Culture, Politics, and Comradeship at the German-Nordic Writers’ House, 1934–1939
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National Socialist Cultural Diplomacy provides the first comprehensive account of the German-Nordic Writers’ House. From 1934 to 1939, young Scandinavian and Finnish writers spent summers at a seaside villa in Travemünde, mingling with representatives of the “new German literature,” to enjoy beach days, excursions in the Third Reich, and evening discussions on literature, politics, and comradeship. The book treats the Writers’ House as a case study of National Socialist cultural diplomacy, offering fresh insights on the ways in which semi-official cultural mediators addressed, navigated, and were constrained by a dilemma central to all cultural diplomacy, but more urgently so in the case of totalitarian regimes like the Third Reich: that in order to be perceived as legitimate, culture cannot be too obviously circumscribed by politics, while cultural autonomy comes with a lack of control that does not sit well with totalitarian regimes. Between the prevalent ideal in the Nordic cultural sphere that culture stands apart from politics, on the one hand, and the political aims of official German diplomacy, on the other, the institution showcases the constraints faced by aspiring cultural diplomats in the Third Reich and the strategies with which the Writers’ House’s organizers addressed them. With the Writers’ House as a prism, National Socialist Cultural Diplomacy also offers a case study of the fault lines that emerged in the Nordic literary sphere with the post-1933 ideologization of the German literary field, its institutions, and its lucrative book market. At stake was the role and identity of the literary intellectual, the proper relationship between culture, economics, and politics, and—for some of the visiting writers—whether to place consciousness over comradeship. This book will be of interest to researchers of Nazism, social and cultural history, and the history of the extreme right.
