Following the amalgamation of the Georg-Müller and Albert-Langen firms, Pezold needed to establish the new company both economically and ideologically in order to serve the political goals of the DHV. To do this, he drew on the existing reputations of the two houses and the support
164 Wilhelm Stapel, ‘“Literarische Diktatur” des D.H.V.?’, Deutsche Handels-Wacht:
Zeitschrift des Deutschnationalen Handlungsgehilfenverbandes, Gerwerkschaft der deutschen Kaufmannsgehilfen, No. 12, 38. Jahrgang, Hamburg 25.6.1931.
of several prominent authors already on their books. The goodwill of the book trade was also necessary. In 1934 Pezold chose to build in particular on the success of Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum, first published in 1926 by the Albert-Langen Verlag.165 He resolved to publish a cheap edition of the novel, which had already sold 60,000 copies in an expensive two-volume edition. As a wave of so-called Volksausgaben began to appear on the book market, most notably Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, published by the S. Fischer Verlag, a cheap edition of Volk ohne Raum was likely to receive a warm welcome.166
The peace of 1918/19 not only saw the loss of German territories in Europe, but also the end of German ambitions to found an empire else-where. Volk ohne Raum was the most (in)famous völkisch-nationalist work to tackle the issue of Germany as a world power, presenting her problems in terms of space and proposing colonial expansion as the solution.167 For Grimm, Germany’s problems in the 1920s were the outcome of centuries of misrule and the inability of Germans to recognise their own plight.
Germany had missed the chance to expand in previous centuries. Grimm blamed this on the division of the German people, encouraged by other nations. He also maintained a fundamental belief in the superiority of the
‘white race’.
Hans Grimm was born in Wiesbaden in 1875 to upper-middle class parents. On leaving school in 1896, he went to London to train in busi-ness. A year later he departed for South Africa, where he remained for thirteen years. In Africa, he became convinced that Germany needed to expand her colonies in order to remain a great power. He also witnessed the Boer War and the German colonial campaigns, which profoundly influenced his writing and politics. His first work, the play Die Grobbelaars was published in Berlin in 1907, but gained little attention.168 On his return
165 Quoted in Meyer, Die Verlagsfusion, p. 111.
166 Ibid. pp. 111–112.
167 Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (First published Munich: Langen, 1926; edition consulted: Lippoldsberg: Klosterhaus-Verlag, 1956).
168 Hans Grimm, Die Grobbelaars: Ein Trauerspiel in vier Aufzügen (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Vita Deutsches Verlagshaus, 1907).
to Germany in 1910 he went to study politics, first in Munich and then at the Kolonialinstitut in Hamburg. In 1913 he published Südafrikanische Novellen and Afrika-West. Ein Reisebuch und ein Einführungsbuch. These were followed in 1916 by Der Gang durch den Sand, which includes an account of South Africa’s invasion of German Southwest Africa in 1914.169
From the beginning of his writing career, Grimm saw himself as a political writer. During the First World War he served briefly in the German artillery in Europe before he was moved to the Auslandsabteilung of the Oberste Heeresleitung. This office, funded by the Foreign Ministry, gath-ered intellectuals with expert knowledge of foreign countries together to examine the writings and letters of prisoners of war, and produce propa-ganda. Grimm was employed to write African stories that propagated the colonial ambitions of the German Reich. The result was the strongly nationalistic and anti-French Der Ölsucher von Duala, which documented alleged French atrocities during the conquest of Togoland.170
The Auslandsabteilung of the Oberste Heeresleitung was particularly significant in the development of völkisch-nationalist literary networks, forging networks that served the nationalist literary sphere during the Weimar Republic. Grimm’s colleagues during this period included Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Waldemar Bonsels and Friedrich Gundolf, professor of literature in Heidelberg, were also engaged by the bureau. After the War, Münchhausen and Grimm both became members of the Juniklub, an elitist organisation founded in 1919 and dominated by Moeller van den Bruck. For a relatively small organisation, the Juniklub disseminated its anti-republican message widely, thanks largely to its members’ prolific production of articles for right-wing cultural journals.171 In their activities in the Juniklub, Grimm and
169 Hans Grimm, Südafrikanische Novellen (Frankfurt a/M: Rütten & Löning, 1913);
Afrikafahrt-West: Ein Reisebuch und ein Einführungsbuch (Frankfurt a/M: Rütten
& Löning, 1913); Den Gang durch den Sand und andere Geschichten aus südafrika-nischer Not (Munich: Langen, 1916).
170 Hans Grimm, Der Ölsucher von Duala (Berlin: Ullstein, 1918).
171 On the significance of the Juniklub, and in particular its success in disseminating völkisch-nationalist thought, see Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, pp. 32–34.
Münchhausen put themselves forward as members of the nationalist liter-ary elite, striving for an authoritarian system of government in accordance with ideas propagated by völkisch theorists before the war. In the early 1920s, they also made the acquaintance of Friedrich Lienhard, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Wilhelm Schäfer, and Hans Friedrich Blunck, all of whom later played a significant role in the development of völkisch literary circles in the Third Reich.
The alienation of a people severed from their native soil was one of the fundamental concerns underlying völkisch ideology. Rapid population growth, combined with simultaneous industrialisation and urbanisation, continued to shape German consciousness into the 1920s and 1930s.
Grimm’s ongoing concern with this subject struck a chord. Volk ohne Raum is set partly in Germany and partly in Africa and tells the story of the German, Cornelius Friebott, between 1887 and 1925. The book is divided into four parts, each narrating sections of the hero’s life, and at the same time presenting specific political arguments. It demonstrates the perceived degeneration of German society and explores possible solutions, before settling on colonial expansion as the answer. In so doing, it also tracks the history of Germany’s attempts to found a colonial empire in Africa, representing a lament for the German colonies lost during and after the war, developing themes that had occupied völkisch-nationalists before 1914 and restating their relevance for the post-war period. Grimm’s approach to writing novels like Volk ohne Raum, which combined narrative fiction with the historical and political events of Germany’s recent history, can be seen in his later correspondence with Gustav Pezold regarding a second epic work on German-British relations, on which he worked in the 1930s and during the Second World War. Grimm first decided which events his heroes were to be involved in and then contrived ways to weave them into the life stories of his characters.172 Thus his readers were presented with novels that entertained with stories of adventure and at the same time
‘educated’ them in questions of politics and history.
172 See, for example, Grimm to Pezold 24th June 1940, DLA – A: Grimm, Grimm to Pezold, 1938–1946.
In common with fellow völkisch commentators, Grimm identified the forced migration of Germans to industrial cities as a cause of degeneration in Germany. Part One of Volk ohne Raum, entitled Heimat und Enge, dem-onstrated his belief that lack of space lay at the root of Germany’s problems.
The son of parents whose fortunes deteriorate in the early chapters of the story, Cornelius Friebott grows up in the Weser valley, where Grimm made his home from 1913. To supplement the living from his parents’ insufficient smallholding, he trains as a carpenter. Failing to find work in his village, he tries various ways to earn money. A stint in the German navy and manual labour as a stone-cutter contribute to the formation of his early worldview, before he ends up working in a factory in Bochum. Grimm thus created an opportunity to portray the misery of Germany’s industrial cities, and the alienation of the people cut off from the soil of their homes and the free-dom offered by rural life rooted in traditions developed over generations.
These linked the individual to the Volk through a shared past, present and future. A lack of land in Germany, however, made a return to this life at home impossible. Grimm therefore proposed colonial expansion to provide more land for the growing population, as it had for the British. Only as free men and women on German soil could the German Volk be great.173
Grimm also brought his hero into contact with Social Democracy. He thus addressed what he viewed as the failure of this ideology to provide solutions for the problems of the Weimar Republic. This, he suggested, was because it did not take the German völkisch identity into account. Friebott’s involvement with Social Democracy, which was banned in Germany between 1878 and 1890, ends in a prison sentence. Following his release he decides to leave Germany and try his luck in Africa. Part two, Fremder Raum und Irregang, describes Friebott’s experiences in the British-ruled South African colonies. During this time, he learns that he will never find freedom in a land ruled by another Volk. After the Boer War, he lands in German South-West Africa, in time for the Herero Uprising. As the title of part three, Deutscher Raum suggests, he is on home territory here, in a land ruled by Germans for Germans. The vision of a German living and farming
173 Grimm, Volk ohne Raum, pp. 18–19.
German soil grows and matures in Friebott’s mind as the story unfolds, finding its fruition in a brief interlude of peace and prosperity before the colony is lost to the British. Following World War One, Friebott returns to Germany and in part four, Volk ohne Raum, he becomes an itinerant preacher of völkisch-nationalist colonialism, spreading Grimm’s message of Volk ohne Raum across Germany, much as Grimm’s writing was intended to do, and finally dying as a martyr to the cause.
For Grimm the German Heimat was where the German people lived independently, un-oppressed by foreign rulers. German soil could be any-where, providing it was possessed, inhabited and cultivated by Germans.
Colonial expansion, he argued, would not only provide space for Germans to establish themselves once more as a farming people, but also the neces-sary raw materials for German self-sufficiency, thus freeing the country from dependence on capitalist world markets. Like Frenssen, he justified colonialism on social-Darwinist grounds, arguing that a Volk that takes the territory of another is able to do so through its racial superiority and has therefore won the right to thrive at the expense of the weaker people.
Building on the success of Volk ohne Raum, Grimm continued to campaign for the restoration of Germany’s colonies throughout the Weimar period and into the Third Reich. In 1929 he published Das deutsche Südwester-Buch and in 1934 a collection of seven stories, Lüderitzland.174
Ketelsen suggests that Grimm’s was not simply a nationalist mes-sage, in spite of the clear nationalism that characterised his works. He also suggests that Grimm’s interest in Africa was not based on his per-sonal biography, but on his fascination with the contrast between the African landscape and the Oberwesertal.175 This point of view seems overstated. The question of Germany’s African colonies was not only one of enormous significance during Grimm’s formative years, but also one he experienced first hand. Grimm’s nationalism was formed by his years in Africa. Volk ohne Raum addressed concerns that had occupied
174 Hans Grimm, Das deutsche Südwester-Buch (Munich: Langen, 1929; edition consulted 1937); Lüderitzland: Sieben Begebenheiten (Munich: Langen-Müller, 1934).
175 Ketelsen, Literatur und Drittes Reich, pp. 678–679.
nationalists before 1914. It dealt with all the major völkisch themes. As a Kolonialroman, it advocated a strong colonial policy to deal with the perceived problems of overpopulation and urbanisation, and to restore the German nation to its rightful place in the world. As a Heimatroman, it emphasised the importance for Germans of the connection between the Volk and the land and expressed Grimm’s concern about the dete-rioration of this relationship. Finally, it was infused with anti-socialism and profound anti-Semitism.
Grimm’s portrayal of the Jews was based on a strong conviction of racial difference. It depended to a large extent on older stereotypes of the Jews as untrustworthy businessmen. Describing the trading of Jewish diamond merchants in Lüderitzbucht, Grimm suggested that they were deceitful dealers. He implied that, in the pay of the English, they made use of the fact that they had been born either in Germany, or to German-born parents, or in Russia, where they spoke Yiddish. As a result, he argued, they could not only understand and be understood by the German community, but their familiarity with German culture gave them an advantage in trade, which they exploited to the full.176 By reinforcing the impression that they were concerned only with making money – ‘Where the Jew goes, money will be made’177 – he explicitly built on the myth of the Jewish foundations of world capitalism.
For Grimm, Jewish capitalism was also represented by the British in Africa. The link between the British and Jewish business was a common one in völkisch-nationalist literature. Grimm’s view of the British was ambigu-ous. On the one hand, he saw the British Empire as a positive example of the racial development of the Anglo-Saxons that should be emulated by the Germans; on the other, British capitalism was a sign of the degeneration of a Nordic race. Grimm admired the British for their imperial success, but at the same time, echoing Frenssen, he believed that the British were guilty of betraying the ‘white race’. Capitalism and the hunger for power and wealth had overcome the deeper values of the British Volk. By contrast those of the
176 Grimm, Volk ohne Raum, pp. 853–855.
177 Ibid. p. 855.
German Volk were upheld by German völkisch-nationalists.178 In Volk ohne Raum, Friebott finds two worlds, that of the solid German farmer in the shape of the Boers, and that of the profit-oriented businessman represented by the English. For völkisch-nationalists during the Weimar Republic, Germany was still engaged in the struggle between German virtue and the mammonism of capitalism.179 In this, Grimm’s work is another example of the continuity in völkisch-nationalism from the Kaiserreich to the Weimar Republic which provided an intellectual framework for his nationalism.
Following the publication of Volk ohne Raum in 1926, Grimm increas-ingly found himself on the cusp of literature and politics. Alongside his speeches, articles and political activities, his fictional work also addressed political issues more directly than that of many right-wing contemporaries, including Hermann Stehr, Emil Strauß, and Kolbenheyer.180 He appar-ently experienced no conflict between his artistic and political ambitions.
Unlike other politically conscious writers of his generation, for example Döblin or Brecht, he saw no need to analyse how these two goals should be integrated.181 The opening sentence of Volk ohne Raum left the reader in no doubt about Grimm’s intention: ‘This German tale is, in my opinion, a political tale and therefore illustrates our German fate.’182
In spite of his ideological convictions, however, negotiations with Hans Grimm regarding a Volksausgabe of his epic proved less straight-forward than Pezold hoped. Grimm demonstrated his businessman’s credentials when it was suggested the cheap edition should be sold for the unusually high price of 8.50 RM; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks by
178 Hans Grimm, Englische Rede: Wie ich den Engländer sehe (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1938).
179 See for example, Grimm, Volk ohne Raum, pp. 189, 439–440, 501; see also Schoeps, Literatur im Dritten Reich, pp. 74–75.
180 Bodo Heimann, ‘Die Konvergenz der Einzelgänger: Literatur als Integration des problematischen Individuums in die Volksgemeinschaft: Hermann Stehr – Emil Strauß – Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer’ in Denkler and Prumm (eds), Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich, p. 121.
181 Ketelsen, Literatur und Drittes Reich, pp. 199–200.
182 Grimm, Volk ohne Raum, Foreword.
comparison cost 2.85 RM. Of the 8.50 RM, Grimm was upset to discover that he was to receive royalties of only 60 pfennigs per copy. Grimm also expressed displeasure at the degree to which the Langen and Müller pub-lishing houses had been merged, threatening to fall back on the unusual conditions of his contract with the ALV, which allowed him to withdraw all his books from the firm should it change hands.183 He also disliked the way in which Pezold and Stapel applied moral pressure to persuade him that a cheap edition of Volk ohne Raum was in the interest of the nationalist cause.
On 31st July 1931, Pezold visited Grimm in Lippoldsberg, where the latter continued to prove intransigent. Above all, he demanded the con-tinued right to remove his works from the LMV in the event of changed ownership. He also reserved the right to publish any future works with other firms. As a concession, he was prepared to guarantee not to make use of these rights as long as Pezold was in charge. This would prove important in the future. Practically speaking, he won himself a privileged position.
For the Volksausgabe, moreover, he received an assured royalty of 240,000 RM over a period of eight years, almost twice as much as Thomas Mann received for Buddenbrooks. In the end, he was granted royalties of 1 RM for each copy sold at 8.50 RM.184
Pezold believed that a cheap edition of Volk ohne Raum would satisfy an existing demand, even at the relatively high price he proposed. Moreover, the political goals of the project were important; success in winning the LMV a place as a leading publisher of nationalist literature would at least partially offset any losses incurred in the process.185 In order to achieve his dual goal, Pezold embarked on an aggressive advertising campaign. His efforts did not go unrewarded and four weeks after its appearance, on 16th November 1931, he was able to boast in a notice in the Börsenblatt that the first 50,000 copies had been sold.186 By December, only two months after
183 Meyer, Die Verlagsfusion, p. 112.
184 Ibid., pp. 115–117.
185 Ibid. p. 117.
186 Ibid. pp. 120–122.
its publication, the new edition had more than doubled the total sales of Volk ohne Raum since its initial publication in 1926. Pezold made it one of the most prominent völkisch-nationalist novels of the Weimar period and gave the LMV a clear identity, placing it securely on the map of right-wing, conservative publishing.
Kolbenheyer’s role in the DHV’s purchase and merger of the two publishing houses and Grimm’s unusual contractual agreement with the LMV are evidence of a unique relationship between the firm and its authors, based on a shared völkisch-nationalist belief in literature as both the bearer and the transmitter of the German Geist. Following the publication of the Volksausgabe of Volk ohne Raum, Grimm’s attitude towards the firm was based simply on its success in fulfilling the völkisch-nationalist task. Grimm thus attempted to bring other völkisch-nationalists and conservatives to the firm. Whilst in Berlin in the early 1930s, he made the acquaintance of Ernst
Kolbenheyer’s role in the DHV’s purchase and merger of the two publishing houses and Grimm’s unusual contractual agreement with the LMV are evidence of a unique relationship between the firm and its authors, based on a shared völkisch-nationalist belief in literature as both the bearer and the transmitter of the German Geist. Following the publication of the Volksausgabe of Volk ohne Raum, Grimm’s attitude towards the firm was based simply on its success in fulfilling the völkisch-nationalist task. Grimm thus attempted to bring other völkisch-nationalists and conservatives to the firm. Whilst in Berlin in the early 1930s, he made the acquaintance of Ernst