Hermann Claudius and the Politics of Inner Emigration

Aesthetic Fundamentalism and the National Conservative Writer-Führer

The Writer-Führer was an important concept for two groups of writers connected to the so-called “conservative revolution” in the late-1920s and early-1930s: what Breuer refers to as the “aesthetic fundamentalists,” which included Stefan George and the George Circle, and nationalist neoclassical writers such as Paul Ernst. In their reflections on political aesthetics, these writers emphasized three details relevant to this argument: the association of aesthetic experience with an inward spiritual transformation, the temporal lag that exists between aesthetic engagement and political change, and an abstract, nonpartisan understanding of the political. The Writer-Führer manifests in these texts as an outstanding individual above or outside the fray of politics, an inspirational model or “Vorbild” who could remake the image of German society and thereby lead to spiritual, cultural, and national renewal.

In 1927, two years before his death in 1929, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote two texts about the politics of German poetic language, arguing that the unfathomable depth of such language holds the nation together as its “spiritual life” [Leib]. In “Wert und Ehre deutscher Sprache,” he focuses on German language dialects and the Volkslied, arguing that the German language elevates poetry to a sublime realm in which the German nation can be found and expressed. (“Wert und Ehre” 130). In “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation,” which he gave as a speech in the main auditorium of the University of Munich, he explicitly develops his idea of a conservative revolution whose “Ziel ist Form, eine neue deutsche Wirklichkeit, an der die ganze Nation teilnehmen könne” (Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum” 41). In the speech, Hofmannsthal lays out a spiritual conception of the nation that is based not only on the German language but also on German inwardness. This community [Gemeinschaft] is bound by a spiritual connection sustained through literature (Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum;dp 24). Specifically, he describes a dialectical process whereby the spirit overcomes difference by poeticizing conflict into unity (Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum” 41). Following from his mentor Stefan George, Hofmannsthal conceptualizes the poet in these texts as capable of leading and unifying a nation by inspiring inward, spiritual transformation.

In “Wert und Ehre deutscher Sprache” Hofmannsthal describes the sublimity of German poetry as the “das Griechische [der] deutschen Sprache” (Hofmannsthal, “Wert und Ehre” 130). A similar neoclassical framing of the nation as the sublime poetic expression of an inward transformation can also be found in a book review of the neoclassical writer (and future member of the nazified Preußische Akademie der Künste) Paul Ernst’s 1929 essay collection Grundlagen der Neuen Gesellschaft. Titled “Der Dichter als Führer,” the review appeared in July 1930, the year after Hofmannsthal’s Munich speech, in the monthly Die Neue Literatur, which was “seit ihrer Gründung (1923) ein Kampforgan der ‘völkischen Dichter,’ insbesondere ihres Herausgebers Will Vesper, gegen die Literatur der Juden und Judengenossen” (Berglund 7). The author, Hasso Härlen, is not included in Breuer’s study of aesthetic fundamentalism, though he expresses similar ideas about the Writer-Führer. Härlen was a mathematician from Stuttgart whose name is listed on the 1929 Vienna Circle brochure, often considered the group’s unofficial manifesto.3 More op-ed than philosophical analysis, there are still certain noncognitivist, emotivist, and voluntarist influences on Härlen’s review, namely his argument that the Writer-Führer is capable of creating a new political ethos that will overcome what he perceives as the decadence threatening German society. The political action of the “Staatsmann,” he writes, must stem from sources “jenseits des Vernünftigen” (Härlen 336). Free from the limits of truth and falsity imposed by the scientific method, the creative writer alone is able to work intersubjectively and tell us “was wir tun sollen, indem er in uns eine neue Gesinnung schafft” (334). In this sense, Härlen declares, the classical writer is a political writer. “Der Mangel des Gefühls für die Dichtung ist Ausdruck eines allgemeineren Mangels: wir leben in einer Zeit der falschen Gefühle und des falschen Denkens. Durch die Schöpfung neuer Gefühle überwindet der Dichter die Welt der falschen Gefühle” (Härlen 334). While less refined than Hofmannsthal’s work, Härlen makes a similar claim: the classical writer is a political writer insofar as he provides humanity with new images and new possibilities to lead them out of the hell of formlessness and dead forms. This idea was echoed more famously by Gottfried Benn several years later in his 1934 “Rede auf Stefan George,” in which Benn speaks of “die neuen Götter: Form und Zucht” (Benn 489).

For George himself, the poetic realm is not only a site of spiritual transformation; it also allegorizes its own distance from the political, suggesting a temporal lag between aesthetic engagement and national-cultural renewal. A few months before his death in December 1933, George declined the Nazi Bernhard Rust’s invitation to join the reconstituted Writers’ Academy, writing explicitly, “die gesetze des geistigen und des politischen sind gewiss sehr verschieden” (Raulff 52–53).4 I read George’s Writer-Führer as an event in language, a poetic device that interpellates readers into an aesthetic (and not political or racial) community. For example, in George’s arguably most political poem “Der Dichter in Zeiten der Wirren,” the Writer-Führer “pflanzt das neue Reich,” a metaphor that connotes temporal lag (as planting something means it will take time to grow and flower). William Waters has described this as the “underlying constant opposedness between art and social realities” in George’s work (Waters 45).5 George’s implicit notion of the Writer-Führer maintains this opposition, insofar as the writer’s political influence is limited to a poetic realm, and the material impact of this influence is thus always indirect, nonpartisan, and deferred, calling forth a new image of society from, and through, the autonomous realm of poetic language.

Whereas the Writer-Führer was a fairly implicit concept in the work of George and Hofmannsthal, the George disciple (and future Nazi) Max Kommerell describes this figure explicitly in his book Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik, published in 1929 by George’s publisher Georg Bondi. In this text, Kommerell also maintains an explicit separation between art and politics, stating in the preface that his use of the word “Führer” does not mean that he believes the writer is a political actor (Kommerell 7). As a contribution to literary history rather than a political directive, he foregrounds a Wirkungspoetik whereby the writer serves as a “Vorbild” who both inspires a new spiritual movement but is also conditioned by their experience in a particular social and historical context. Like Hofmannsthal, he describes a “Raum der Sage” that unifies “Geist und Tat, der dichterischen Stimme mit der lauschenden Gemeinde, des Helden mit dem Volke” (Kommerell 466). The “Writer-Führer” who have mastery in this realm are “sinnbildliche, stellvertretende Figuren” who construct the “Geheimbilder” of social renewal and stand behind the coming event of social transformation (Kommerell 481). Kommerell describes this transformation as a kind of “zweite Hohzeit” and “inner ernstes Morgen” where the youth will experience the birth of the new fatherland through both “glühende Einung” and the clamor of long-buried weapons (483). The transformation of the Volk is thus mediated by, and emergent from, the poetic image, which he describes as a “Kleinod.” The poetic image conditions both this glowing treasure of unity and the martial instruments of mobilization in the way it facilitates and realizes the formation of the Volk, which is an aesthetic or spiritual, rather than racial, community. There is a clear reference here to George’s “Der Dichter in Zeiten der Wirren,” which deploys similar metaphors like the völkisch banner, the loyal flock, and planting the New Reich.

These metaphors underscore how cultural renewal and political change, the domains of the Writer-Führer, were understood for the aesthetic fundamentalists and neoclassicists like Härlen and Paul Ernst as abstract phenomena rather than concrete racial or ideological demands. In August 1935, two years after Ernst’s death, Die Neue Literatur published a reprint of his 1932 essay “Das deutsche Volk und der Dichter von heute.” In the essay, Ernst criticizes Marxism for leading to the “Entseelung der Arbeit” and claims “die Nationalsozialisten haben die Falschheit der [kommunistischen] Zielsetzung erkannt” and “[sie predigen] das richtige neue Lebensgefühl, das aus einer tragischen, ja, religiösen Lebensauffassung kommt” (Ernst 510). He discusses a general discontent brought about by “Mechanisierung,” which has replaced organic life, and concludes that any hope of a new world will need to start “im Geistigen” (510). Like the other writers discussed here, he emphasizes that literature [Dichtung] has neither a political nor a social effect but rather fulfills “ihre eigene dichterische Aufgabe: den Menschen ein schönes und gutes Weltbild zu zeigen” (509). Even in a more explicitly political context, Ernst’s conservative revolutionary notion of the Writer-Führer falls short of collapsing the poetic realm into the political realm.

Such major conservative writers had thus been exploring the concept of the Writer-Führer both explicitly and implicitly in their work in the eight years or so before the four Claudius poems were published in Die Neue Literatur in 1935. For each of these writers, whose styles varied considerably, the Writer-Führer was important for having the capacity and impetus to create national community on a spiritual level through a shared, inner aesthetic experience that could reveal a higher truth. The possibility of community was predicated on this internal, or spiritual, experience, which was deeply rooted in Innerlichkeit. Thus, while each of these texts has a conservative political dimension, insofar as they suggest cultural renewal through spiritual transformation and aesthetic experience, they couch this renewal and this national community in cultural, rather than racial, terms.

From the Writer-Führer to the Nazified Dichter-Führer

In what follows, I want to consider a particular strand of inner emigration writing—what I call Nazi inner emigration writing—that employs these tropes to tacitly affirm or accept the myth of the “Aryan,” in whose context the concepts of “Dichter” and “Führer” had quite specific meanings. Drawing on these meanings, I argue that Nazi inner emigration writing imputes an explicitly racist dimension to this spiritual transformation that builds and reinforces a homogenous “Aryan” community through what Leonard Olschner describes as the inner emigration tropes of silence, stasis, and the “absence of historical time” (149).

On the one hand, the concept of inner emigration—understood as an inward emigration away from Nazi Germany by those residing in Nazi Germany—does not quite capture what the aesthetic fundamentalists were advocating. Nonetheless, their various descriptions of how reading can facilitate a process of turning inward, away from the world, in order to discover a higher truth does prefigure certain tendences in inner emigration writing. The major difference, however, is that because inner emigration writing exists in the context of Nazi racial “theories,” it cannot invoke aspects of these beliefs, such as the “Volk,” without either (implicitly or explicitly) resisting or tacitly endorsing them. For non-persecuted Germans, I argue, ignoring or distancing oneself from the biological racism that largely defined the Nazi worldview can do more to reinforce these beliefs than it can do to undermine or challenge them. It builds community around a shared racial identity rather than a shared (antifascist) political orientation.

As a literary mode, inner emigration writing seems to have emerged somewhat organically and was never a “unified phenomenon” acknowledged by the Nazi cultural bureaucracy (Trommler, “Targeting the Reader” 115). As studies by Jan-Pieter Barbian and Volker Dahm have demonstrated, inner emigration literature was tolerated by the Reich Chamber of Literature for its political indifference and because it “betrayed no noticeable aesthetic connection to condemned modernist artistic and stylistic movements” (Dahm 173). The Reich Chamber of Literature was a division of Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, which oversaw the process of Gleichschaltung, the mandated Nazification, or ideological coordination, of all German political, social, and economic institutions. Furthermore, while the Nazis wanted “Dichtung” to lead readers to the “collective experience of lesende Volkgemeinschaft,” they did not “find a way to transform reading from an uncontrollable private act to a social or collective affair” (Trommler, “A Command Performance” 125–126). A distinct quality of NS literature was thus its “enormous effort to shape a particular form of reception, a Nazi reading experience strongly directed toward the communal and collective” (Trommler, “A Command Performance” 112).

Some examples of national conservative inner emigration writing have been understood as conveying covert, clandestine, or indirect critiques of National Socialism. These include texts by writers such as Werner Bergengruen, Ernst Jünger, and Reinhold Schneider, who used “historical camouflage” or exotic lands as “modes of indirect critique” (Schoeps 188). Another example is the racist yet self-proclaimed anti-Nazi Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s novel Bockelson. Geschichte eines Massenwahns, which was either published by accident, because no one denounced it, or because “numerous rivals and conflicting opportunists in the cultural bureaucracy of the Third Reich allowed a number of works to slip through” (Schoeps 196). Of course, it was also possible for national conservative writers to be targeted by Nazi censors. For example, the apolitical writer Friedrich Georg Jünger’s “Der Mohn,” a poem about intoxication, was deemed too explicitly critical by the cultural authorities and resulted in the Gestapo searching Jünger’s house. Many other examples are characterized by what Olschner describes as “a stubborn though ultimately comprehensible sense of stasis [and a] remarkably depersonalized mode of voice” (Olschner 131). In Olschner’s analysis of a broad selection of inner emigration poetry, he argues that “the absence of historical time functions as a prerequisite and justification for the very existence of poetry,” and “silence, a modernist dilemma, is nowhere seriously threatening” (149). Drawing on Adorno, he writes that “history is locked up in works of art, in poems—repressed, denied—because it was so threatening” (Olschner 138).6

With its thematizing of stasis, silence, and the absence of historical time, inner emigration writing thus differed thematically from committed NS literature that explicitly reflected the Nazi worldview.7 It could still, however, accomplish at least some of the same goals as committed NS literature, namely, the construction of the “Aryan” and the collective experience and celebration of the racially homogenous Volk. As Ralf Schnell argues, the most important attribute of NS literature was a literary attitude that produced homogeneity and sameness: “[Diese Haltung] verfolgt selber ihre Zwecke: allen die identische Rede aufzuzwingen, allen ein identisches Reden abzuringen” (118). Not just language, but Innerlichkeit itself, could be controlled, regulated, and made infinitely selfsame through the endless repetition of identical speech. The goal of the Reich Chamber of Literature, he writes (quoting Hildegard Brenner), “war erklärtermaßen ‘die Umschaltung der Massen nach gewonnenem Siege auf die Innerlichkeit’” (cit. Schnell 81).

As I argue below, in the Nazi inner emigration writing exemplified by the Claudius poems, these seemingly nonpolitical themes of stasis, silence, and the absence of historical time combine with a Nazi subtext constructed through euphemisms, allusions, and coded and suggestive language to reinforce belonging and build a reading racial community. The distinguishing characteristic of such writing is the implied Writer-Führer who builds community through interpellation. This poetic subject evokes the specific meanings of both “Dichter” and “Führer” in the NS period, namely Goebbels’ understanding of “Dichter” and Carl Schmitt’s understanding of “Führer.” Each of these concepts is based in the context of the racialized Volk.

As Frank Trommler has written, the category of “Dichter” conveyed prestige and genius, the ideal Nazi writer inspired by völkisch idealism or “a venerated figure among the German educated classes and a figure of exalted calling beyond the trivialities of politics and markets” (”A Command Performance?” 114). The related concept of “Dichtung” referred to literature that was elevated to its highest artistic form, renewing German culture and providing dignity, legitimacy, and seriousness to National Socialism and its racial “theories” of the German “Volk.” The Nazis closed off a “public sphere in which literature functions to instigate critical discourse about life and society” while Goebbels simultaneously promoted a kind of “völkisch reading practice […] in which readers experience themselves as part of a larger reading racial community” (“A Command Performance?” 117). As Trommler argues, “no term was more indispensable to Nazi cultural politics that that of Volk. It provided the glue for that vague, unifying and race-based projection of belonging” (“A Command Performance?” 118). Thus, “Dichter” emblematized, justified, and helped to unify the Volk. One can see this idea in a speech from March 21, 1935, the same month as the Claudius poems were published in Die Neue Literatur. In this speech, the president of the Reich Chamber of Literature and eventual co-founder of the Eutiner Dichterkreis Hans Friedrich Blunck draws an explicit connection between the Dichter and the Volksgemeinschaft, writing that his Volk needs the Dichter more than ever. Blunck insists that the Dichter must affirm, reform, and fulfill the “Volksgemeinschaft aller, auch der Schaffenden.” Unlike the aesthetic fundamentalists, Blunck overlays an explicitly racial dimension to writing that also ruefully acknowledges the loss of a “lyrische Deutung der Welt” (“Vortrag”).

The concept of the Volksgemeinschaft was also inextricably connected to the concept of the Führer, which had political, cultural, racial, and legal meanings. One way of understanding this relationship is through the Nazi legal concept of the Führerprinzip, which also became a guiding principle of NS cultural production (expressed by Ian Kerschaw in the phrase “working towards the Führer”). The Führerprinzip was a complex legal framework developed by Carl Schmitt that theorized a mutually constitutive relationship between the racially homogenous Volk and the metonymic Führer, in whom all branches of the government were condensed and consolidated.8 In his 1934 article “Der Führer schützt das Recht,” Schmitt describes this circularity by arguing that the Nazi “Gemeinwesen” is comprised of “das eigene innere Recht derjenigen staatstragenden Lebens- und Gemeinschaftsordnungen” that are in turn founded on sworn loyalty to the Führer (“Der Führer” 949). As the juridical foundation undergirding what Schmitt called the Führerstaat, the Führerprinzip reimagined the notion of political sovereignty because the political leader and the people were co-constitutive: the Führer makes, and is made by, the Volk. Both are, as Schmitt says, “Träger des politischen Willens.” In contrast to the conservative revolutionaries who emphasized a temporal lag between aesthetic-spiritual experience and political change, Schmitt writes about “Volksgebundenheit” and “Artgleichheit” in the context of “Führung in der Sache selbst” as a real, unmediated, concrete presence (Staat, Bewegung, Volk 42). While Schmitt theorizes the Führerprinzip in the context of the state and civil rights, the concept extended into all aspects of the Nazi state. Jan-Pieter Barbian, for example, has shown how the Führerprinzip influenced Nazi Germany’s “media dictatorship,” which tightly controlled the market for literary production, limiting what could be published and punishing those writers who challenged or questioned Nazi ideology.9

In what follows I explore how four poems by the “implicated subject” Hermann Claudius depict a Writer-Führer figure that has been Nazified, or gleichgeschaltet, into what I read as a Dichter-Führer. The poems, layered with inner emigration tropes and conservative revolutionary aesthetics, interpellate the non-persecuted “Aryan” reader into a Volksgemeinschaft, a community based explicitly on National Socialist conceptions of the Dichter and the Führer. These readings may also help explain why the former president of the Reich Chamber of Literature Hans Friedrich Blunck, in a letter from 1946, wrote that had he been able to, he would have given Claudius a literary prize for the German lyric.

“Aryan” Subjectivity and the lesende Volksgemeinschaft

In this section I look closely at these four poems, titled “Lebenslied,” “An Hans Grimm,” “Der Dichter,” and “In der Nacht.” Specifically, I will consider three aspects of the poems that I argue reflect a layering of political and nonpolitical tropes by a Dichter-Führer who builds community, interpellating the non-persecuted German into the Volksgemeinschaft. First, the repetition of the pronouns “I” and “you” (and their various declensions and variations) reify the reading racial community by actively blurring the distinction between the non-persecuted “Aryan” self and the non-persecuted “Aryan” other, thus emphasizing togetherness and homogeneity. Second, this community of the same is reinforced by references to “Blut und Boden,” a concept that provides a kind of ideological glue, and the subtle invocation of the Dichter-Führer, who metonymically represents belonging in and to the reading racial community. Third, the “Aryan” poetic subject is split between his public self (his “face”) and private self (his “soul”), which performs a kind of moral dilemma that Ralf Schnell calls the “aporia of the simple life” (133) in the context of the fascist demand for homogeneity, identical speech, and Gleichschaltung. By drawing heavily on the inner emigration tropes of stasis, silence, and inaction as a way of resolving or reconciling this dilemma, the poems further reinforce the reading racial community by offering readers a way out by doing nothing, making what I ultimately describe as Nazi inner emigration writing.

The words “I” and “you” (and their declensions and variations) are repeated thirty-four times in the four poems, emphasizing the importance placed on questions of identity and belonging. Often, this repetition has the effect of pulling the reader (“du”) into a relationship with the poetic subject (“ich”). In the first poem, “Lebenslied,” for example, the poetic subject comes across as a kind of authority, teaching the reader something about the meaning of life (“was Leben ist”). In the second poem, however, the poetic subject addresses writer Hans Grimm. And in the following two poems, the subject is more ruminative and mostly addresses himself (“Seele, bleibe du”). In his fifteen theses about NS literature, Ralf Schnell associates the emphasis on identity with “Aufbruch” (106), a Nazified version of the inward, spiritual transformation I discussed above in the context of aesthetic fundamentalism. A difficult word to translate into English, “Aufbruch” connotes breaking out but can also imply an awakening, being on the move, or being on the brink or eve of something new. Schnell explains,

Die Identität, welche die Aufbruchsbewegung verbürgt, ist dualistisch strukturiert […] Nationalsozialistische Dichtung feiert in sich selbst immer das Andere, das Bessere, das ‘Heterogene’ zum gesellschaftlich ‘Homogenen’ […] als sie selber, nach 1933, Teil einer neuen sozialen Homogenität ist. (106)

The poems reinforce this dualistic structure through their repetition of “you” and “I” (and their declensions). However, they also create a sense of “Aufbruch”—from the exceptional Aryan self into the reading racial community—in their patterning of these pronouns. That is, the first two poems are saturated with the word “you,” whereas the final two poems are saturated with the word “I,” meaning the cycle starts with the selfsame other and ends with the self.

The last poem, “In der Nacht,” explicitly references a circle as a metaphor for Christian eternity, and I would propose reading the four poems as a kind of cycle, whereby the shift from the last poem to the first poem depicts an “Aufbruchsbewegung” into the reading racial community underwritten by “Aryan” identity. As Schnell writes, “Der intendierte Leser, Hörer, Zuschauer ist immer zugleich ein implizierter Leser” (113). The self and the other begin to merge into a single figure, abstracted into the non-persecuted “Aryan” of the reading racial community. This metaphor of the circle is thus unintentionally self-reflexive. If the four poems are read as a circle, and the last poem returns us to the first one, this circularity also links the existential knowledge-seeking “I” to the “you” being taught something about the meaning of life.

Wann ich wieder zurückkommen werde,

Aus dem großen Kreis

Zu der kleinen mühseligen Erde – – –

Ob ich es dann noch weiß?

Furthermore, by placing this line after three dashes and bracketing it from the rest of the cycle, the last word becomes “Erde.” If the poems comprise a circle, “Erde” is connected with the first word of the first poem, “Blut.” Reading the poems this way reveals how they subtly displace the Christian notion of eternity (God) with a völkisch notion of eternity (the Volk), expressed through the mystical concept of “Blut und Boden.” This concept—widely in use by 1935 and inextricably connected to the notion of Lebensraum—encapsulates the official Nazi policy of biological racism that connects the “Aryan race” (Blut) to German land (Boden).

While the poems are not explicitly pro-Nazi, they overlay a kind of mystical and racialized history on a mythical past. The first poem “Lebenslied,” opens with an allusion to the Biblical verse “Erde zu Erde, Asche zu Asche, Staub zu Staub.”

Blut zu Blut

In schwerem Zwist.

Du lernst nicht aus,

was Leben ist.

The next lines directly address this intended and implied “Aryan” reader. Here, placing the struggle of the racial community over the individual evokes a concept described by the protofascist inner emigrant Ernst Jünger (who, like Hans Grimm, never joined the NSDAP). In his 1934 essay “Über den Schmerz,” Jünger describes pain and sacrifice as a process of self-objectification outside of what he calls the “Zone der Empfindsamkeit.” Drawing on the metaphor of the photograph, Jünger describes this process as a kind of colonization of the self, a process that is necessary for waging the war of imperial conquest. This process of self-colonization through interpellation into the reading racial community continues in the next stanza.

Du lernst nicht aus,

was Leben sei.

Da du noch sinnest,

ist es vorbei.

The first poem ends with the word “Ewigkeit,” an idea quite closely associated with the concept of “Blut and Boden,” given that Germanic land and “Aryan” blood were the foundations of the Nazi “Thousand-Year Reich.” The next poem, “An Hans Grimm,” continues to foreground these concepts, revealing an intimate closeness across the four poems between what Frank Trommler describes as the exclusive definition of the racial reading community based on “youthful self-empowerment and militancy” and the inclusive experience based on “conservative visions of tradition, family, and community” (“A Command Performance” 118). The poem itself is an ode to Claudius’s friend Hans Grimm, who lived in colonial Germany’s Southwest-Africa until 1914 and wrote in his 1926 novella Der Richter in der Karu about the “natürliche Überlegenheit [der weissen Rasse]” (Sarkowicz 120). Grimm also wrote the much more successful Volk ohne Raum (1926), a novel about German colonialism in Africa whose title became a kind of slogan for the Nazis and their racist-imperialist pursuit of “Lebensraum” in Eastern Europe. After 1945, Dieter Lattman ascribed the popularity and success of Grimm’s novel to three points: “die Raumidee, der militante Nationalismus und der unverhohlene Rassismus” (Sarkowicz 122). As a non-persecuted German, Grimm (like Claudius) was an opportunist and beneficiary of the Nazi regime who expressed a connection between the “Rettung des Abendlandes in biologischem und geistigem Sinn” and the “Lösung der Judenfrage (cit. Sarkowicz 127).” Grimm is a logical subject for what I call Nazi inner emigration writing because he belonged “weder zur ‘Inner Emigration’ noch zu den Widerstandskämpfern” (Sarkowicz 124). Like his friend Claudius, Grimm’s personal politics and non-persecuted positionality made him a beneficiary of Nazism. While he never joined the NSDAP, he did support and defend their racial “theories” and racist policies. He disappeared from public life in 1938 but remained in Nazi Germany as a beneficiary of these policies and the racist violence they enacted.

The poem itself praises Grimm as an exemplary “Aryan Dichter” without explicitly using either word. In fact, most of the poem operates through innuendo and euphemism, using NS-coded language to promote the concept of “Blut und Boden.” For example, the neologism “Wandermut” could, on its own, simply refer to a penchant for traveling, a play on the word “Wanderlust.” But given Grimm’s lived experience in German colonies, as well as his racist defense of colonialism as a necessary and violent struggle for “(Lebens)Raum,” the word “Mut” imputes a more political dimension to the act of “wandern.” It echoes certain aspects of Nazi propaganda that framed the world domination for the “Aryan” race as a courageous and brave undertaking. Likewise, describing a writer praised by the Nazis as the “Enkel eines edeln Blutes” is a clear reference to the Nazi belief in “Aryan” racial superiority. The lexicon of hypermasculine imagery associated with knights and battle (“Kreuzfahrer,” “Schwert,” “Schild,” “Mannesseele,” “Ritter,” etc.) evokes the idea popular among members of Eutinger Dichterkreis that the “Aryan” was descended from Nordic warriors, with words like “in müden Händen” and “Kreuzfahrer” implying a long-term struggle that evokes the Nazi framing of the struggle for racial purity. Given the various Christian images, this struggle could even be understood as an eternal struggle between good and evil, where Grimm, the “Gläubiger am Wort,” is also “letzter, lieber, treuer, deutscher Ritter.” Most importantly, the Grimm described here is introspective, and his path of Nazi inner emigration leads him inward: “Nach innen sucht dein Aug den steilen Pfad.”

“An Hans Grimm” ends with the word “Ich,” which is also the first word of the next poem. This poem, titled “Der Dichter,” employs similar strategies of Nazi inner emigration writing. The poetic subject reflects on how often he has longed for fame, or “Licht und Raum” (a word that, in the context of Hans Grimm, evokes colonial expansion, even sharing a metrical cadence with the word Lebensraum). He then folds his hands in prayer as an expression of humility and gratitude for being honored not just by the public, but by the Volk: “Daß man vor allem Volke / mich erhöht.” Finally, he shifts focus from public recognition to his private persona, figured here as the soul, with the apostrophic line “Seele, bleibe du!” That the poem builds up to and ends with this line elevates the importance of its message and foregrounds how the retreat into inwardness reveals a higher truth. This higher truth, as Lawrence Stokes writes, seems to be swearing “politische Enthaltsamkeit” (262).

Daß meine Seele vor Gott

einsam sei,

daß sie nicht willig werde

dem Taggeschrei

This poem ends with the coming of night, and it is followed by the appropriately titled “In der Nacht,” which draws on a Christian lexicon to thematize spiritual inwardness, eternity and mortality, and enigmatic [rätselsam] transformations of the writer’s soul. This poem takes place in the realm of Innerlichkeit, once again distinguishing the (private, individual) soul from the (public, deindividuated) self. Seeking some kind of higher truth, the poetic subject must return to earth from the “great circle” and look inward.

Wann ich wieder zurückkommen werde

aus dem großen Kreis

zu der kleinen mühseligen Erde – – –

I contend that each of these rhetorical features—the repetition of first and second person pronouns, the invocation of “Blut und Boden,” and the split “Aryan” subjectivity—actively contribute to creating the racial reading community through a shared literary experience of the Volk in Nazi inner emigration writing. Doing so entailed creating a poetic subject as Dichter-Führer who engaged the themes of both inner emigration and Nazi racial ideology. As Trommler writes, “the reading masses [in Nazi Germany] wanted a truth that was refined from the mere facts by the illumination of the inner motives of the person, the unique individual experience” (120–121). This emphasis on “inner motives” and “individual experience” reflects the long literary tradition of poeticizing Innerlichkeit to reveal a higher truth and makes it difficult to ascertain thematic or stylistic differences between conservative non-Nazi and Nazi writing. Rather, I argue, Nazi inner emigration writing engages both the inclusive and exclusive definitions of the experience of Volk through the Nazified representation of the Writer-Führer. That is, the Claudius poems do not reflect the aesthetic fundamentalism of other conservative writers precisely because they create (or strive to create) a reading racial community through the lens of the racialized Volk. Such Nazi inner emigration writing can therefore help us understand the invisible, repressed, or submerged politics of a seemingly nonpolitical literary mode.

Conclusion: The Dichter-Führer and Passive Representational Violence

The figure of the Writer-Führer is at least as old as the Greek poet Tyrtaeus, who played a key role in suppressing the slave revolt during the Second Messenian War (660–650 BCE). According to legend, Tyrtaeus became inspired at Sparta and then transferred that inspiration to others, empowering them to rush into battle and “infusing [them] with such great ardor that they think no longer of survival, but of burial” (Compton 219). There is a long history in Europe and the United States of invoking Tyrtaeus for political or rhetorical effect, in particular with the rise of philhellenism and the “Greek revival” in the nineteenth century (Davis 13–17). Perhaps not surprisingly, the Nazis were no exception almost a century later. In 1940, for example, Kurt Schrötter and Walther Wüst published a short pamphlet on “Aryan heritage” titled Tod und Unsterblichkeit: Aus indogermanischem Weistum that claims Tyrtaeus shares a “racial bond” with writers like Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, and Homer (Chapoutot 41). On one page in particular, a poem by Tyrtaeus is juxtaposed with a letter written by a young German soldier who died in battle. Depicted as a cultural descendent of the poet-general who advanced Spartan imperialism, the “Aryan” who emerges from this juxtaposition is thus constructed as possessing a poetic capacity to lead others to fight, and die, for Nazi imperialism.

Likewise, the “Aryan” was a racist idea that preexisted the Nazi construct. The term was first used in 1830 by Christian Lassen to describe what he considered unconquerable white people who represented “das vollkommener organisirte, unternehmendere und schaffendere Volk” (Benes 129). Non-persecuted, “Aryan”-identifying Germans could be moved to support—or simply accept—National Socialism in any number of ways. These four poems by Hermann Claudius show how what I call the Dichter-Führer trope could operate in inner emigration writing to create a reading racial community by drawing on both exclusive and inclusive definitions of the Volk. While the poems do not encourage or demand active violence against the Other, they do invoke and indirectly praise this violence while also affirming inaction and promoting a sense of belonging. In this sense, the poetic subject enacts what I call passive representational violence by affirming the superiority and desirability of the “Aryan” racial community and associating the “Aryan,” who is a passive beneficiary of this racialized worldview and does nothing to question it, with positive attributes like honor, grace, integrity, virtue, and moral righteousness.

This notion of passive representational violence comes from major theories of fascism, which elucidate a dialectal quality of fascist violence: there is the active iteration, reflected in Umberto Eco’s “action for action’s sake,” and the passive iteration, reflected in Hannah Arendt’s “failure to think.” Broadly speaking, the violence of an individual or a society can be an intentional and desired outcome or a banal and indirect effect of doing nothing, and it can take many forms, including physical (from street violence to concentration campus), economic (from boycotts to state-sponsored theft), epistemic (from book burnings to race laws), and representational. Much has been written about the active forms of representational violence, which we might categorize broadly as the myriad forms of propaganda that circulated in all domains of German society, from museums to theaters to the media. This propaganda caricatured the Nazi state’s enemies as simultaneously impotent and weak and part of a powerful cabal that could destroy Germany at any moment, thus reflecting two major aspects of Nazi race “theory”: the superiority of the “Aryan” and the arbitrary threat to racial purity posed by everyone else. One goal of propaganda was to essentialize these individuals and reduce them to a fixed, if flexible, stereotype. The figure of “The Jew” in Nazi propaganda was thus a sexual predator and impotent, a capitalist and a communist, a conniving genius and a dimwit. Such contradictions allowed non-persecuted Germans to project onto the vast and diverse Jewish community whatever fear was convenient.

Likewise, Nazi propaganda also perpetuated the myth of the “Aryan,” who was similarly essentialized and stereotyped as the “true” and “racially pure” German engaged in an eternal struggle of “race and space.” This struggle was both a defense against threats to “Aryan” racial purity (as in Hitler’s favorite metaphors, the “germ” and “parasite”) and an offensive attack with the goal of securing Lebensraum, an expansion that necessarily required the removal of “non-Aryans” at any cost. Propaganda that focused on creating the image of the “Aryan” thus often contained symbolism and aesthetic motifs connected to both warfare (e.g. weaponry, sacrifice, physical strength, courage, brotherhood) and idyllic nostalgia (e.g. Tracht, farming, harvests, modesty, innocence, motherhood), a binary reflected by the notion of “Blut und Boden.” As I have referenced throughout this article, Frank Trommler associates these sets of motifs with “inclusive” and “exclusive” definitions of the experience of the Volk. Thus, even propaganda aimed at glorifying the “Aryan” had to appeal to a diverse group with a range of possible reactions. Some individuals might be moved by representations of heroism and sacrifice, whereas others might be moved by representations of modesty and quiet introspection.

I am not suggesting here that a poem that is not explicitly antifascist or antiracist is necessarily fascist or racist, but rather that these various active and passive failures to resist “implicate,” in Rothberg’s sense, the poetic subject in this oppression and violence. Instead of a circle, another way of looking at these poems is to see them as forming a kind of political chiasmus, or “X,” evacuated of any and all antifascist political conviction, Schnell’s “hilfloser Antifaschismus.” Together, they form a kind of totality in which the writer and the reader are collapsed into a vacuum of fascist presence that excludes or relinquishes the possibility of antifascism. The affective humility together with a lack of representational resistance and antifascist clarity culminates in the Dichter-Führer’s Nietzschean return to a kind of willed (and timeless or original) ignorance that affirms his commitment to tolerating, and thus enabling, real fascist violence.

The Claudius poems are important for an understanding of political aesthetics in the Nazi period because they represent a mode of passive representational violence that operated alongside the more active modes of representational violence, like propaganda. They depict a lyric subject—the “Aryan”—as a Dichter-Führer who retreats towards apolitical interiority and cedes social or political influence to Nazi propaganda. At the exact mid-point of the four poems, the poetic subject (“I”) confronts Hans Grimm (“you”). This standoff ends not just in the poetic subject’s deference and praise of Grimm as “letzter, lieber, treuer, deutscher Ritter” but it also transitions into a sustained poetic meditation on how humility and modesty are honorable, admirable, and desirable traits. To not only comfortably benefit from Nazi violence, but to relish and affirm this privilege, is what I consider an act of passive representational violence. This construction of the “Aryan” paves the way for the Nazi perversion of creative self-expression where every non-persecuted German, or implicated subject, can be a poet-general like Tyrtaeus who gives themselves to the cause of maintaining a status quo that continues to oppress, if not annihilate, the marginalized and disenfranchised.

Other than a tacky rhyming couplet, Claudius never expressed any shame or remorse for his support of National Socialism, saying decades later, “ich bin—und schäme mich nicht, es zu sagen—kein kritischer Geist. Mein Herz lag allzeit offen, was mir oft nicht gerade zum Vorteil gereichte” (cit. Stokes 262). This attitude towards his Nazi past is not just a far cry from Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It is apathetic and extremely narcissistic in its disregard for human suffering, two traits that are already evident in the four poems from 1935 that I have analyzed here in the context of Nazi inner emigration writing.