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"From an order of Hitler's dated August 16, 1940, one can
infer that the threat of an invasion of England was to be kept alive, even
if it doesn't actually take place." Willi A. Boelcke, Do You Want Total
War?: The secret Goebbels staff meetings, 1939-1943, p. 94, German
Publishing Office, Stuttgart (1967).
"The Bush administration has refused to rule out a military option, and in June Israel’s air force rehearsed what American intelligence officials described as a possible strike on Iranian nuclear facilities." Nazila Fathi, Iran Escalates Military Rhetoric, NY Times, August 5, 2008. Some things never change. |
Annals of Propaganda
Hans Fallada 1893-1947 |
n July 18, 2008, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung reported that a
long-lost, unpublished manuscript of a short story by the German author Hans
Fallada had resurfaced. The particulars were:
The report included a review of the short story and then, surprisingly, it appended the story in full to the review.
Fallada's story is interesting because, as a literary archaeological find, it gives us a glimpse of life in wartime Germany before the defeat at Stalingrad. It is also interesting because of the differing opinions about whether the story is propaganda or not and if it is, which side does it take. This interest is heightened by the fact that the FAZ, the German equivalent of the New York Times, published the story in full, presumably paying for the right to do so, and reached its own conclusion about its ideological content. An undertone to the evaluation is Fallada's own history of psychosis, substance abuse, and criminality.
A peripheral issue is what publication commissioned the story?
I believe that it is. In a manner which can easily be read from its summary it sets up the target to be destroyed by making it appear, initially quite innocently, obsessed with physical gratification. In a six-fold repetition, he has six characters express the material shortages they dislike the most. These are. in turn, a car, meat, a hot bath, lighted cities, fine soaps, and young men. With the stage thus set and the reader, in a sense lured into the psychological trap of sympathizing with these six characters, the author springs the trap. The seventh character, Frau Veronika, says she misses her son, who is fighting on the Russian front, the most. In the longest dialogue in the story, the author renders everything that has gone before as trivial, selfish, and childish. In a key phrase Frau Veronika says:
But I miss him so much! I know it can't be any other way, that it has to be like this, but that doesn't make me miss him any less, isn't that right? [My emphasis]
Having established the moral superiority of Frau Veronika and thus setting her up as a model, in the italicized part of her dialog she admits the primacy of the state's needs over her own. This is the moral which the author powerfully communicates to the reader. It is the universal demand of all states, especially when their very existence is threatened, that its citizens place the needs of the state above their own. The shorthand for this, which is perhaps a euphemism to conceal the harshness of the demand, is for the citizen to "be patriotic."
From persons familiar with Fallada's correspondence, there are two possibilities: Signal and Das Reich.
Since Signal was not circulated inside Germany, it is unlikely that Fallada was personally acquainted with its editorial spin, i.e., that the war had a minimal effect on the German home front. Assuming that the editor, in communicating with Fallada on the subject of a short story, would have advised him of the general tenor of the expected work, Fallada would never have written the story he did, except as a conscious act of defiance. It seems to me that Fallada's life-long history of substance abuse and the weakness of character it suggests, preclude this possibility.
This leaves Das Reich as the remaining venue for the story. Fallada's fame would have made him a potential writer for the paper. Fallada's story is dated during the era when the paper was most liberal. The shortages mentioned in the story would have been matters of daily experience to the readers and the moral of the story would have been entirely congenial to the Propaganda Ministry. The FAZ reviewer concludes that the cause of the failure of the story to get published lies in the words of the artist:
…certifying the Germans as "evil conspirators" belonging to the forces of darkness…However, this blemish on the text was easily rectifiable. Thus, the story's failure to get published remains a mystery.