'Nationale Märtyrer': Albert Leo Schlageter und Julius Fučík. Heldenkult, Propaganda und Erinnerungskultur by Stefan Zwicker (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 147 Boosting the impression of Party-inspired dynamism was the staging of special events. The Committee on Big Flights was established in 1925 and an international 'friendshipflight' from Moscow toPekin followed the same year; four of the six aircraft completed the trip, taking fiveweeks, and thiswas no mean achievement given the succession ofmechanical defects. But the first attempt on theMoscow-Paris flight ended when the aircraft crashed into a telephone pole, and the firsttrans-Polar flight turned back because of an oil leak. A non-stop flight fromMoscow to Oregon in 1937was perhaps the high-point of these demonstrations. The aim of spreading aviation enthusiasm outside the two capitals resulted in local initiatives thatwere soon suppressed by the obsessive imposition of centralized control. But 'agit-flights',inwhich one ormore aircraftwould fly long distances, dropping down at small towns en route, were a feature and in the 1920s theywere linkedwith the 'back to the village!' drive. Aviation was a natural partner in the struggle against religion, perhaps because the heavens were the natural habitat of both God and aircraft. Taking peasants for joy rides above the clouds was an important feature of rural air events. Frequent crashes, itmight be thought,would have somewhat dented the appeal of joy rides.With the drive forquick results, thepace of aircraft design and assembly was, quite literally,breakneck. But themost spectacular disaster, that of the highly-publicized giant ANT-24 Maksim Gorkii,was not the result of poor-quality assembly but of that elan which propagandists claimed distinguished the new breed of Soviet pilots; in this case the elan resulted in a mid-air collision. This isa commendable and interestingbook, illustratedwith contemporary photographs and posters. Some may find the sections devoted to thehistorical background and to the systemic faults of theUSSR a bit tiresome but these may help attract others, in addition toRussian specialists, to gain thewider readership that the book deserves. Centre for Russian andEast European Studies J. N. Westwood Universityof Birmingham Zwicker, Stefan. NationaleMartyrer': AlbertLeo Schlageterund Julius Fucik.Helden kult, Propaganda undErinnerungskultur. Sammlung Schoningh zur Geschich te und Gegenwart. Ferdinand Schoningh, Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich, 2006. 369 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. 44.00. On 9May 1923, a French court martial inDusseldorf sentenced Leo Schla geter to death; on 8 September 1943,Julius Fucik was executed at Plotzensee prison. In an engrossing study,Stefan Zwicker contrasts the fates of these two 'national martyrs', one a German nationalist, the other a Czech communist. Soon after theirdeaths, theyboth became objects of public veneration. Schlageter was twenty years old when the first World War broke out; he became a front-line soldier,who went on fightingafterGermany's defeat. 148 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 With his Freikorps comrades, he defended the threatened fringesof the former Reich, in the Baltic, Silesia and theRuhr. He may have become a member ofHider's emergent party in the last year of his life: thiswas in Prussia in 1922,where NSDAP organization was banned at the time and far fromwell established. Schlageter was one of 140victims of theFrench occupation of the Ruhr, though he was the only one who was tried and sentenced by a court martial. Julius Fucik, nine years younger than Schlageter (hewas born in 1903, Schlageter in 1894) led the life,before the Second World War, of a Central European intellectual. He leftPilsen (where his fathermade guns for Skoda when he was not acting in amateur theatricals) for Prague in 1921,where he worked for a short time at the Statistical Office while attending lectures at the faculty of philosophy at Charles University. He was influenced by Zdenek Nejedly, a musicologist who tried to reconcile nationalism with communism. Fucik became a successful radical journalist who supported the Stalinist wing in theCommunist Party ofCzechoslovakia. After the outbreak of thewar, he joined theunderground organization of theparty.He was arrested on 24April 1942, less than a month before the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich in Prague, in a drive by theGestapo against the resistance movement. Before his execution in September 1943, Fucik wrote a series of reports smuggled from prison, which provided the foundation for his later canonization as a great national hero and martyr. The early masters of...