The Bard of Eugenics: Shakespeare and Racial Activism in the Third Reich

Abstract

In April 1937, roughly midway between Hitler's appointment as Chancellor and the inception of the 'Euthanasia Programme', some of Germany's leading literary critics and beaux esprits attended an unusual exposition of nazi eugenic theory. The annual meeting of the German Shakespeare Society in Weimar provided the setting, Shakespeare's birthday the unlikely occasion. The event itself took the form of a paper with the title 'Maidens and Matrons in Shakespeare: A Practical Perspective', published subsequently in the Society's Jahrbuch for 1937.1 This article considers how this curious document ostensibly an exercise in literary reflection foreshadowed and facilitated Germany's deadly eugenic experiment. 'Maidens and Matrons' is a remarkable document for several reasons: first, because it highlights the often incongruous ways in which nazi ideology was disseminated; second, because it demonstrates that this was done as much through individual initiative as organized propaganda; third, because it reveals how complicity with the regime and its aims was gradually established even among sections of German society that had initially sought to keep nazism at arm's length; and fourth, because it demonstrates how such complicity provided the basis for the progressive escalation of nazi racial policy. Lastly, the document is remarkable in itself, as evidence of the degradation of German intellectual and cultural life in the Third Reich. The author of the paper in question, Hans FK. Giinther, was an influential academic figure in 1930s Germany; and though he held a doctorate in Germanistik,2 and had at various times dabbled in verse and drama, his name was not generally associated with literary criticism.3 It seems doubtful that in the normal course of events he would ever have been invited to address the high-minded circle of Bildungsbiirger that made up the German Shakespeare Society. The first thing about the paper, therefore, that deserves comment is its