The success of Chamberlain’s work is one example of the widespread accept-ance of anti-Semitic views in ‘polite’ society. From the early 1880s, discus-sions of the ‘Jewish question’ moved away from a focus on assimilation towards racial discourses in which the Jews were perceived not only as a foreign race, but a threatening ‘counter race’. A desire for ‘racial purity’
drove the anti-Semitic discourse of the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth to new extremes. Likewise,
19 Field, Evangelist of Race, p. 225.
20 Ibid.
21 Quoted in Kohler, Wagner’s Hitler, p. 125.
22 Ibid. p. 125.
anti-Semitism influenced the development of völkisch-nationalism in these years as the two increasingly converged.23
At the turn of the century Adolf Bartels, an outspoken anti-Semite and literary critic, was instrumental in popularising the racial anti-Semitism of men like Marr and Chamberlain. He remained prominent until his death in 1945. He published several novels and plays, but was best known for his literary criticism. As a literary critic Bartels was a man of his time. Fifty years earlier literary criticism was still bound to the universities.24 After 1871, how-ever, a change occurred in the literary sphere. Rapid industrialisation and the changes it brought to the German economy were accompanied by an explosion in the number of publishers, journals and newspapers responding to an increase in the size of the reading public and a corresponding growth in the demand for reading material. Books, journals and newspapers were no longer produced for an educated minority, but became commodities with a large market.25 Literary criticism gained a new readership among the middle classes.26 Literary critics increasingly expressed views that went beyond the works themselves, dealing with social and political issues. Bartels was one of the most extreme. In the 1890s his work appeared in two jour-nals, the political articles in Die Grenzboten and the literary in Ferdinand Avenarius’ Der Kunstwart. In total he wrote over 300 articles for the latter until September 1906, after which his views became too extreme for even the conservative Avenarius. In these articles he popularised his favourite authors, including Friedrich Hebbel, Otto Ludwig and Wilhelm Raabe.
He also began to define the problems he saw in German literature. Both
23 Werner Bergmann, ‘Völkischer Antisemitismus’, in Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, Justus H. Ulbricht (eds), Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871–1918 (Munich:
Saur, 1999), p. 456. Bergmann lists further völkisch-nationalist groups among those that represented this later, ‘scientific’ form of anti-Semitism: the Verein deutscher Studenten; the Deutsche Turnerbund; the DHV (see below); the Wartburgbund;
and finally the Bund Alldeutschland.
24 Steven Nyole Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather: Adolf Bartels and Cultural Extremism, 1871–1945 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 51–52.
25 Peter Fritsche, Reading Berlin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
26 Steven Nyole Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather, pp. 51–52.
he and Avenarius used a metaphor of sickness when referring to the devel-opments they saw in German culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Bartels labelled it ‘modernitis’.27
As a literary critic, Bartels popularised ‘race’ as a critical category, an approach first introduced by Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn in the second half of the nineteenth century.28 His most significant work was his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, first published in 1901, and reappear-ing in a number of revised editions until 1945.29 Here he tried to cover the complete corpus of German literature. Half the work, however, is devoted to the nineteenth century. It combined his literary theories with his Geschichtsbild, which was firmly anti-modern. Bartels was the enemy of liberalism and Judaism, two of the forces of degeneration he saw and fought in society. He divided German literature into that written by Jews and that written by non-Jews and ignored criticisms that he was nation-alistic. Nationalism was, in fact, something he deliberately cultivated and took very seriously.30
The Geschichte der deutschen Literatur was extremely successful, third and fourth editions being published by the Eduard Avenarius Verlag within two years of its appearance. His publisher also commissioned a third volume, the Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, which was sold as a companion to the first two volumes.31 In addition a single volume Geschichte der deutschen Literatur sold almost 30,000 copies between 1919 and 1924.
Bartels constantly revised this edition during the Weimar Republic until it was little more than a list of works divided into two categories: those that
27 Ibid. pp. 62–63.
28 See, for example, Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1890;
edition used here: 1922); Thomas Neumann, Völkisch-nationale Hebbelrezeption:
Adolf Bartels und die Weimarer Nationalfestspiele (Bielefeld: Aisthesis-Verlag, 1997), pp. 39–40; Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair.
29 Adolf Bartels, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 2 vols (Leipzig: Avenarius, 1901/1902).
30 Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather, pp. 70–71.
31 Adolf Bartels, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Leipzig: Avenarius, 1906).
supported the rebirth of the German people and those that, according to Bartels, were in league with the forces of liberalism and world Judaism.32
Bartels also used his reputation as a literary critic to contribute to anti-Semitic campaigns in Germany in the early twentieth century, not least his battle against the positive legacy of Heinrich Heine. On repeated occasions in the 1890s, and again in 1906, völkisch-nationalists mobilised to prevent the erection of a memorial to Heine, a Jew, in various German cities. In 1906, Bartels led the successful struggle against the unveiling of a statue in front of the city hall in Hamburg to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Heine’s death. On 1st July, his 375-page book, Heine: Auch ein Denkmal, appeared, setting out his case against the poet.33 Bartels’
complaint was that Heine was a Jew who claimed, or his supporters both during his lifetime and after his death claimed for him, a place in the ranks of the great German poets. He wrote:
[…] he [Heine] is not a German lyricist; he is, as one must emphasize again and again, a Jew writing in German, who cannot de facto mean as much to us as even a smaller German talent whose poetry grows out of his life and being and, moreover, out of the German Volk. […] Therefore the one-sided eroticist Heine cannot, by a long chalk, be to us what Hebbel and Mörike are.34
Bartels did not consider language sufficient to make a poet a member of the Volk. His racism was based on a theory of blood rather than culture.
Bartels’ work aroused both positive and negative reactions. Among those who responded favourably was Ludwig Lorenz, who published a study of Bartels’ works in 1908. Lorenz defended the anti-Semitic character of the Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, suggesting that it served to highlight the weaknesses in German literature in the early twentieth century. He defended Bartels’ campaign against Heine:
I believe the influence of Jewish writers, who can basically never be completely German, is today actually too great and damaging in various ways. […] If a spirited
32 Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather, pp. 70–71.
33 Adolf Bartels, Heinrich Heine: Auch ein Denkmal (Dresden: Koch, 1906).
34 Ibid. p. 284. Quoted in Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather, p. 120.
campaigner has become angry about the state of literature today, I find it very under-standable. Incidentally I would like to point out that Bartels is just as hard on Richard Voß, Bierbaum, Hartleben and others as he is on Jewish talents. In any case it is not permissible to reject his aesthetic judgements on account of his anti-Semitism. Even Jews, if they reflect carefully, have to recognise this.35
Like other apologists for Bartels, Lorenz saw his subject’s self-imposed role as a national fighter as a strength; the importance of his literary works lay in their representation of their author’s love for his homeland, an example to all Germans.36
The second significant achievement of Bartels’ career was the estab-lishment of the National Theatre Festival for German Youth and its parent organisation, the German Schillerbund. His crusade to bring school children from across Germany to Weimar to see productions of German classics began in 1905, and was combined with his desire to create a national the-atre in Germany. In a pamphlet published the same year, entitled Das Weimarische Hoftheater als Nationalbühne für die deutsche Jugend: Eine Denkschrift,37 he argued that from the mid-nineteenth century German theatres had relied too heavily on foreign dramatists to provide them with their repertoire, allowing the non-German Geist to gain a hold. Bartels called for the renewal of the German theatre through the foundation of a German national theatre and the staging of festivals for school pupils, which would ensure that the seed of the German Geist was planted in the next generation.38 The timely opening of a new theatre in Weimar in 1908 presented Bartels with an opportunity to bring his plans to fruition. This was further helped by the appointment of Carl von Schirach, one of his strongest supporters and the father of Baldur, the future leader of the Hitler Youth, as its managing director.39
35 Ludwig Lorenz, Adolf Bartels und seine Dichtungen: Eine Studie (Dresden: Koch, 1908), p. 100.
36 Ibid. pp. 101–103.
37 Adolf Bartels, Das Weimarische Hoftheater als Nationalbühne für die deutsche Jugend:
Eine Denkschrift (Weimar: Böhlau, 1905).
38 Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather, pp. 89–90.
39 Ibid., pp. 89–90. Bartels was also Baldur von Schirach’s tutor in these years.
The German Schillerbund was founded at the first Nationalbühnentag on 30th September 1906 with 60 members, largely writers, artists and teachers. The following year an Anruf was issued calling for support for the theatre festival.40 With the influential support of several prominent literary figures behind it, it was possible to stage the first festival from 6th to 24th July 1909. Two thousand students were given the opportu-nity to see Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, Kleist’s Prinz von Homburg and Goethe’s Egmont. The first festival was such a success that it subsequently became a biennial fixture in the German cul-tural calendar. Thereafter, however, the Schillerbund distanced itself from its creator, removing Bartels from its governing body in 1913. He finally resigned altogether in 1915.41