Word: books
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Nazi writers have succeeded little better than Nazi drill sergeants in filling rush orders for the model Nazi hero. In real life he might be a nuisance; in a book he is a bore...
Friedrich Ekkehard is the author of Storm-Breed, whose down-at-the-mouth hero is revived by hearing Hitler speak "beautiful words, splendid words." Gottfried Rothacker's Frontier Village told of the pre-Munich yearnings of a Sudeten German to be reunited with the Reich. The book sold 60,000 copies...
...Nazi editors and publishers responsible for what they print. Seldom is an attempt made to tell writers what to write or not to write. But worried publishers are quick to submit any doubtful work to the local party official. This gives the Nazis all the control they need. Book News (published in Berlin) now prints a green flimsy supplement headed "Expert Opinion." In one section are listed books to push, and in the other books to soft-pedal...
Nazis of lesser faith find it a long wait. Dr. Hellmuth Langenbucher, Director in Chief of Literature, in Nazi Book News of April 1939 grumbled: "a plethora of translations," "a flood of historical novels, more than 100 in 1938, many of them 1) bad, 2) unnecessary, 3) irrelevant, 4) mediocre, 5) 'more or less average." He found too "an extraordinary number of books" in which non-German personalities were stressed, Roman Generals, Russian composers, French painters. Other shortcomings : "No new peasant novels, soldier novels, glorification-of-the-Führer novels, sport novels, strength-through-joy novels, no conquest...
...best book because it is his clearest and most interesting, The Bridegroom Cometh "dramatizes [says Frank] in flesh and blood the loss of the religious instinct in modern American life, and both the need and the promise of its triumphant rebirth." It is really a sequel: all of Frank's writing is focused on the search for a new religion...