THE NOVEL IN particular made possible the detailed representation of the ideology of National Socialism. As bestseller lists from the twenties and thirties show, the novel surpassed all other genres. This chapter will show, on the basis of several selected novels, what subjects were dealt with in the novels that were welcome to the Nazis for ideological reasons. It makes no difference that some of the novels were already written before Hitler's official seizure of power in 1933. Decisive is only the ideology expressed in the novels and the fact that several editions and many thousands of copies of the novels were distributed in the period from 1933 to 1945 and reached a large segment of the reading public. Karl Prümm provides several examples of this: “In 1936, 500,000 copies of Edwin Erich Dwinger's novels were printed. Through the distribution mechanisms of the Party, the total number of copies of Zöberlein's works printed had reached 800,000 by 1940, while Beumelburg had already exceeded the million mark in 1939.” The National Socialist novel concerns itself with themes similar to those of the National Socialist drama: the community-building experiences of war and battle (“Steel Romanticism”) from the First World War or from the period of struggle of National Socialism before the seizure of power, the peasantry of German blood and soil, Aryan people of the north and Jews, historical champions of the Reich idea, important leaders and founders of the Reich from German history, and martyrs of the Reich. Several examples of these theme groups will be represented in the following pages.

War and Battle

Among the most popular themes was the experience of the front and the camaraderie that had been established in the First World War, and its decline in a mollycoddled Weimar Republic. As Karl Prümm shows, “war themes” ranked “quantitatively even before such accustomed subjects as ‘blood and soil,’ ‘homeland and people.’” The anti-democratic front-line collective with its authoritarian structures of leader and followers was the prototype in the Third Reich for a National Socialist community of the people. Thus, the literature scholar Hermann Pongs sees an “underground connection” between the “elemental matter of war, which is reclaimed as the destiny of the people, and … the great people's movement that leads to a new Germany of the people.”