The Conversion of “Comrade” Müller

Posted by Bogumil

“I probably will never be a real National Socialist, but…” A 1935 example of National Socialist ‘proletarian fiction’ by Labor Front writer Walter Dach

One of the many innovations which the early socialist movement developed in the field of propaganda was the concept of ‘proletarian literature.’ Proletarian literature constituted writing directly aimed at appealing to a working-class audience and at conveying socialist ideology to them through entertainment. Usually published as a novel or as a serialized story in a workers’ newspaper, proletarian literature was written in a popular, accessible style, and would typically focus on presenting readers with characters and situations they could relate to: working-class people living working-class lives and experiencing similar joys and frustrations to their own. This format’s efficacy in terms of communicating ideological principles and talking-points was notable, and proletarian literature was one of the many forms of socialist technique which the National Socialists in Germany and Austria incorporated into their own political propaganda work. Proletarian stories were not uncommon within National Socialist publications during the movement’s ‘years of struggle’ before 1933, and they were a regular feature in Goebbels’s daily Der Angriff in particular, which was specifically targeted towards a working-class audience. Proletarian fiction continued to be employed by the NSDAP after it came into power, with the vast resources of the German Labor Front (DAF) aiding in the publishing and dissemination of labor-themed stories and novels which it was hoped would help win over the workers to the ‘New Germany’ into which many of them had been somewhat reluctantly thrust. The story excerpt below is one such example. The author, Walter Dach, was employed by the ‘Strength Through Joy’ organization (an arm of the DAF) to write National Socialist-themed proletarian literature aimed at propagating National Socialist ideals about the ‘dignity of labor’ and the ‘ideal worker’ among the German working-classes. This particular story was excerpted from a 1935 collection by Dach entitled Volksgenosse Müller II: Erzählungen der Arbeit (‘Folk-Comrade Müller II: Labor Stories’), and includes a trope common to National Socialist fiction – the simple, noble-hearted German worker (‘Comrade Müller’), whose deep-rooted love of Volk and Fatherland causes him to rise above his conditioned sympathy for Marxism or Bolshevism and to embrace Germany (as well as Hiter and National Socialism) instead. This translation is not by myself, but comes from George L. Mosse’s book Nazi Culture; I have not so far been able to find an original copy of Dach’s book, so I am unsure whether this excerpt represents the story in its entirety or is merely a fragment.

The Conversion of “Comrade” Müller
Walter Dach

“I must leave again right away,” Müller said quickly, after he had swept up his boys, all three of them, in the circle of his mighty arms, the while shouting “Loafers! Vagabonds!” and, in accordance with a long-established custom, carried them out of the kitchen and threw them onto the beds. The youngest, a six-year-old, enjoyed it most, but all three roared and bellowed like lions.

“Must you go out again?” Müller’s wife asked with a touch of apprehension. She knew that something was gnawing at him and boiling inside him. He was a regular fanatic in everything he did, and on occasion he easily became thoughtless. The cause of Labor seemed definitely lost; it had been drilled into him for a generation, so that he had to believe it now. But what wholly confused him was that he had no evidence for it. “Hitler is a slave of the bourgeoisie!” they had shouted for many years at political meetings. And now they saw how captains of industry and banker-princes had to ask this Hitler for favors.

“And they will certainly take him in!” Müller had tried to tell himself.

They want to. Could be. But will he permit himself to be taken in? That is the question. Frau Müller had never been particularly interested in politics. But this much she understood (in fact, she felt it): Hitler wants the best for the worker; one can trust him. He has himself stood on a scaffold as a simple worker, and he knows what’s in the poor man’s heart.

“He will forget, just like all the other big shots we’ve had before,” grumbled Müller.

“I don’t believe that,” said his wife. “The man lives so simply, you can see that by his clothes. Of course, time will tell. By the way, there’s a letter from the Association of the Saarlanders… about the plebiscite.”¹ Continue reading →

National Socialism or Bolshevism?

Posted by Bogumil

An early example of national-bolshevist ideological writing by Joseph Goebbels

The writing and speeches of Joseph Goebbels – especially those produced during the ‘Years of Struggle’, before the National Socialist German Workers’ Party attained political power – are particularly instructive in demonstrating the kinds of radicalism which could exist within the Party. Goebbels was always a radical; as a young man he had found an attraction in the unlikely works of August Bebel and Walter Rathenau, and his direct experiences with poverty had sharpened his sense of social justice. Initially drawn to communism, Goebbels’s inability to embrace the internationalist aspects of Marxist ideology led him first to the völkisch movement and then, in early 1925, into the newly reconstituted NSDAP. From the beginning Goebbels represented the more revolutionary side of National Socialism: bitterly opposed to the bourgeois world and its values, proud of his shabby poverty, and aggressively vocal in his belief that it was the socialism in National Socialism which took precedence above all else. His radicalism first led him into an alliance with Gregor Strasser and then, after several years of struggle and disillusionment, into a bitter opposition to the man who had once been his mentor. Even as an enemy of the Strasser brothers Goebbels was still a radical, with much of his effort as Gauleiter of Berlin-Brandenburg in the late ’20s and early ’30s spent attempting to win over the Berlin workers with fiery attacks on capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and the “false socialism” of the Marxists and the Bolshevists. Goebbels’s earliest writings are perhaps some of his most interesting, because in this period his appreciation for communism was still fresh and his ideology was in many respects more National Bolshevist than National Socialist in orientation. The article below, written not long after Goebbels had spoken before a joint meeting of Communists and National Socialists in late 1925, is strong evidence of his views in this early period of activism, when he was most vocal in avowing class-struggle and proletarian liberation as among the chief goals of the National Socialist movement. Addressed to his “friend from the Left” (i.e. the Communist he had debated at the previous meeting), this article was originally published in the October 1925 edition of Gregor Strasser’s Nationalsozialistische Briefe, a left-oriented NS journal of which Goebbels was editor at the time.

National Socialism or Bolshevism?
Joseph Goebbels

First published in the Nationalsozialistische Briefe, no. 2, 15^th October 1925.

My friend from the Left!

Not as captatio benevolentiae,¹ but straight out and without reservations, I confess that I liked you, you are a fine fellow! Yesterday evening I could have carried on debating with you for hours before the thousands of transfixed listeners, because I had the feeling that the fundamental question of our commonalities and our differences was being raised within the forum of the German workers, whom this question ultimately concerns. And it is with the same feeling that I am writing out these lines to you.

You have clearly recognized what is at stake. We have agreed on the causes. No honest, thinking person today would wish to deny the legitimacy of the workers’ movements. It is only a question of the method and the formulation of their final goal. Grown out of need and misery, they stand before us today as living witnesses to our disunity and impotence, to the deficiency of our national spirit of sacrifice and our will for the future. We no longer need to discuss whether the demand of the German employee for social compensation is justified, just as we do not need to discuss whether or not the disenfranchised fourth estate² should live or must live.

National or international in path and goal, that is the question. We both are fighting honestly and resolutely for freedom and only for freedom; as our ultimate accomplishment we both desire peace and community – you that of the world, I that of the Volk. That this accomplishment cannot be attained within this system is entirely clear and evident to both of us. To talk of quiescence today is to make the graveyard one’s home; to be peaceful in this state is pacifism and cowardice. You and I, we both know that a state, a system that is inwardly thoroughly mendacious, is meant to be overthrown; that for the new state one therefore has to fight and make sacrifices. In this respect yesterday we both could have been saying the exact same things about the bourgeois cowards of black-red-gold Social-Democracy. Thus far we have been in agreement. Continue reading →

The Social Economy

Posted by Bogumil

“Earn it if you would own it!” National Socialist economic theoretician Dr. Otto Wagener and the ‘third way’ between nationalization and socialization

A common misconception I see about National Socialism is that the movement “had no theory,” that it comprised at best a set of mindless slogans and aesthetics which had no solid intellectual footing. The swaggering remarks made by some NSDAP leaders admittedly have not helped allay this perception, as they were often overly keen to define their movement as one of “action” in order to set it apart from the staid, dogma-laden, bourgeois respectability of more mainstream competitors. Yet the claim that National Socialism was bereft of ideas or principles cannot have been particularly convincing to anyone alive when it was at its most active, at least to those with eyes. The movement in its heyday produced massive quantities of publications examining political, economic, scientific, and philosophical issues from the perspective of the “nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung,” including a number of theoretical journals. Particularly central to National Socialist ideology was its economic theory, which had deep roots by way of Social-Democracy and the Kathedersozialisten, and which the Party’s Economic Policy Department (Wirtschaftspolitische Abteilung, WPA) worked into a variety of draft policy proposals in the early 1930s. The head of the WPA was Dr. Otto Wagener (b.1888 – d.1971), a man who for several years was a senior figure in the NS leadership as well as the NSDAP’s chief economic theoretician. One of the potential models for a National Socialist economic order explored by Wagener was that of the “social economy” (Sozialwirtschaft), a system in which the principles of natural selection and worker participation would merge to form a new alternative to both nationalization and socialization. Property rights in Wagener’s “social economy” would not be absolute, with the system instead being characterized by a gradual and continuous transfer of business and industry ownership into the hands of the most capable workers. Wagener’s idea, like many of the draft proposals researched and debated by the WPA, never actually became official policy, but it nonetheless still serves as a perfect example of the theoretical credentials of a movement so often painted as crudely anti-intellectual. The text below is an excerpted chapter from Wagener’s post-War memoirs, in which the author gives an account of the informal economic policy conferences he held with Hitler in 1930 where the idea of the “social economy” was first discussed. The majority of the text is taken verbatim from Ruth Hein’s English translation of Wagener’s memoirs, although I have edited it slightly to add in several sections from the German original which Hein cut from her translation.

Plans for a “Social Economy”
An Informal Economic Policy Conference, Summer, 1930
From the memoirs of Dr. Otto Wagener

NS_Swastika

In the early summer of 1930, Hess asked me on behalf of Hitler whether I had time at a certain hour the next day for an economic policy conference. Strasser and Dr. Wagner,¹ at that time Gauleiter of Munich, would be present.

The next day the four of us sat around the round table in Hitler’s office.

Hitler raised the issue of my position on the problem of nationalization and socialization. I had the feeling that he wanted to familiarize himself for the first time with my attitude towards economic policy.

I began by stating something like the following:

“Of course, I am naturally well-acquainted with what the points of the NSDAP programme say regarding this topic. But since you are asking how I feel about these problems, I shall now neither take these into account nor refer to them.”

In wide-ranging remarks on the problem between “capital and labor” in industry, Wagener in the following pages of his memoir then rejects as a solution both nationalization and a “direct socialization” through the takeover of enterprises by workers.² A “direct socialization” is impractical in the long term, especially with regard to future investment. Nationalization merely replaces the private entrepreneur with the state, while leaving the worker in a service relationship with capital. This entangles the state in the conflict between capital and labor, a development which could have dangerous political consequences. Nationalization also leaves unanswered the question: Who is the state? Its final result would be domination by those groups which control the state, the consequence being the spread of the “spirit of the feeding-trough.” In addition, the “automatic self-healing mechanisms” inherent within “healthy competitive struggle” would also be lost. Wagener therefore warned against the nationalization of those enterprises which the state did not absolutely need to possess. “Completely different methods” would be necessary in order to achieve the transition from individualism to socialism.

Continue reading →

Gregor Strasser on National Socialism

Posted by Bogumil

“We National Socialists are socialists, real, national, German socialists!” A 1925 article by Gregor Strasser on the meaning of Fatherland and National Socialism

NSDAP_Wir_Arbeiter_sind_erwacht The following article by Gregor Strasser was first published on 4 September, 1925, roughly six months after the NSDAP’s refounding following Hitler’s release from Landsberg Prison. I am not sure in what publication it first appeared. Possibly it was in the Nationalsozialistische Briefe, of which Gregor was chief editor for several years and which was founded at roughly the same time this article was originally printed. Regardless of which platform the article first appeared in, it was considered significant enough to be reprinted in subsequent collections of Gregor’s writings – it shows up both in his 1928 booklet, Freiheit und Brot (‘Freedom and Bread’), and in his ‘collected works’ from 1932, Kampf um Deutschland (‘Struggle for Germany’). It is fairly typical of Gregor’s early writing in that it is heavy on sentiment and emotion but light on actual, concrete policy propositions. This was a deficiency which Gregor was apparently aware of and sought to address later on in his career, as in the early ’30s he began working quite closely with economic experts, business figures, and state officials in an attempt to develop workable programs for resolving the unemployment and housing crises (see his famous ‘Work and Bread!’ speech for one example of this). Despite its propagandist tone the article still makes for an interesting read from a number of angles. It is overtly anti-capitalist, espouses a commitment to radical economic restructuring and to concepts of social justice (the ‘community of bread’), and additionally includes a brief recollection from the author’s time as a junior officer in WWI. Like many in the national-revolutionary camp Gregor makes it clear – both in this piece and many others – that his experiences in the Great War are what led him to an awareness of the plight of the German worker, and are what turned him from an ordinary German nationalist into a National Socialist, the belief system of which he attempts to convey within this article.

National Socialism:
“What does ‘Fatherland’ mean?”
Gregor Strasser

With the Dawes Plan, the intention of Jewish-influenced, American-English capital to use Germany’s national economy as a gigantic profit-extraction operation, to transform German industry into a colossal workshop for Wall Street capital, and to make an industrious Volk of 60 million people into an enormous army of defenseless wage-slaves, will be fully realized within the next few years.

In light of this development we must now and forever set our goals clearly, unambiguously, and openly.

Only in this way will our ideas gain an attractive power with respect to the yearning of a deceived, betrayed Volk.

We National Socialists are socialists, real, national, German socialists! We reject the vulgarization of this concept, the watering-down of the word from “socialism” into “social” – a word which, like no other, has become a hypocritical smokescreen behind which the all-too-visible inadequacy of the capitalist economic system is concealed, or which is, at best, the totally inadequate consolation for the kinds of honest men who believe that they can cure the festering wounds on the body of the economy and the Volk by placing a compassionate sticking-plaster over them. No, we are socialists, and we do not shy away from taking upon ourselves the stigma of this word, a word which Marxism has so terribly distorted. Continue reading →