjamin G. Martin, this organisation and its conferences represented "a high point in the Nazi attempt to redefine European culture in the service of the Hitler Reich". By the end of the war, some 250,000 prisoners from more than 35 countries had set foot in the concentration camp and its satellite camps - for some 56,000 of them, the camps were the last place they left their footprints.

The contrast between the two forms of 'internationalism' I have outlined here is stark: the deliberately orchestrated cultural internationalism of the writers' congress versus the multinational composition of the concentration camp's prisoners; the juxtaposition of a group of travelling and congress attending writers, invited and celebrated by the National Socialist regime, on the one hand, and the victims of that same regime, transported to Buchenwald from all corners of Europe and treated as sub-humans, in many cases resulting in death, on the other, may seem absurd. Nevertheless, by juxtaposing the two gatherings, I hope that the contrast will highlight a question that, more fundamentally, was also at the heart of my dissertation, and which may call into question its moral foundation: How can the historian justify writing about the writers in Weimar and not about the genocide that took place barely 10 kilometres away?

And the contrast could have been sharper. Buchenwald was indeed barbaric, but it gets even worse if you look eastwards to the areas that Timothy Snyder has called Europe's "Bloodlands", where villages and neighbourhoods were exterminated in mass executions, and from which virtually none of the more than one million - mostly Jewish - people who were sent to the extermination camps of Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibór and Majdanek ever returned.

The primary research object of my dissertation was neither the Writers' Congress nor the genocide, although the Congress is to some extent a historical extension of the institution that was: The German-Nordic Writers' House in Travemünde near Lübeck on the German Baltic coast. The house, an art nouveau villa built by a Libyan senator around the turn of the century, hosted a handful of Nordic and German writers each year from its opening in 1934 until the summer of 1939 for one or more summer months of collegial exchange (a total of 30 Nordic and more than 20 German writers stayed at the house during the six summers). Some of the Nordic and German guests at the writers' house also appeared in connection with the Weimar congresses, a fact that does not in itself constitute the main connection between the two events, but which nevertheless suggests an institutional continuity and some similarities between the functions of the two institutions. Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, for example, was the main source of funding for both initiatives, which in different ways were part of the Third Reich's cultural diplomacy.

In a more abstract way, the question of authors and genocide was relevant to my dissertation project: Can the cultural institutions of the Nazi regime and their attempts to create international organisations and relations be taken seriously as a research topic without losing sight of what the lessons of history must and should be? For what is the significance of the never-realised attempts to create Nordic and European cultural institutions and relations in comparison with the crimes of National Socialism?

In a letter to a Finnish-Swedish colleague he had met at the Writers' House in the fateful summer of 1939, the Danish writer Erik Bertelsen reported that his latest collection of poems had received "some very good reviews, but not many. There is so much going on in the world that overshadows poetry. In other words: Who cares about collections of poetry when war and destruction loom?

Similarly, the culture and cultural institutions of the Third Reich have not figured prominently in historiographical discussions. With a few exceptions, most notably the in many ways pioneering historian George L. Mosse, until two or three decades ago historians treated Nazi culture and Nazi cultural institutions primarily as mere instruments of propaganda, and historians generally saw no need to engage with their cultural content. In his book The Seduction of Unreason, the historian Richard Wolin has noted that the Nazi state has often been portrayed as an anti-intellectual state, and another historian, David Atkinson, has pointed out that many post-war scholars and writers "clung to the general claim that the regime was devoid of thinkers, ideas and ideology", a position that proved "curiously durable". The 'Nazi intellectual' was - and often still is, especially outside academic history circles - considered a contradictory concept in itself. Intellectuals and cultural producers who worked in or interacted with the institutions of the Nazi state were long regarded as significant primarily in the sense that they contributed to the regime's propaganda, thereby legitimising the regime and, to a certain extent, facilitating its crimes.

It is obvious that artists, writers and intellectuals who were part of the Third Reich's cultural production aimed at both German and foreign audiences contributed directly or indirectly to the Third Reich's propaganda. But that doesn't mean they weren't sincere in their beliefs, or that their worldviews and ideas were not coherent when understood on their own terms, no matter how amoral we may find them. American historian Timothy Snyder, who, if anyone, has described the brutality of the Nazi genocide in the aforementioned bestseller Bloodlands, reflects in a short section of the book on the historian's moral approach to victims and war criminals, respectively:

"It is easy to legitimise political actions or support identities with reference to the death of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral hazard is never that you can become a victim, but that you can become a perpetrator or a bystander.

On a more theoretical level, British fascism scholar Roger Griffin has, since the early 1990s, been a seminal proponent of a turn in fascism scholarship that maintains that it is necessary to understand fascist ideologies on their own terms in order to understand the appeal of fascism among its political supporters and party members, as well as the general population at large - but also artists and intellectuals. In other words, Griffin argues for an approach that is empathetic rather than judgemental; not to excuse those who facilitated or participated in the crimes of fascism and Nazism, but to understand why both ideological radicals and the wider population participated in and supported those crimes.

It is therefore not wrong to understand, for example, the writers' house and the writers' congress as part of the Third Reich's propaganda, which, at least to some extent, was intended to legitimise National Socialist expansion plans. But it is not enough to condemn this propaganda and, for example, Nordic authors' participation in it. The argument can be taken further: the fact that the institutions were part of a propaganda apparatus does not automatically mean that they were not based on sincerely held thoughts, ideas and worldviews, or that the actors involved, whether German or Nordic, did not sincerely believe in their ideological premises. For example, German historian Arnd Bauerkämpfer, who has been at the forefront of attempts to understand the transnational aspects of Nazism over the past two decades, argues that

Italian fascism and German Nazism were genuinely attractive [to intellectuals and politicians] throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The cross-border ties that emerged in the "magnetic field" of these two important regimes cannot be reduced to a camouflaged quest for dominance.

And precisely because the propaganda was grounded, so to speak, it is all the more important to understand it, also because some of the intellectual visions expressed in the cultural sphere - for example, in the institutions I have mentioned here and the printed matter and journals they produced - also shaped and reflected the regime's politics. So there is a connection between the Writers' Congress and the concentration camp. Both were the results of the multifaceted sets of visions for a "European reorganisation" that, as German historian Raimund Bauer has shown in his book The Construction of a National Socialist Europe during the Second World War, were constantly under negotiation among Third Reich officials and politicians. According to Bauer, such visions were based to varying degrees on racial biological hierarchies on the one hand, and economic visions of Europe as an integrated economic space - a so-called Großraum - on the other. The weight and significance of the different elements for German occupation policy in different parts of occupied Europe varied over the course of the war and was largely dependent on the Third Reich's institutional and political power struggles - and on internal discussions at official level. Indeed, Bauer convincingly insists that German discourses of a racial-biological-economic "European reorganisation" cannot be understood with sufficient clarity if they are seen primarily as attempts to flatter the Third Reich's European allies or the populations of the occupied countries.

Bauer does not deal with the cultural sphere, but Benjamin G. Martin, as mentioned earlier, sees the European Writers' Union as part of an institutional set-up that aimed to create a European cultural reorganisation. More specifically, Martin shows how the creation of the Authors' Guild, along with Italian and German attempts to take control of a number of international organisations and other newly created institutions, was rooted in serious intentions to organise European cultural life in line with inter-national precepts. Inter-national in the sense that the hyphen was taken at face value: these institutions were to function as forums where representatives of centralised, corporate state organisations could each represent a selection of - ideologically acceptable - 'national' cultural producers whose cultural views revolved around national particularities and rejected universalist thinking.

In my PhD, I argued that the Authors' House was also rooted in deeply rooted visions of what constituted 'the Nordic' and serious consideration of how 'interpersonal relations' could be organised in line with varieties of National Socialist ideology. This is not to say that the backers of the German institutions didn't hope - they demonstrably did - that the house, the interaction with German writers and the many trips to events, social institutions and tourist destinations around the Third Reich would serve as good publicity for National Socialist Germany. It didn't always work, but there were writers who were attracted to Nazism - or at least came home better "friends of German culture," which, according to one of the visiting writers, was the house's real purpose. There was no genocide going on during the years from 1934 to 1939 when Scandinavian and Finnish writers stayed at the Writers' House, although the regime's discrimination against Jews as well as the National Socialists' political opponents was in full swing. Many of the writers were primarily curious and wanted to see for themselves the political experiment that the Third Reich also was, some were seeking material for their writing in the "new Germany," others were probably hoping to be introduced - or strengthen their position - in the lucrative German book market. Others wrote critically about National Socialist Germany after their stay; a few even spoke out quite passionately against the regime and its actions. At the same time, their stay itself helped to normalise cultural relations between the Third Reich and the Nordic countries.

Thus, there are many nuances to consider when exploring the function of Nordic writers in the cultural diplomacy of the Third Reich. Following Timothy Snyder's point, it is important to understand the motives of the authors and the visions that underpinned the German-Nordic or "European" author collaborations, and which the participating authors to a greater or lesser extent accepted - to chart the "magnetic field" of Bauerkämper - if one wants to understand why some of the authors were attracted to Nazism and thus (albeit indirectly) became "perpetrators," and others ended up as passive "bystanders" to the conditions and political system that made the genocide possible.

Frederik Forrai Ørskov is a postdoc at the University of Helsinki and a visiting researcher at the Nordic Humanities Centre at the University of Copenhagen and editor of Baggrund.