As Adolf Bartels was one of the founders of the Heimatkunstbewegung, so Gustav Frenssen was one of its most successful representatives. The best-selling author in Germany in the years 1905 and 1906, Frenssen, like Bartels, contributed to making völkisch-nationalist ideas part of mainstream liter-ary culture in Germany between 1900 and 1914. In 1913, the total copies printed of his colonial novel, Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest, numbered around 180,000, while in 1916 Jörn Uhl reached close to 240,000. Frenssen began his career as a pastor in Schleswig-Holstein. Three volumes of his sermons were published between 1899 and 1902 and by 1928 a total of 97,000 copies had been printed.64 During his years as a pastor, Frenssen not only developed his social and theological thought, but also began to develop an interest in biological and racist literature. In his memoirs, the Grübeleien, he described his desire to improve the health of human nature and society.65 The huge success of Jörn Uhl in 1901 enabled Frenssen to leave his career in the church in order to devote his energies to writing. During
63 Rossbacher, ‘Programm und Roman der Heimatkunstbewegung’, p. 123.
64 Dietrich Stein, ‘Spuren im Nebelland. Fakten und Menschliches in Frenssens Biographie’, in Kay Dohnke and Dietrich Stein (eds), Frenssen und seiner Zeit: Von der Massenliteratur im Kaiserreich zur Massenideologie im NS-Staat (Heide: Boyens, 1997), pp. 23–24.
65 Ibid. p. 24.
the years that followed he wrote one of his few dramas, Das Heimatsfest, and the novel Hilligenlei.66 Hilligenlei was concerned with the anger of the bourgeois youth, and the possibility of a better, more völkisch religion.
Frenssen challenged bourgeois morality, particularly regarding sexuality, and promoted behaviour based on biological-racial considerations. Overall, he adopted a strongly chauvinist and racist version of the völkisch ideol-ogy, which also included criticism of institutional Christianity.67 A pure, German belief system was needed that would, he argued, reunite nature and religion.
A year after Hilligenlei, Frenssen published the novel Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest and 100,000 copies of each novel had been printed by November in their respective years of publication. Both demonstrate the themes running through Frenssen’s ideological thinking at this time, themes that continued to influence his work. Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest, Frenssen’s contribution to colonial literature, dealt with the campaign to put down the Herero Uprising in German Southwest Africa between 1904 and 1907. Here, Frenssen demonstrated his concern for Germany’s position in the world alongside the other great powers. Racial relationships are also considered in the book.68 The words of the Oberleutnant in the final pages reflect Frenssen’s own social-Darwinist views:
‘These blacks have deserved death before God and humanity, not because they have murdered two hundred farmers and risen up against us, but because they have built no houses and dug no wells.’ […] ‘What we sang in the service the day before yester-day: “We come to pray before God the just”, I understand as follows: God gave us victory because we are nobler and strive harder. That does not say much in relation to this black people; we must ensure that we become the best and the most watchful of all peoples on Earth. The world belongs to the industrious, the brightest. That is God’s justice.’69
66 Gustav Frenssen, Das Heimatsfest: Schauspiel in 5 Akten (Berlin: Grote, 1903);
Hilligenlei (Berlin: Grote, 1905; 1937 edition also consulted).
67 Stein, ‘Spuren im Nebelland’, pp. 31–33.
68 See for example: Frenssen, Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest: Ein Feldzugsbericht (Berlin: Grote, 1942), pp. 68–69.
69 Ibid. p. 196.
One thousand copies of the work were distributed by the Central Office of the Navy League, Germany’s largest nationalist organisation, as propaganda for the nationalist, colonial cause in the 1907 Reichstag elections. The Navy League’s propaganda efforts were undertaken in close coordination with Chancellor Bülow’s office, which also informally provided the funds for this undertaking.70 Frenssen’s work was, therefore, not only widely received by the German public at large, but also by the political establishment. The appeal of his novels lay in the fact that he addressed themes current to his readership. His position at the heart of German literary life demonstrates his place in the mainstream of the early twentieth century. This was due to the successful combination of völkisch mysticism and more straightfor-ward political nationalism, which did not threaten the establishment, in which he had many friends. Frenssen’s nationalism, his support for German colonialism, his call for a more Germanic Christianity and a return to values based in the Volk and nature all found a resonance not only among völkisch-nationalist reformers, but also among the German bourgeoisie.71
The breadth of his correspondence also attests to his wide appeal. He exchanged letters with Hermann Hesse and other liberal writers, as well as with nationalists like Börries von Munchhausen.72 Around the time when he was writing Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest, Frenssen was also in contact with Hans Grimm, who was living in South Africa. Through Grimm, Frenssen accessed experience of Germany’s colonies. Grimm’s son, Wernt, later remem-bered visits to Frenssen’s home in Blankenese with his parents during the First World War, when he was a small child.73 The contacts between the
70 Eley, Reshaping the German Right, pp. 255–256.
71 Stein, ‘Spuren im Nebelland’, p. 32.
72 Ibid.
73 Wernt Grimm added a note to Grimm’s archive, in which he recalled these visits.
See: DLA – A: Grimm, Grimm to Gustav Frenssen, 1902–1928. That such visits took place is confirmed in the correspondence between Grimm und Frenssen. For example a postcard from Frenssen of 18.8.1915 requests the arrival details of Grimm in Blankenese: Postcard from Frenssen to Grimm, Blankenese, 18.4.1915. Also post-card, 4.7.1917. Other postcards exchanged between the Grimm and Frenssen families also illustrate the visits between them took place during the war, DLA – A: Grimm, Frenssen to Grimm, 1902–1928.
two writers occurred on a level of personal friendship that extended to their families. Frenssen also encouraged Grimm in his early literary endeavours, complimenting him on his amusing style in a postcard in 1914,74 presumably after having read one of his two works published in 1913: Südafrikanische Novellen or Afrikafahrt-West. Ein Reisebuch und Einführungsbuch.75 Given Frenssen’s proven interest in African affairs and his personal friendship with Grimm, it is likely he was acquainted with these works.
The personal nature of such acquaintanceships contributed to the creation of strong networks among writers of a völkisch-nationalist persua-sion. These survived periods in which they found themselves faced first with the challenges of the Weimar Republic and then with the attempts of Goebbels and the Nazi regime to break down these networks and replace them with their own. Nonetheless, not all the contacts between völkisch-nationalist writers were cordial. Frenssen was also acquainted with Adolf Bartels. The latter was born a year before Frenssen and their attendance at the Gymnasium in Meldorf, Schleswig-Holstein, overlapped between 1877 and 1879. From the beginning of his literary career, Frenssen received negative criticism from Bartels. On the appearance of Frenssen’s second novel, Die drei Getreuen, Bartels reviewed his work in the Literarisches Centralblatt, in which he described it as typical of trivial literature written for women.76 Frenssen, dissatisfied with Bartels’ judgement, wrote him a long letter on 28th November 1898, in which he defended his writing in a long discussion of the worth of the Schriftsteller opposed to that of the Dichter.77 Frenssen identified himself in the tradition of the Dichter, aligning
74 Postcard from Frenssen to Grimm, 1.6.1914 in DLA – A: Grimm, Frenssen to Grimm, 1902–1926. The envelope is addressed to Grimm at Beethovenstr. 9, Bahrenfeld-Altona, where he lived while he studied at the Colonial Institute in Hamburg.
75 Hans Grimm, Südafrikanische Novellen (Frankfurt a/M: Rütten & Löning, 1913);
Afrikafahrt-West: Ein Reisebuch und Einführungsbuch (Frankfurt a/M: Rütten &
Löning, 1913).
76 Thomas Neumann, ‘“Deine Ausführungen hättest Du Dir sparen können … ” Einige biographische Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis Adolf Bartels – Gustav Frenssen’ in Dohnke and Stein (eds), Gustav Frenssen in seiner Zeit, p. 348.
77 The full text of Frenssen’s letter is reproduced by Neumann in ‘“Deine Ausführungen hättest Du Dir sparen können … ”’, p. 349.
himself with names in German literature such as Goethe and Keller rather than fellow Heimatkünstler like Lienhard and Bartels.78 Nevertheless, he suggests that the name of Schriftsteller would be satisfactory to him if it was also applied to Gustav Freytag, Peter Rosegger and Charles Dickens. The debate about the definition and relative worth of Dichter versus Schriftsteller was one that would continue throughout the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in völkisch literary circles.79 The animosity between Frenssen and Bartels, who had much in common, both ideologically and biographically, did not abate in the course of their later careers.
Gustav Frenssen’s völkisch-nationalist worldview was rooted in his relationship with his Schleswig-Holstein Heimat and his religious views, which increasingly tended towards the brand of völkisch mysticism he demonstrated in Hilligenlei. His concept of the Volk was bound up with social-Darwinism, and in particular the idea of the survival of the fittest, as he demonstrated in Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest. Before the First World War, he differentiated between different Völker, but for most of his career he did not nurture a particularly negative view of the Jews, in contrast with Adolf Bartels. For Frenssen a racist worldview did not automatically mean anti-Semitism; racial differences also existed between the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons, the Turks, the Romanians and so on. Indeed, Crystall sug-gests that Frenssen consciously rejected the anti-Semitic sentiments that existed in the church circles from which he came. Furthermore, during the First World War, he made several positive comparisons between the Germans and the Jews in his propagandistic journalism for the German cause.80 At this stage, therefore, for Frenssen the Jews were a separate race,
78 Uwe K. Ketelsen, ‘Frenssens Werk und die deutsche Literatur der ersten Jahrzehnte unseres Jahrhunderts. Zuordnungen, Parallelen, Abgrenzungen,’ in Dohnke and Stein (eds), Gustav Frenssen in seiner Zeit, p. 155.
79 See, for example, Hans Wysling (ed.), Dichter oder Schriftsteller? Der Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Mann and Josef Ponten, 1919–1930 (Bern: Francke, 1988).
80 See, for example, Gustav Frenssen, ‘Um Haus und Herd’ in Deutsche Kriegswochenschau, No. 15, 18.3.1917, quoted in Andreas Crystall, Gustav Frenssen: Sein Weg vom Kulturprotestantismus zum Nationalsozialismus (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2002), p. 403, n.424.
but not necessarily inferior. From about 1927, however, with the publication of the second volume of his Grübeleien, a change can be observed in his attitudes. From this point, Crystall argues, in years of diminishing success, Frenssen increasingly demonstrated the overtly negative attitude towards the Jews that was to characterise his position in old age after 1933. Influenced by his publisher, Müller-Grote, he blamed his lack of success in the 1920s on the unhealthy impact of Jewish internationalism on German culture.81