Berlin полностью

Ironically, the Berlin papers catering exclusively to the Jewish community were given broader latitude than the rest of the city’s press. As long as they did not directly attack the regime’s policies, papers like Der Jüdische Rundschau, Israelit, and Der Nationaldeutsche Jude were pretty much left alone. The logic here was that the purely Jewish press could not be expected to conform to higher Aryan standards since its writers were racially incapable of doing so. The relative lack of censorship allowed the Jewish papers to be more factually accurate than their “German” competitors. Realizing this, some non-Jewish Berliners began reading the Jewish press. The circulation of the Jüdische Rundschau actually increased in the early years of the Third Reich.

In the end, however, even limited diversity in Berlin’s newspaper world was unacceptable to the Nazi regime, and more and more papers were forced to close due to political or economic pressures. Between 1933 and 1938 Berlin lost twenty-nine of its papers. By the beginning of World War II, aside from those owned by Hugenberg, only ten papers survived, all of them under direct Nazi control. Berlin’s days as Europe’s greatest newspaper city were over.

Journalists were the first to feel the heat of Nazi censorship because they obviously shaped public opinion. But imaginative writers, whose influence was less obvious, also had to watch what they wrote if they did not want to end up on the regime’s “black list,” which at the very least could mean a prohibition on publication. Rather than attempting to conform, a host of novelists and poets left Germany in the early years of the Third Reich, following the example of those who had already emigrated in the waning days of Weimar. Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, who had moved from Munich to Berlin in the mid-1920s to escape the growing influence of volkisch barbarism, now quit Germany entirely, decamping first to France, then to America. Their final landing place was Los Angeles, which became the exile home for dozens of other German émigrés: a kind of Berlin-on-the-Pacific. Another prominent German writer who ended up in Los Angeles was Heinrich’s brother Thomas. He began his long exile in February 1933 after being branded a traitor by his fellow intellectuals in Munich for allegedly besmirching the good name of Richard Wagner. In addition to Heinrich Mann and Feuchtwanger, the literary hemorrhage from Berlin in the first years of the Third Reich included Kurt Tuchol-sky, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Walter Hasenclever, Alfred Döblin, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Werfel, Anna Seghers, Arnold and Stefan Zweig—the list reads like a Who’s Who of German literature. They constituted the first wave of a cultural exodus that grew with the years until that dreadful moment when it became no longer possible to leave—except in a boxcar. Those who got out in time were the lucky ones, though the dislocation of exile proved too much for some. Among the prominent literary suicides from Berlin were Benjamin, Hasenclever, Stefan Zweig, and Tucholsky.

The Nazis graphically demonstrated their attitude toward “un-German” and “Jewish-Bolshevik” literature by organizing book-burnings in university towns around the country. The one in Berlin, which took place on May 10, 1933, was the largest, befitting the city’s status as a center of “literary subversion.” In the middle of the Opernplatz, just a few meters from the statues of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, storm troopers and students built a pile of 20,000 books that they had pillaged from libraries and stores around town. The authors honored in this anti-canon included Marx, Brecht, Feuchtwanger, the Mann brothers, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Kastner, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, H. G. Wells, Sig-mund Freud, Emile Zola, Upton Sinclair, Andre Gide, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, and Helen Keller. Also tossed on the pyre was the entire library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research, which the Nazis had recently smashed up and closed. As their fire blazed, the students (and, even more revoltingly, a few professors) chanted the dim-witted dogmas of Nazi cultural politics: “Against decadence and moral decay! For discipline and decency in the family and state!” “Against impudence and arrogance, for respect and reverence toward the immortal German soul!” At midnight Goebbels showed up to address the crowd. He had been somewhat reluctant to attend, fearing that some might recall that he had studied literature with Jewish professors and had once even praised some of the authors now being pilloried. Nonetheless, he managed to bring forth the expected slogans, denouncing the works on the smoldering pile as “the intellectual foundation of the November Republic,” now vanquished along with the “era of Jewish hyper-intellectualism.”