Hermann Claudius and the Politics of Inner Emigration

Abstract

This article examines four poems by Hermann Claudius, which were published in March 1935 on facing pages in the national conservative literary monthly Die Neue Literatur. Reading the poems as a cycle, I argue that they represent a literary mode whose political aesthetics fall between inner emigration writing and committed National Socialist literature, which I call Nazi inner emigration writing. The concept of the Writer-Führer serves as a bridge from theorizing the political potential of Innerlichkeit for the conservative-revolutionary aesthetic fundamentalists to its role in Nazi inner emigration writing. Drawing on what Frank Trommler calls the lesende Volksgemeinschaft as well as Nazi understandings of “Dichter” and “Führer,” I argue that the “Aryan” poetic subject in the Claudius poems represents a “Dichter-Führer” who seeks to build a reading racial community of non-persecuted Germans without using explicitly racialized language, which I describe as passive representational violence. (CL)