Kraft Durch Freude Research Articles

“Strength Through Joy Organization” in the Ideological Fortification of Nazi Germany

The aim of this study is to examine the role, position, and function of the Organization of Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude- KdF), which was established in 1933, in Nazi Germany. In the context of the projection on the social and economic structure of the aims of totalitarian regimes to intervene in social life without leaving any gap, in Nazi Germany, KdF organized events that affected many points of social life, especially holiday organizations, and strengthened the Nazi regime until the year it ended its actions, taking the principles and goals of national socialism at the center of these activities. At this point, the KdF first played a major role in increasing the trust and loyalty regarding the Hitler government. Second, it constituted one of the transporter and application areas of the eugenics politics at the point of Nazism's project of creating a pure race. Finally, it contributed to the establishment of socio-economic and socio-cultural harmony between German society in accordance with the ideological structure of Nazism, and to the cultural production based on this harmony.

Pionier der alten Musik: Hans Eberhard Hoesch und die Kabeler Kammermusik by Nikolaus de Palézieux (review)

PIONEERS Pionier der alten Musik: Hans Eberhard Hoesch und die Kabeler Kammermusik. By Nikolaus de Palezieux. Kassel: Barenreiter, 2012. [155 p. ISBN 9783761822722. i29.95.] Illustrations, index.Nikolaus de Palezieux's 2012 study of early music pioneer Hans Eberhard Hoesch (1891-1972) is an indispensible work for academics and amateurs alike who are interested in the early music revival in twentieth-century Germany. Although Hoesch played a vital role in collecting rare baroque scores, period musical instru- ments, and even creating the first early mu- sic chamber orchestra in Germany, his name has been ignored in virtually all other historical accounts. De Palezieux's book represents a vital step in rectifying this omission, and this work will be the volume on which all other studies of Germany's early music revival must build.Hoesch lived most of his life in the small city of Hagen, located on the eastern edge of the Ruhr region. As a teenager, he stud- ied violin with Bram Eldering in Cologne, a colleague of Johannes Brahms. After Hoesch's service in World War I, he re- turned to Hagen to serve as the technical director of his family's highly successful pa- per factory. Most of the book details the years 1928 to 1934, the period in which he created Kabeler Kammermusik, an early music concert series in which Hoesch played viola. By April 1931, Hoesch had as- sembled the first complete chamber or- chestra to play on period instruments. He then founded his own workshop for instru- ment preservation on the ground floor of his home. Hoesch ultimately financed the entire venture himself, as he received little to no support from the city government. And in 1933, he opened a small concert hall inside his home for public performances.Through de Palezieux's treatment of Hoesch's musical tastes, it is easy to get a sense of why he was so driven to create such an ensemble. Hoesch considered modern music (especially jazz) to be a highly de- structive influence, a sentiment that he also shared in the program notes for the Kabeler Kammermusik's first public con- cert in January of 1930. Hoesch's own musi- cal ideology can tell us much about the cul- tural milieu in which the early music revival took place, and although the Nazis would share his musical preferences in many re- spects, Hoesch nevertheless found the party's cultural politics abhorrent.The question lingering throughout the book-why did Hoesch not receive any credit for his part in the early music revival?-is artfully threaded in and out of the narrative. Ultimately, there are several reasons why Hoesch languished in obscu- rity: his primary role as a paper manufac- turer rather than cultural impresario, the ensemble's Hagen origins which isolated the group from success outside the region, and Hoesch's own brief involvement with the entire project. As de Palezieux points out, Hoesch's decision to resign from the ensemble in 1936, just as the group was be- coming more established, also meant that he remained uncelebrated. With the unex- pected death of his third wife, Hoesch felt unable to continue his work with the Kabeler Kammermusik. In addition, the Nazis' cultural politics had begun to make Hoesch increasingly uncomfortable, and he wanted to avoid registering his ensemble with the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK). To Hoesch, there appeared no better solution than to resign.After his departure, the group soon changed their name to the Kammer- musikkreis Scheck-Wenzinger after two of the ensemble's long-standing members, flutist Gustav Scheck and cellist and recorder player August Wenzinger. Al- though Hoesch had resisted pressure to join the RMK and accept funding from the National Socialists, the ensemble's new leaders were not so reticent. In 1940, the Kammermusikkreis Scheck-Wenzinger re- ceived funding from the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude and its Italian counter- part, Dopo Lavoro, to go on a concert tour of Italy. …

The Continued Presence of the Past: New Directions in Holocaust Writing?

The Continued Presence of the Past:New Directions in Holocaust Writing? Christine Berberich German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust. Pascale R. Bos . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv + 143. $65.00 (cloth). Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1954. Jay Howard Geller . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 330. $24.99 (paper). Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes. Antony Rowland . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Pp. vii + 192. $80.00 (cloth). Hitler’s Künstler: Die Kultur im Dienst des Nationalsozialismus. Hans Sarkowicz , ed. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2004. Pp. 453. €24,80 (paper). Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich. Kristin Semmens . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv + 263. $74.95 (cloth). In My Brother’s Shadow. Uwe Timm . Anthea Bell , transl. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Pp. 148. $18.00 (cloth). 2005 was a year of commemoration and remembrance. Sixty years since the end of the Second World War. Sixty years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Sixty years of trying to comprehend and deal with the extent of organized mass-murder committed during the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship. [End Page 567] On the publishing front, 2005 saw a renewed upsurge in scholarly titles dedicated to the Holocaust and the Third Reich in what seems a general reorientation for new perspectives. The ranks of actual witnesses to and survivors of the Holocaust are inexorably thinning, and instead of new memoirs by survivors one now increasingly finds second- or third-generation, postmemory, or fictional accounts of the Holocaust alongside scholarly treatises on varying aspects of the Third Reich and its reign of terror. The books discussed here are indicative of this broad range of themes and approaches that can presently be found in Holocaust and Third Reich writing; they range from traditional literature analysis (albeit with new perspectives and/or examining hitherto neglected authors) to historical discussions about Jewish life in postwar Germany and, intriguingly, tourism during the Nazi era. While this interesting scope of themes and topoi can potentially be explained with market demand, the question of positionality should not be forgotten. Borrowed from feminist studies, where positionality is used to address questions of identity construction of individual gendered subjects, it has recently been applied to Holocaust studies to address the potential problems of author background, origin, and writing incentive.1 It acknowledges that, in Holocaust studies and literature, the background of the author does, indeed, matter, despite Barthes's concerted efforts to disregard the author's life in literary analysis.2 In Holocaust studies, disregarding the author will not do. It clearly, and literally, matters where authors come from, which position they are writing from: are they survivors of the Nazi atrocities? Are they children of survivors who have grown up with their parents' memory? Are they non-Jewish? What is their incentive for writing on and researching the Holocaust? Questions such as these have become particularly pertinent since the advent of poststructuralism in Holocaust studies and the accompanying disturbing claim that Holocaust literature is a genre that can be studied and imitated—a claim that endangers the automatic right to authenticity of Holocaust memoirs but that has, since Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake memoirs Fragments (1995; 1996 in English translation), been substantiated.3 Positionality thus affects the way the subject of the Holocaust is dealt with. The issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past—is approached and dealt with differently depending on the writers' backgrounds. The books of this review all demonstrate how writers from different backgrounds approach similar topics in very different ways. Crucially, though, the authors, despite their different perspectives, arrive at similar conclusions. And these point squarely at Vergangenheitsbewältigung: how does, in particular, the new, reunited Germany deal with its past? Kristin Semmens's book Seeing Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich is a fascinating account of how the Nazis used travel and tourism to indoctrinate the German people. It covers such diverse topics as the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) movement, the Kinderlandverschickung (a program sending thousands of children to the relative safety of the countryside), commercial and international...

The Most German of Towns: Creating an Ideal Nazi Community in Rothenburg ob der Tauber

During the Nazi period, Rothenburg ob der Tauber served to exemplify Nazi ideas of landscape and nation. This article focuses on the manner and circumstances under which Rothenburg was manipulated to advance what Nazi ideology held to be the fundamental characteristics of the German nation and its history. The first section of this article examines attempts to politicize and reorganize tourism in Rothenburg led by Kraft durch Freude (KdF). The KdF aimed to promote a sense of national belonging, demonstrate the regime's commitment to improving the material, physical, and spiritual well-being of the German nation, and project a positive image of the regime in Germany and abroad. The second section moves beyond KdF to explore efforts to transform the town into a type of Nazi utopia through more stringent preservationist and commercial policies designed to eliminate non-German elements from the town's built environment, while reinforcing the themes of cleanliness, health, and traditional ways of life and consumption. Finally, anti-Semitism emerged as an important factor within this broader campaign to restructure the town in accordance with Nazi ideology. The aim is to see Rothenburg not merely as a symbolic representation of Nazi beliefs, but also to see local residents and the town itself as an active force in reshaping and framing these beliefs into a form that could be seen, experienced, and consumed.

Vacations for All: The Leisure Question in the Era of the Popular Front

One of the ironies of the 1930s was the democratization of the summer vacation in Europe. While neither the forty-hour week nor other proposals for economic security were successful, holiday-with-pay won nearly universal acceptance. The vacation was not merely mass escapism as Europe prepared for war; rather the paid holiday was a deeply felt social need which, after the war, became one of the most valued entitlements in Europe. The mass vacation appealed to both the cultural Right and the Left. The holiday-with-pay reflected a consensus that modern work required compensatory leisure in the form of extended periods of time to 'recover' lost values of family and community. Both the fascist dopo lavoro and the nazi Kraft durch Freude shared with the French Popular Front a common functional language of leisure: patriotism would emerge from touring historical sites and meeting fellow countrymen in different regions and walks of life; popular sports and the return to nature would renew national energies; vacations would give 'dignity' and 'joy' to the worker. Is this consensus a reflection of 'deep structures' which transcend politics? In one sense such a view is surely wrong. The political contest was still the animating factor in leisure policy; agreement was primarily over recognition of the growing cultural centrality of leisure as the terrain for the struggle over control of popular opinion. Especially after the first world war, when the eight-hour working-day became nearly universal, elites of both the Left and Right realized the potential political significance of organizing leisure time. For the French Popular Front, the holiday movement was an attempt (perhaps belatedly) to create an alternative to bourgeois or fascist control of leisure.

Revolution, Totalitarianism, and Music

ALTHOUGH the interrelationship between music and the more extreme political ideologies in vogue from the time of the French Revolution until the first World War manifested itself primarily in the censorship of theatrical and patriotic music, the effects of modern totalitarianism upon the tonal art and its exponents have been far more diverse. Even before Hitler's advent to power, the NationalSocialists attempted to extend their policy of exaggerated nationalism to music. All radical innovations in musical technique were deemed degenerate, and linked to Semitic influence. This attitude was formulated definitively in Eichenauer's Musik und Rasse, in which it is baldly stated that each forward step in musical progress is due to Nordic influence, whereas each relapse into decay is of Near-Eastern (Jewish) origin. The elimination of Jewish and other non-Nazi composers, critics, conductors, and performers from the profession of music, and the boycott of compositions by men who either were non-Aryan or had expressed themselves in an advanced idiom were aspects of the act of purification which took place during the first years of the Third Reich. An attempt was made by Goebbels to forbid all art criticism, which was to be supplanted by mere description and contemplation. Most of the musical organizations existing before 1933 were suppressed, especially those which had been international in scope, and others, Aryan and conservative, were set up in their places. A positive, socialistic step was the campaign to provide cultural (especially musical) entertainment for the masses by assigning large blocks of concert and opera tickets to employees who were banded together under the auspices of the Kraft durch Freude organization and the Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde. On the other side of the ledger, the German inheritance of folk-song was partially contaminated by its combination with new, hate-inspiring and militaristic texts, in order to stimulate the combative instincts of German youth. The artistic policy of Fascist Italy was comparatively liberal and constructive until it was revised as a result of National-Socialist indoctrination. Soon after the establishment of the Axis, Hitler's cultural principles of anti-modernism and anti-Semitism were adopted in Italy also. It is in Soviet Russia that the influence of an ideology upon the