PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lisiecki, Chet
TI  - Hermann Claudius and the Politics of Inner Emigration
AID  - 10.3368/m.116.4.570
DP  - 2024 Nov 01
TA  - Monatshefte
PG  - 570--595
VI  - 116
IP  - 4
4099  - http://mon.uwpress.org/content/116/4/570.short
4100  - http://mon.uwpress.org/content/116/4/570.full
AB  - 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)