Authors

Discussion

Nazi culture is remembered for its broadsides against Soviet society and ideology, such as the incandescent Reichstag exhibition “Bolshevism Without a Mask” (1937) or wartime hate films G.P.U. (1942) and Red Mist (1942). Yet German consumers of the pre-Barbarossa years also indulged an appetite for the lost world of tsarist Russia—not unlike the kitsch “Russonisme” one could find in interwar Paris, London or New York. While Chekhov and Turgenev were seldom performed (Gogol’s Inspector General did somewhat better), the Reich produced a surprising bounty of entirely new stage plays about imperial Russia. This paper analyzes six such plays authored by three very different playwrights, each of whom saw potential for profit, recognition and artistic fulfillment in the Russian topic. I will suggest that prerevolutionary Russian themes and iconography were a normal, even banal, characteristic of Nazi culture, one that could be exploited by regime-sympathetic and -estranged artists alike.

Harald Bratt was the pseudonym of August Christian Riekel (1897-1967), a one-time professor of education science at Braunschweig Technical University. In 1931, Riekel was ousted from his position and deprived of his pension on account of outspoken social democratic views. Thereafter he made a living writing plays for the Bremen Schauspielhaus, which attempted to preserve a liberal identity during the early years of National Socialism. His works on Russian themes—The House of Romanov (1938) and Duschenka (1938)—center on two sentimental staples of interwar German popular culture: the fate of Nicholas II and the plight of White refugees.

Hanns Gobsch (1883-1957) achieved international fame for his pacifist novel Delusional Europe 1934 (1931), predicting a Second World War within three years of publication. In the German theater, he was regarded for a widely-staged ‘Tragedy of Russia’ trilogy. Its titles were Unlucky Star Over Russia (1935), concerning the demise of Nicholas and Alexandra; The Throne Between Continents (1938), a tale of intrigue in the court of Elizabeth; and the highly-successful The Other General (1938), supplying the Russian perspective at the Battle of Tannenberg.

Friedrich Wilhelm Hymmen (1913-1995), a Nazi Party member, worked as deputy editor of the Hitler Youth organ Will and Power. In May 1940, while serving in the Wehrmacht, he debuted a play in Stuttgart, The Petersburg Coronation, which dramatized the enthronement of Elizabeth two hundred years prior. The play acquired special significance as one of several theatrical gestures of goodwill toward the Soviet Union during the Molotov-Ribbentrop era.