Wenn Ich Kultur Höre ... The Rise and Fall of Hanns Johst

 Hanns Johst (1890 - 1978)

When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver!

This oft-quoted line - commonly, but mistakenly, attributed to Hermann Goering or one of the other Nazi leaders - continues to resonate with us today and to mutate into new and often amusing forms. 

But it has perhaps still not quite been understood that whilst the original speaker - a character called Friedrich Thiemann, in a play entitled Schlageter - is indeed expressing his preference for paramilitary violence over all intellectual or artistic pursuits, the author, Hanns Johst, had a rather more developed racial understanding of the culture question.

    

For Johst, like many other writers and thinkers at this time, there was traditional German culture on the one hand, which he loved and wished to defend; and then there was modern Jewish culture, which he despised and wished to combat, fearing that it would otherwise infect and corrupt the purity of the former. This is why he joined the nationalistic and anti-Semitic Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture) in 1928 and why, four years later, he became a committed member of the Nazi Party.

Schlageter, which tells the story of a proto-Nazi martyr, was in fact written solely to express his support for National Socialist ideology, including its arts policy which declared that only works which conformed with classical standards and expressed the Aryan ideal would be allowed; those which failed to do so were notoriously branded as degenerate. 

In 1935, Johst became the President of both the Writers' Union in Germany and of the Akademie für Dichtung. By 1944, now an officer in the Waffen-SS, he was named as one of the Third Reich's most important artists. 

After the war, Johst was interned by the Allies and eventually received a three-and-a-half year prison sentence. Unable to successfully re-establish his writing career following his release, he was reduced to placing poems written under a pseudonym in Die kluge Hausfrau - a magazine published by that great bastion of all things German, Edeka, a large supermarket chain.

 

When I hear the word kultur, I reach for my price gun ...