Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars

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Introduction: Guns, Opera, and Movies in a Nazi Town “Politics doesn't belong in the town hall!” So claimed in May 1924 the leaders of Göttingen's Apolitical List, a coalition of right-leaning organizations that had formed a political party to run in local elections. Their call went on: Politics doesn't belong in the town hall! That is the solution from nineteen Fatherland clubs, economic associations, and undersigned women's groups! Politics doesn't belong in the town hall! That is the solution for all voters who don't want one-sided, party-political ligation [Gebundenheit] or paternalism [Bevormundung] in their representative's work on economic, cultural, and social issues in the town hall. The groups that forged this anti-party were chiefly occupational organizations. Many were explicitly nationalist like the Young German Order and Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) Association of Front Soldiers.1 They had only christened the Apolitical List a couple of weeks earlier but fully expected to garner at least 15 percent of the vote by poaching from various nationalist parties. Advocating “home [Heimat] and fatherland above all special interests of party politics,” they believed the List “most clearly demonstrated the degree to which parliamentary politics in our town has already been vanquished.”2 And in fact they did receive the largest share of votes (21.5 percent) in local 1924 elections. Afterward leaders boasted that many Göttingers “have convincingly proven the accuracy of the claim that ‘Politics doesn't belong in the town hall.’”3 The Apolitical List sent six men that year of varying backgrounds to the City Council, and they put retired Forest Director Hermann Kautz, an early Nazi Party (NSDAP) member, on the superior city Magistracy.4 The Apolitical List dissolved a few months later but formed the core of the Nazi Party's political representation.5 On one level these groups’ rejection of “politics” reflected their opposition Page 2 → to democratic wrangling in local government. But their position underscored a deeper desire to find solutions to Göttingen's problems elsewhere. A standard political history of Göttingen would trace this anti-politics to the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich in 1933. This book will instead argue that we should look elsewhere to understand the rise of Nazism and take seriously the claim that “politics doesn't belong in the town hall.” Beyond the Apolitical List's obvious frustration with parliamentary procedure, their appeal sought to solve serious social and economic problems outside the traditional political process. This study explores the broader implications of this desire. Specifically, it offers a cultural history of how Göttingen became a Nazi town. In their daily cultural activities, Göttingen citizens created ideas that resonated with and even prefigured Nazism. And as Hitler's regime took shape beginning in 1933, these cultural activities helped anchor Nazi policies to established practices in Göttingen, turning this Nazi town into a city supportive of the Third Reich. Cultural practices thus became venues for working out political issues beyond the town hall. Studying Nazism as a political force outside party politics helps explain how Germans made the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. I trace that move by treating the interwar years as a single epoch, bookended by the ruptures of the two world wars. Göttingen is an effective venue for analyzing this tumultuous period. A city of about 45,000 inhabitants between the world wars, it was large and diverse enough to experience a wide range of cultural activities yet small enough to reveal their finer workings. In order to describe the concrete ways cultural life changed during these years, this study looks closely at three examples: sharpshooting, the Göttingen Händel Opera Festival, and cinema. Each one connected public and private activity in revealing ways, and together they capture the breadth of cultural activity in Göttingen. These activities, as well, allow us to study cultural groups and practices that appealed broadly to Göttingers, as well as local ideas, institutions, and individuals shaping cultural development in town. For each case study, I identify an important turning point in 1925, 1928, and 1930, respectively, when leading participants and observers began shaping that cultural activity in ways that ultimately lent support to Nazi ideas. These shifts helped make the ideas behind Nazism integral parts of Göttingers' daily lives. Together with changes in party politics, these significant cultural developments marked Göttingen as a Nazi town by about 1930 and then shaped how the city became integrated into the Third Reich

after 1933. The book's organization reiterates the argument. I divide each of the three parts on sharpshooting, the Händel Festival, and cinema into two chapters. The Page 3 → first chapter in each part elucidates the process by which the cultural activity developed into something lending support to Nazism well before 1933. The following chapter traces the subsequent impact of that alteration into the volatile early 1930s and then the Third Reich. Highlighting these shifting moments does not teleologically assume that the creation of the Third Reich was a foregone conclusion. In each case Göttingers tried to make their cultural activities meaningful by using the resources and discourses available to them, including National Socialism.6 Cultural activities gave local meaning to Nazi ideas, enabling Nazi leaders to build support first for their Party and then for their regime. This argument about culture shaping politics addresses three important assumptions that have informed much literature on interwar Germany. First, moving the analysis of political contestation from town hall (or Reichstag) to cultural activities reveals that political transformation was not limited to 1933. Germans changed their cultural lives and their corresponding visions of politics over a longer period from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. Events of 1933 were part of a process.7 When describing the Third Reich's “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of free-time activities, Hajo Bernett differentiates between longer “evolutionary” changes Germans made and the specific “revolutionary” changes Nazism brought to daily life.8 The turning points highlighted in this study similarly demonstrate that, even in the late 1920s, Göttingers were forging cultural endeavors that reinforced Nazi ideology. Likewise the Nazi regime could reshape cultural life after 1933 because it crafted state policy from cultural practices flourishing since the mid-1920s. Reframing the period of change, second, explains connections between Weimar and Third Reich culture, whereas most scholarship emphasizes differences between the cultural activities of these two regimes. Indeed, touchstone studies such as Peter Gay's Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider narrowly define “Weimar culture” as avantgarde, cosmopolitan, leftist, and chiefly Berlin-based cultural activities.9 While Peter Jelavich's recent Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture dislodges 1933 as the pivotal moment of change in this era's culture, his definition of “Weimar culture” also excludes cultural activities most Germans experienced during this time.10 Many works on the Third Reich, in turn, define “Nazi culture” as the opposite of the “Weimar culture” that Gay and Jelavich study. These studies often assume that political changes in 1933 determined Germans' cultural lives. Classic works such as George Mosse's Nazi Culture and subsequent collections like Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will's The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich or Stephanie Barron's “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany Page 4 → take the top-down control over culture the Third Reich tried to exert as the main definition of “Nazi culture,” similarly ignoring the complexity of most Germans' cultural lives.11 These works mainly treat culture as a product. They use the presence, absence, or promotion of certain kinds of cultural products as the main definition of a particular era. My broader definition also analyzes culture as something in which Germans participated and to which they ascribed meaning. As a result, Becoming a Nazi Town enlarges our understanding of Germans' cultural lives by detailing their complexity in one place. This book shows that Germans' everyday lives did not always conform to the standard outlines of national political history. Third, my work focuses on Germans' more common experience outside Berlin. Historians' interest in Berlin—the center of 1920s cultural innovation and the political capital—has sharpened differences between “Weimar” and “Nazi” culture. The “Weimar culture” Jelavich sees perishing in 1930, for instance, is squarely Berlin culture, as is that which Peter Gay and many others have studied. In his recent survey of Weimar Germany, Eric Weitz goes so far as to say that “Weimar was Berlin, Berlin Weimar.”12 My study takes the opposite approach. Göttingen was not Berlin, nor was the rest of Germany.13 In fact, if we dig down to specific neighborhoods, Berlin was not even “Berlin.”14 To equate “Weimar culture” or “Nazi culture” with certain practices or policies in Berlin oversimplifies Germans' cultural lives. Products, ideas, and rules coming from the capital were a part of but did not define Germans' cultural activities. Modernism, for instance, flourished in many places.15 Likewise, scholars of “Nazi culture” often assume that Third Reich cultural policies emanating from Berlin actually worked. The chapters that follow show the mixed results of Nazi cultural programs. This local study therefore offers the dual opportunity to analyze the process of cultural change and the ways in which experiences outside the capital typify

Germans' experiences between the world wars. Local studies have in fact helped historians revise other broad concepts in German history. This book takes cues from previous examples to explain the relationship between culture and politics during the 1920s and 1930s. In many ways William Sheridan Allen's The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town continues to inspire all local studies on modern Germany by revealing the mechanics of political change.16 My work, though, goes further to illustrate that some of the most significant political development between the world wars took place in people's daily lives, outside the town hall. My conclusions also explicate the process by which Germans localized national governmental authority, something Celia Applegate and Alon Confino Page 5 → have studied.17 Local studies of Germans' everyday social lives have likewise expanded our understanding of “politics.” Rudy Koshar's Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 and Andrew Bergerson's Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim provide especially valuable models for describing larger political development through daily activities.18 My local study does something similar by studying cultural activities.19 Modern Germans (and indeed people throughout the West) increasingly defined themselves through cultural consumption in the twentieth century. Göttingers organizing the cultural activities I describe all created a product for consumption: a competition, a staged production, a movie, a festival. At the same time, participation at various levels—playing, watching, directing, regulating, writing, or reading about these activities—gave people the opportunity to make them meaningful. This study explains the ways Göttingers made their cultural lives politically salient. Moreover, the cultural activities I analyze all introduced new ideas to Göttingen, demonstrating how citizens there incorporated external concepts into their cultural lives. National Socialism was of course a national or even international idea. My local cultural history illuminates the lived experience of that catastrophic ideology. As well, the history of Göttingen's becoming a Nazi town highlights the essential roles that individuals and local institutions played in interwar German cultural life.20 Cultural activities, as places where material and mental life collide, reveal the concrete ways Germans used ideas to alter their daily lives.21 They offer a vehicle for studying the everyday impact of this era's ideological conflicts. More than just reflecting political shifts, cultural activities actually shaped politics during this era. Cultural practices introduced into public discussion concepts with political ramifications. They also created a space in which participants and observers could imagine social change. An expanding number of cultural associations even gave Göttingers actual venues in which to practice alternative forms of political organization. Göttingers could use these real and imagined forms of social organization to make pro-Nazi ideas a part of their daily lives. In particular, leaders and observers of prominent cultural activities advocated male control over public life instead of egalitarian democracy; they celebrated tradition and preservation over experimentation; and they lauded militarism and consumption. Named or not, many pointed toward a Volksgemeinschaft or racially defined “people's community” or “national community” as social ideal.22 The sometimes-messy process of integrating these cultural activities into the Third Reich subsequently indicated that these cultural practices helped Göttingers envision a Volksgemeinschaft, if not necessarily the Page 6 →Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. The fact that voters in Göttingen offered early and strong support to the Nazi Party certainly helped make such ideas popular. But during both regimes most Göttingers had sustained contact with these concepts in their cultural lives. This study analyzes Göttingen's cultural space.23 This idea brings together two perspectives on culture. First, I look closely at actual locations (shooting ranges, theaters, cinemas) where Göttingers produced, consumed, and participated in cultural life, as well as the organizations that controlled those spaces. Second, I study the discursively constructed images of “Göttingen culture” in local media and government.24 This work therefore draws chiefly from Göttingen municipal and private club records and newspapers. While the book's three parts on sharpshooting, the Händel Festival, and cinema roughly exemplify popular, high, and mass culture, respectively, these activities really functioned more broadly in Göttingen. Studying them as cultural spaces reveals commonalities and differences not reflected in simple sociological definitions. This book treats cultural activities as both something consumed and vehicle for signification.25 By studying cultural activities as both a process of consumption and an opportunity to ascribe meaning, this analysis explains the ways they were in fact political venues. Indeed, controlling and participating in cultural activities represented some of the most significant

political actions of this era, ones that helped to normalize the ideas and actions of Hitler's regime. As such, cultural activities constituted a vehicle for Germans to change their actions and ways of thinking while maintaining the appearance of normalcy.26 The individuals, institutions, and ideas described here may have been unique to Göttingen, but they point to the fact that all Germans experienced culture locally. Since Germans' daily cultural lives often developed independent of regime changes, my examination encourages us to inquire how Weimar turned into Nazi Germany generally. Stressing gradual developments from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s rather than a rupture in 1933 does not minimize the changes that Hitler's regime brought to Germany. On the contrary: studying Göttingen's transformation into a Nazi town lays bare some of the reasons Germans accepted and took part in actions carried out by Hitler's regime, including the most brutal ones. Thomas Kohut has argued recently that National Socialism was transmitted through experiences that seemed apolitical even if they carried tremendous political implications.27 The deep alterations that reshaped German cultural life did not merely result from a break in government. Understanding cultural developments from the perspective of Germans' lived experiences illuminates the process of change without relying upon a simplistic dichotomy between “Weimar” and “Nazi.” Page 7 →

Setting the Scene: Culture and Politics in Göttingen through the Mid-1920s Located in a long valley along the Leine River, just southwest of the Harz Mountains and a little south of Hanover, Göttingen has historically been a trading and administrative center for the surrounding countryside. A document of Holy Roman Emperor Otto I mentioned the town of “Gutingi” first in 953. During the Middle Ages it flourished as a member of the Hanseatic League. In 1737 George August II, King of Great Britain and Elector of Hanover, opened the George August University in Göttingen, which quickly became the leading progressive cameralist university in Germany and put Göttingen on Europe's intellectual map. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the university gained a reputation as an international center for science and mathematics, producing a string of Nobel laureates in the twentieth century. In 1866 Göttingen became a part of Prussia when the Hohenzollern kingdom absorbed the Kingdom of Hanover.28 The creation of the Kaiserreich (German Empire) in 1871 strengthened Göttingen's connection to Germany and the world by improving the university and making the city a garrison town for the first time. The presence of the Eighty-Second Regiment until 1945 sustained local appreciation of military ceremony and similar public pageantry. The George August University's reputation since the early twentieth century has been the city's chief calling card around the world, such that most histories refer to it as a “university town.”29 Although the university was one of the leading employers in town and its members exercised some influence in public life, it did not directly impact the daily lives of many Göttingers. This study's attention to the Händel Festival, which represented the university's most prominent foray into cultural life, reflects the important though limited role of university representatives in Göttingen's cultural life. As was the case across Germany, however, many professors in Göttingen after 1918 cast doubt on the new German republic's legitimacy, pushing the town toward reactionary politics in the Weimar era.30 Socially, the influence of the university, the garrison, and other businesses gave the middle classes significant political authority in Göttingen. By the end of the nineteenth century, professionals and small business owners comprised more of Göttingen's economy than average in Germany. Far from natural resources and water transportation, Göttingen's industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century centered less on heavy industry than in the western parts of Germany. Specialized industries such as fine mechanics, which grew partly from the university's strong science programs, and well-established trades Page 8 →groups made Göttingen's working class more skilled overall. The city grew from 15,000 citizens in 1875 to 33,500 in 1910. As new factories at the turn of the twentieth century attracted more workers, voter support for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) increased accordingly. Nearly 38 percent of Göttingen voters chose the SPD in 1913. Yet this leftist group remained until its dissolution in 1933 a minority voice in Göttingen politics. In addition, many blue-collar workers lived outside Göttingen, employed in the factories on its outskirts (especially in the villages of Grone, Weende, and Hanover-Münden). The established authority of the middle class (especially small business owners,

professionals, bureaucrats, soldiers, and professors) formed a core conservative elite in politics. Moreover, the city's relatively mild weather, hotels and restaurants, garrison, and university attracted retirees, so that Göttingen earned the nickname “Pensionopolis.” Those older, wealthier retirees who stayed or moved there buttressed conservative leadership.31 As a result, many Göttingen citizens, especially cultural critics and government officials, tended to favor cultural activities that were well-established and familiar (like sharpshooting) or brought acclaim to the city (like the Händel Festival). Göttingen's confessional homogeneity also contributed to its conservative atmosphere. Between the world wars, about 87 percent of the population identified themselves as Protestant.32 This trait helps explain the success there of a music festival devoted to Händel, a famously Protestant composer.33 Göttingen's relative lack of religious diversity likewise minimized potential reasons for sharpshooters to resist Nazism, since Catholic clubs elsewhere used their religious mission to challenge Third Reich control.34 Politically, the absence of a Catholic Center Party limited political options for Göttingen voters and strengthened right-wing parties like the German National People's Party (DNVP) and National Socialist Party.35 The city's Jewish population remained around 1 percent (mirroring national statistics) in the 1920s and 1930s.36 Often successful members of the middle class (especially business owners, professors, and other professionals), Göttingen Jews had become important citizens by the late nineteenth century. But as they did elsewhere in Germany, antisemites used this well-integrated position of Jews in Göttingen to spin conspiracy theories about “Jewish influence” on public life. Already in 1893, the antisemitic German Reform Party employed this argument to garner 13 percent of Göttingen's Reichstag vote and draw acclaim from local dignitaries.37 The rabidly nationalist, sometimes antisemitic Göttinger Tageblatt, the town's largest newspaper by 1900, lent financial and editorial support to groups after the Great War that spouted such political antisemitism to defame the Weimar Republic.38 Göttingen's religious homogeneity and traditions of antisemitism Page 9 → thus shortened the distance in public discourse between frequent calls for apolitical unity and the racialized concept of a Volksgemeinschaft. Consistent civic leadership for much of the first half of the twentieth century meant that conservative elite attitudes of the Imperial era from before 1918 informed governance in the Weimar and Nazi periods. Many top government offices, including seats on the superior Magistracy, remained in the same hands from the 1900s to the 1940s, even as the lower Town Council moved gradually to the right between 1919 and 1934. Only three men, for instance, served as Göttingen's Lord Mayor from 1894 to 1945, and the City Building Director remained in office from 1909 to 1946.39 As in many smaller cities, local “notables” (Honoratioren) helped synchronize political and cultural developments, because they led both civic administration and leisure organizations.40 The conservative Magistracy wrote the laws that regulated cultural activities, and one member served as Police Director to enforce them. These established elites recognized the tremendous growth of cultural activities after the Great War and tried to cast cultural innovation and expansion as tools to reinforce, rather than challenge, traditional social and political authority.41 Following the outlines of an 1893 law, the Magistracy revised cultural regulations seven times between the world wars, mostly in the 1920s.42 These rules codified elite assumptions about cultural life. In particular, laws favored familiar high culture (theater, classical music, visual art) and that which promoted nationalism (patriotic events, military festivities, national epic films). They acted on the belief that mass culture should be closely supervised, heavily taxed, and potentially edifying. At the same time Göttingen regulations had to function within parameters set by national laws from both the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Göttingen's cultural regulations choreographed a delicate dance in the 1920s and 1930s between, on the one hand, local economic interests, elite assumptions, and methods of control and, on the other, the pressures of national governance, the general process of cultural homogenization, and globalization. During the 1920s local government practices often paralleled right-wing notions about the function of culture; certainly they aided such thinking. In the Third Reich these familiar rules made cultural “coordination” or Gleichschaltung a process that wove together national and local interests, if not always smoothly.43 Despite some social and political continuity, most people in Göttingen and across Germany experienced the trauma of the Great War as a major rupture in their lives. Ulrich Popplow argues that 1918 represented more of a break for most Göttingers than did events of 1933, when the Nazis came to power.44 In the closing decade of the Kaiserreich, Adelheid von Saldern explains, Page 10 → “the old Göttingen disappeared gradually, and a city

emerged that, on the one hand, retained its provincial characteristics yet, on the other hand, had international contact at its disposal” through the university and businesses.45 The dislocation, hunger, and political upheaval caused by the Great War sealed this shift. And because of the war's gruesome toll on soldiers and civilians alike, most citizens in Göttingen embraced the opportunity to change Germany's politics in the November 1918 Revolution.46 However, initial enthusiasm for the revolution quickly turned to skepticism and even criticism of the new Republic in the face of pressing social and economic problems, tenuous law and order, and anger over the Versailles Treaty. The SPD and the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) formed Göttingen's core political support for the new Republic.47 The voting chart in figure 1 illustrates pro-Republic parties' quick decline and the SPD's settling into the position of vocal minority in Göttingen politics. The SPD's position as opposition since the turn of the century made its leaders cautious about pushing dramatic revolutionary change. Indeed, not one local official, police officer, or judge was removed because of the 1918 Revolution. In short, few officials wholeheartedly endorsed republicanism in Göttingen.48 Nevertheless, the Revolution and its fallout fundamentally changed the tone of political participation in Göttingen, engendering more active, if often vitriolic, engagement with events in the public sphere.49 Some organizations took advantage of the burgeoning ethos of participation to promote antisemitism. In particular, groups ranging from the new, capricious German Racial League for Defense and Defiance (DVSTB) to the established Göttinger Tageblatt blamed Jews for post-war problems and the shaky new Republic.50 Meanwhile, leading citizens at the university and in the garrison also cast doubt on the validity of the Republican “system.”51 As a result, Göttingen's established, conservative political elite validated radical challenges to the Weimar Republic, making the upheaval of 1918–19 a permanent part of Göttingen's political landscape. Cultural activities served as a means for Göttingers to come to terms with the Great War and its impact. Organizers and commentators in the early 1920s posited cultural activities as means to heal and strengthen Germany. Cultural rejuvenation outside and despite the messy politics of democracy therefore became a part of Göttingers' thinking about their daily cultural practices. Many cultural leaders likewise emphasized the apolitical nature of sharpshooting, opera, cinema, sports, and other cultural activities, claiming that they could unify the city in a way that democracy could not. The Magistracy's conservative cultural regulations reinforced this perspective. The most salient feature of Göttingen's interwar cultural life was growth. Especially during the 1920s, the number of cultural activities and their importance in people's lives expanded dramatically. Between 1919 and 1930 the number of orchestras in Göttingen grew from one to six, four new movie theaters opened, and Göttingers founded nearly 200 new voluntary associations for sports, socializing, debating, singing, praying, and almost every other activity.52 Three new varieté theaters sprang up. Bars and cafés offered more concerts and dance evenings, and many of them used new radios and phonographs. (We could trace similar growth in private cultural activities—phonograph/radio listening, reading, playing music at home, etc. While these activities certainly shaped Göttingen's cultural life, this study looks chiefly at leisure pursuits practiced at least partly in public spaces.) A host of factors facilitated this rush to enjoy cultural activities: shorter workdays, more affordable entertainment, the desire to participate in public life, and the attempt to forget the many problems Germany faced in the 1920s.53 For most Germans this trend continued into the Third Reich. Indeed, expanding opportunities to participate in and consume culture defined Germans' free time throughout the twentieth century.54 Page 11 → Newspapers aided and reported upon this growth. Göttingen boasted three or four daily papers for most of the interwar years, offering a variety of perspectives and steady growth in coverage of all cultural activities. And most of the time they were supportive of all cultural activities. Heinz Koch, who wrote for the Göttingen Tageblatt from 1919 to 1960, unifies much of the material Page 12 → discussed in this book. As local editor and lead cultural critic, he covered important sharpshooting events and the interwar Händel Festivals and wrote extensive film reviews. A recognizable, established critic who partly crafted the outlook of Göttingen's most read newspaper, Koch's views thus helped mold public perceptions.55 He was culturally and politically conservative, generally favoring well-known artists, nationalist story lines, and limited experimentation. Still, he managed to incorporate the avant-garde Händel Festival of the 1920s and other examples of new aesthetics into his worldview, because they signified the importance of Göttingen culture. His embrace of novelty epitomized the ways conservatives

could celebrate change as evidence of superior “Göttingen” or “German” culture. In many ways Koch's development as critic during these years personifies the larger changes this book describes. In contrast, the Social Democratic Volksblatt served until 1933 as a steady voice of opposition to the conservative or at least middleclass perspectives of Göttingen's newspapers. The Volksblatt amplified the efforts of left-leaning organizations to model egalitarian democracy through cultural activity. Unfortunately, those groups often spoke to each other more than to potential converts, reinforcing but not necessarily expanding their solidly republican position in Göttingen's public life. By the mid-1920s cultural organizations, local officials, and the media had expanded the scope of Göttingen's cultural life in a way that still generally supported traditional conservative interests. The major regulations and institutions remained more or less in place for the next twenty years or so. Still, the continued growth of leisure activities and the intensifying ideological conflicts of the later 1920s made Göttingen's cultural life an increasingly important location for working out “political” issues of all kinds. The Apolitical List's 1924 victory was short lived, since the disparate group fell apart soon after the May local election. But the implications of their ideas—that nationalist unity should determine politics and that rejuvenation lay outside the traditional political process—formed the basis for how cultural activities began to turn Göttingen into a Nazi town.

From “Nazi Town” to Third Reich City This book focuses on the process of Göttingen's gradual alteration during the 1920s and 1930s. Cultural activities facilitated this shift, giving leaders, participants, and observers a venue in which to develop ideas that helped make basic tenets of Nazism—strong male authority over multi-party democracy, Page 13 → celebration of “German” culture, militarism, and a racial definition of the German Volk—a part of daily life. The cultural activities studied here changed at several key moments between 1925 and 1930 in ways that engendered the growth of such ideas. In 1925 middle-class sharpshooting leaders tried to enlist every man in town as a “shooter.” This move parlayed growing participation in their activities to strengthen male control of the public sphere and older notions of social organization “above” party politics. The internationally famous Göttingen Händel Festival likewise began to change in 1928, when supporters bowed to financial, aesthetic, and intellectual pressures. They gradually modified an experimental festival of the 1920s into a celebration of German culture in the 1930s. Finally, responses to three films in 1930—The Blue Angel, Westfront 1918, and All Quiet on the Western Front—bolstered conservative visions of mass culture in Göttingen. In each case, these changes reinforced the city's political move to the right. Cultural practices in Göttingen faced financial difficulties even before the US stock market crash of 1929 that prompted an international depression. And each of the shifting points analyzed here also reflected those economic pressures. Sharpshooting leaders needed greater participation to strengthen their organizations. Mounting debt helped push Händel Festival leaders away from experiment. And tax discounts offered financial benefits to cinema owners who showed “safe” films. As well, the city's ambitious construction in 1927 of a new sharpshooting hall and swimming pool added 300,000 Marks to its growing debt, which limited local government responses to subsequent economic crises.56 And that restriction, in turn, empowered those on the right who blamed democracy for the deteriorating financial situation. Barbara Marshall attributes Göttingers' interest in right-wing politics to broad disillusionment with a political system that many believed was unable to secure local or national “order” as they understood it.57 Cultural activities echoed this disillusionment while also giving Göttingers opportunities to consider ideas that ran counter to Weimar democracy. Even during the stable middle years of the Weimar Republic, Göttingen voters supported parties that challenged the democratic system. By the late 1920s the Nazis had become the chief mouthpiece of right-wing, anti-democratic ideas in Göttingen. University medical student Ludolf Haase founded a local branch of the National Socialist Party in 1922. An SA (Stormtrooper) group followed the next year and quickly grew to 200 men. The Nazis initially attracted students and workers because of the party's rowdiness and aggressive revolutionary ideology. Tacit support from local police gave the young party legal space in which to grow. When the Hanover-based regional Page 14 → chapter broke up in the wake of Hitler's failed 1923 Putsch, Göttingen became the headquarters of a new, smaller district (Gau) with Haase as leader (Gauleiter). The NSDAP flourished in Göttingen in the 1920s because of

discontentment sowed by previous radical groups and because the established political and media elite, especially the powerful Göttinger Tageblatt, sympathized with some of its ideas.58 Elections in 1929 and 1930 cemented Göttingen's backing for anti-republican groups. Right-wing parties benefited from the city's fractious politics, greater debt, increased taxes, and unbalanced budget. From a field of 157 candidates (!), National Socialists led a right-wing bloc that won an absolute majority—53 percent—on Göttingen's Town Council in May 1929. And when that coalition collapsed a year later, the Nazi Party alone controlled the Council.59 This election and one death also replaced all seven elected officials of the normally stable Magistracy. Four of the five non-elected Magistracy positions, though, remained unchanged, coating political change with the varnish of established elite control.60 In the September 1930 Reichstag elections, nearly 38 percent of Göttingen's electorate voted for the NSDAP (compared to 18 percent nationally). Another 20 percent selected the DNVP, giving right-wing parties almost 60 percent of Göttingers' votes that year. Although the Communists gained a few votes, the Left was on the defensive in Göttingen starting in 1929. Street battles between National Socialists and Communists attracted new members to Hitler's Party, enabling the Nazis to claim, paradoxically, that they were the only party truly fighting Bolshevism and seeking to restore law and order.61 Together, cultural and political developments between 1925 and 1930 painted Göttingen as a “Nazi town” by the early 1930s.62 Cultural visions of political unity helped make this change possible. Sharpshooting, the Händel Festival, and cinema chiefly promoted “apolitical” cultural activities to capture the social unity so apparently lacking in public life. One city senator in 1929, for example, maintained that sharpshooters had developed from “protecting the city” to “protecting its unity.”63 Händel Festival leaders claimed in 1930 to cultivate the “cultural possessions of our Volk.”64 And local film reviewers in 1930 could only find common ground in movies devoid of ideology. A number of cultural organizations described in the pages that follow offered Göttingers visions of non-democratic, “apolitical” social life and even the opportunity to administer parts of their lives thusly. At the same time, groups such as sports organizations, especially those associated with the SPD, made clear that democracy and popular participation could bring people together.65 Their closure after 1933 shut down the few democratic alternatives in Göttingen to apolitical, Page 15 →völkisch unity.66 Already in the 1920s some advocates claimed that common cultural participation—with the right leadership—could foster a Volksgemeinschaft. The history of culture in Göttingen demonstrates that those on the left and right often agreed on the need for unity. This agreement ultimately helped conservative-fascist solutions to political and social problems at the expense of liberal democratic ones. As economic conditions worsened in the early 1930s and democratically elected leaders failed to solve problems, Göttingers increasingly ran to völkisch visions of unity. The city's right-wing government and the sympathetic Göttinger Tageblatt blamed previous Social Democratic governments for the deepening financial crisis. The majority NSDAP faction of Göttingen's Town Council refused to cooperate with other parties to solve pressing problems, ironically blaming partisanship for lack of solutions. And Hitler secured almost as many votes in Göttingen in the March 1932 presidential election as did the popular Hindenburg.67 In the critical July 1932 Reichstag elections most Göttingers embraced Nazi solutions to the deteriorating situation in Germany. A full 51 percent of the Göttingen electorate voted for the NSDAP, compared to 37.4 percent Reichwide. At the 1932 Sharpshooting Festival one of the city's most familiar politicians, Paul Warmbold, who had been on the Magistracy since 1911, praised Nazi plans to solve the “catastrophic financial crisis” by ending Germany's “tributary slavery” and Versailles Treaty military restrictions. To great applause, he called those political aims evidence of Germany's “survival instinct.”68 The November 1932 Reichstag elections, in which the Nazis lost some votes nationally but remained Germany's largest party, prompted President Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933 and ask him to form a government. The Nazis blamed the late February 1933 fire that burned down the Reichstag on the Communists and stepped up violence against leftists across the country. In this bloody context the March 1933 election, which gave the Nazis more votes, was at best lip service to democracy and heralded its demise. The Enabling Act of late March granted Hitler emergency powers and suppressed the KPD and SPD. A formal ceremony on 21 March 1933 in Potsdam announced the official creation of the “Third Reich” in Germany. New laws in April “to protect the people and the state” removed Jews, leftists, and other “enemies” from many public positions and began to create an apartheid state.

The infamous book burning on 10 May 1933 in Göttingen may have crafted an iconic example of “Nazi culture” but also illustrated the wedding of local and national interests that characterized the Nazi regime. As they did at Page 16 → thirty other schools, members of Göttingen's German Student Union organized the event in order to curry the regime's favor over other pro-Nazi student groups. They took from the university and local libraries books by fifty-two “leftist” and “Jewish” writers such as Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Alfred Döblin, Berthold Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Stefan Zweig. With torches and songs, they led veterans, a band from the elite SS (the Party organization begun to protect Hitler), student fraternities, and other citizens through the town center to a fire brigade-approved bonfire in front of the city's oldest church. There hundreds of participants chanted slogans about the need to cleanse German culture and burned books.69 Joseph Goebbels and the national government approved of this nationwide “action” but did not hand down an index of banned books to be burned.70 The events built upon the concern right-wing organizations and professors had expressed long before 1933 about “un-German” literature.71 Books burned from Göttingen's city public library actually impacted the reading habits of people in this city more than those few removed from the university library. Plus, conservative politicians had already for several years been using the public library's financial difficulties to prune its collection to their tastes. Likewise, the ways local leaders implemented national “lists” of prohibited authors during the Third Reich determined the availability of books in Göttingen more than a single dramatic book burning did.72 In short, the burning tells us much about connections between the Weimar and Nazi eras. Indeed, we can only understand this symbolic event in the context of a gradual shift from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s. The Nazi regime's Gleichschaltung (coordination) of cultural activities similarly depended upon the cooperation of local and national interests. The policies behind this process may have come from Berlin, but localities determined how they were implemented.73 The “coordination” of Göttingen sport clubs in the Third Reich is instructive.74 These groups depended upon larger cartels to help arrange competitions, and the political affiliation of those national bodies determined attendant clubs' fates in 1933. Laws outlawing the SPD and KPD also closed down clubs associated with those parties. But some Göttingen working-class sport groups managed to reposition themselves and flourish in the Third Reich.75 Solidly middle-class organizations trumpeted their support for new Nazi sport policies, even if members sometimes chose local notables over Nazi politicians to lead clubs.76 While political affiliation determined clubs' options after 1933, individual organizations had to use their connections with local government, police, and media to stand or fall in the Third Reich. For some Germans, of course, there was no choice but to fall, or better, to Page 17 → be knocked down. Ideological and racial repression ended some Göttingers' participation in cultural life immediately. “Coordination” required all voluntary associations to model authoritarian leadership by instituting the “Führer Principle” and to work with existing NSDAP groups like the SA, SS, Hitler Youth, and free-time organization “Strength through Joy.” A lack of National Socialist zeal, for example, eventually doomed the Workers Sharpshooting Club, which managed to survive until 1935.77 The Third Reich also forced associations to allow only “Aryan” members, something a few groups had done since the 1920s.78 Laws that barred Jews from membership in cultural organizations were one of several important steps toward making racial “enemies” into second-class citizens and eventually victims of genocide. Third Reich laws excluded Jews, unrepentant leftists, and other “state enemies” from producing or selling cultural products, participating in many activities, and even consuming some culture. Third Reich cultural policies often took existing practices and rhetoric, codified them in extreme form, and then made failure to adhere to such laws a crime. At the same time, the regime's support for many cultural activities helped make palatable its policy of cultural advocacy for many Germans and repressive brutality for others. The processes by which cultural activities became pillars of support for Nazism by around 1930 in turn shaped the way that they were integrated into the Third Reich. For instance, when Mayor and newly installed Sharpshooting Führer Albert Gnade reorganized sharpshooting in December 1933, he pushed further the trend of expanding participation, drew upon sharpshooting's military heritage, and encouraged closer cooperation with existing military and Nazi Party organizations. The Göttingen Händel Society, which oversaw the Festival, stressed to the Nazi regime that they had already shifted toward “safer” aesthetics and removed the few Jews amid its leadership. And the Third Reich's intense interests in film meant that cinema owners had to rely even more on the good rapport with local officials they had cultivated in the 1920s.

In the same way, the new regime also intensified existing local cultural regulations. New rules in 1933 continued to offer tax discounts to events the government wished to encourage, merely expanding the list to include “state politically valuable” events.79 Even Goebbels's creation of the Reich Culture Chamber in September 1933 to coordinate all production-oriented cultural activities grew from many artists' desire since the early twentieth century for a regulating organization to protect their interests. As was often the case, the Nazis' ability to fulfill previous dreams garnered popular support for the regime.80 The Reich Culture Chamber reached deep into German cultural life. It required anyone involved in these cultural activities to be a member and thus Page 18 → gave Reich officials the ability to exclude people for racial or political reasons. This combination of carrot and stick enabled the Nazi regime to reshape cultural life, but as much due to local administration and policing as to national dictates. The work of two men, Buno Jung and Albert Gnade, epitomizes the synthetic process of turning this Nazi town into a city of the Third Reich. The curious power constellation that emerged in Göttingen during the Third Reich resulted from the combination of strong support for National Socialism since the mid-1920s and conservative protection of “Göttingen's interests.” At the center stood Jung and Gnade, both of whom bridged the Weimar and Nazi regimes. A respected jurist and honorary professor from the moderately right-wing German People's Party (DVP), Bruno Jung served as Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) from 1926 to 1938. He typified the interwar elite as opportunist and pater familias who quickly adapted to the Third Reich while continuing to protect some of the city's interests and traditions. Albert Gnade was a popular restaurant owner with some of the strongest Nazi credentials in town. He was an “old fighter,” a charter local NSDAP member since 1922, and head of the local SS division. Gnade was elected on the Nazi Party ticket to the Magistracy in 1929. In March 1933, he became Mayor (Bürgermeister) under (Lord Mayor) Jung and Police Director partly because of his friendship with the new Regional President Hermann Muhs. As Police Director, Gnade oversaw the city's rounding up of communist and socialist leaders, as well as Jews.81 Gnade succeeded Jung as Lord Mayor in 1938, serving until he surrendered Göttingen to American forces in April 1945.82 Initially, the regional Party expected Gnade to help purge Göttingen's government of non-Nazis like Jung. However, the two men worked closely together. Sometimes to the dismay of Party and military officials, they emphasized law and order and placed the interests of the city—at least their definition of those interests—above those of the Nazi Party. By 1934 they had established, along with other local elites, a power structure in Göttingen that firmly rooted support for the Third Reich in local interests.83 As Mayor and Police Director, “Papa Gnade” especially exercised considerable, direct influence on cultural life in the Third Reich. His actions in this sphere often drew from assumptions about culture that were more common among elites during the Kaiserreich than the Third Reich, highlighting continuities of cultural conservatism throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century. Like previous leaders, Gnade and Jung favored cultural practices with deep roots in Göttingen. This unique situation makes the story in Göttingen all the more compelling, as it helps us understand the ways traditional conservatives helped facilitate Page 19 → Nazi radicalism.84 While the shared interests of men like Gnade and Jung help explain the different situation in Göttingen, my study illustrates that cultural practices could couple forces that did not always work well together in the Third Reich. Individuals who had helped shape Göttingen cultural life since the 1920s—Gnade and Jung, as well as Tageblatt critic Heinz Koch, Händel Society Director Walter Meyerhoff, and cinema magnate Ernst Heidelberg—all continued to exercise influence in the Third Reich. They did so in part because they had learned in the Weimar era how to use local and national authorities to further their interests. Some of them, however, also ran aground on the Third Reich's potentially perilous personal politics that encouraged conflict.85 For instance, despite his credentials, Gnade had to defend himself in 1934 and 1935 against a legal attack from another local Nazi leader. The guilty verdict by a regional Party court maintained that Gnade “no longer felt like National Socialist, but like a bureaucrat.” Gnade had to enlist the assistance of officials all the way to Berlin to overturn the verdict.86 He also clashed with military officials in 1935 over their right to hold tax-discounted events.87 Ernst Heidelberg, who owned Göttingen's largest movie house plus another, was at the center of all local cinema activities from 1910 until the 1950s. He was kicked out of the Reich Film Chamber in 1935 for taxes he owed.88 And during World War II, his son conspired with a disgruntled employee to have Heidelberg arrested and put in a concentration camp in order to take over the successful theaters. Heidelberg's attempt to enlist the help of his good friend Albert

Gnade nearly resulted in the Lord Mayor's arrest.89 The decided absence of female actors in these case studies underscores the emphasis that leaders in all three activities placed on shoring up male control of the public sphere.90 Local leaders may have minimized some facets of Nazism in Göttingen and even suffered in the Third Reich. But they ultimately helped legitimate the Nazi regime for Göttingen citizens by anchoring it to notions of law and order, tradition and myth, civic pride, and the status quo. Such continuity made discrimination against Jews and leftists seem to grow naturally out of popular ideological positions from the Weimar era. This system engendered greater support for Hitler's regime by making its policies of discrimination, repression, and eventually murder part of long-standing traditions in local public life.91 Especially between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s cultural activities helped foster ideas that lent support to Nazism. By 1935 the initial “revolutionary” phase of Third Reich Gleichschaltung was over. Germany's rearmament that year legitimated sharpshooters' claims to rebuild Germany and train “shooters,” while also rendering sharpshooting Page 20 → more symbolically than actually important. The 1935 Händel Festival returned the city to international prominence by celebrating “German” music rather than avant-garde interpretations. And the Magistracy's November 1935 revision of cultural regulations finally offered tax discounts for avowedly Nazi films and events.92 Thereafter cultural activities in Göttingen increasingly blended local and national interests. For instance, the 1937 celebration of the George August University's 200th anniversary in Göttingen wove together the fame of the University, the Händel Festival, sports, and Nazi ideas.93 Certainly local and national leaders bent those institutions to fulfill Nazi ideological purposes, but Third Reich officials also used them to enhance the regime.94 In the late 1930s Nazi organizations such as the Hitler Youth, SA and SS, and Strength through Joy, as well as the military, played larger and more obvious roles in cultural life. As potential patrons, they aided in the success of public festivities like the Händel and Sharpshooting Festivals and helped bolster movie attendance, too. Organizers attracted these people with discounted tickets and events tailored to their interests. Plus, cultural activities gave Göttingers greater means of participating in public life, something citizens had sought since the early 1920s and something the Third Reich demanded to accomplish what it did. In so doing, cultural purveyors reinforced the connection of cultural consumption and ideological aims. Third Reich policies thus appeared to “solve” the tension between controlling and promoting cultural activities that had characterized cultural life in Göttingen throughout the interwar years.95 By the late 1930s right-wing politicians had clearly decided that politics did belong in the town hall, as long as they were the right kind of politics. The chapters that follow make clear that politics also belonged in the shooting hall, opera hall, sports hall, movie house, and many other cultural spaces. Rather than showing how the Third Reich politicized cultural activities, these case studies demonstrate that Göttingers themselves developed ideas in their daily activities that helped engender major political change.

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PART 1 Sharpshooting Page 22 →

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CHAPTER 1 Local Growth, National Renewal, and Invented Traditions, 1919–25 In no other part of the German Fatherland is there such a great fondness for Volksfests as in Lower Saxony. They are public affairs in the broadest sense of the word. Here all class and party differences that unfortunately shape Germans’ thinking and business fall away, so that, at least at the Sharpshooting Festival, Germans are a single fraternal people. For eight long years Göttingen has had to go without its most popular festival. What that means to those who do not enjoy the privilege of being born a Göttinger was made clear yesterday. Beginning in the early afternoon the broad path to the festival grounds, to the Schüttenhoff, looked like caravan route attracting an unbroken chain of curious onlookers. Thousands lined the city streets, as well, through which the historical parade passed. All of Göttingen was literally on its feet, preserving an image of undiminished courage to go on living by a people [Volk] who have gone through years of the worst misfortunes and privations and who nevertheless still possess the joy of life that can only lie in the heart of a truly healthy people. That was the overall lovely impression of this past Saturday.1 With this article on the 1921 Sharpshooting Festival, commentator Heinz Koch welcomed Göttingers to the city's first Festival since the outbreak of World War I. This local editor and chief cultural critic at the Göttinger Tageblatt articulated what many shooters believed at this time, that sharpshooting could unite Göttingen by overcoming the many divisions in post-war Germany. They cast sharpshooting as beloved tradition and a potentially revolutionary force for change.2 The appeal of this combination and the tension it implied drove sharpshooting's development throughout the interwar years. This synthesis served as the basis for sharpshooting's rebirth and significant growth in the 1920s. Like the Apolitical List of a few years later, Koch used Page 24 → anti-politics to politicize sharpshooting's meaning. His comments illustrated the fact that this activity became a venue for working out social and political issues between the world wars. As both a public and private cultural practice, sharpshooting makes especially clear the political implications of everyday activities. Sharpshooting made the leisure pursuits of a growing number of participants a part of political change. As well, the increase in commentaries and spectators at events included many nonshooters in discourses about sharpshooting's meaning. Moreover, sharpshooting's connection with military preparedness throughout the interwar era made it de facto a contentious political issue. The specific point at which sharpshooting began to help Göttingen become a Nazi town came in 1925. Beginning that year, sharpshooting leaders expanded the scope of participation and activities by encouraging more men to take part in competitions with the goal of making every man in town a “shooter.” They welcomed men from all political and social backgrounds, solidifying a definition of participation based on gender (and race) rather than democratic equality. This expansion enabled middle-class men who had traditionally dominated sharpshooting to direct its growth toward conservative political aims. Sharpshooting leaders and commentators alike highlighted its affinity with Nazi ideas, providing Göttingers with an analogue to Nazism in daily cultural life. After 1933 Third Reich leaders tried to reorganize sharpshooting. Their “coordination” efforts fared best when drawing from longstanding practices. Initially, sharpshooting's embodiment of militarism, nationalism, and male authoritarian rule fit well with Third Reich policies. But Germany's rearmament beginning in 1935 rendered sharpshooting a symbol of Nazi policies rather than a vehicle for their implementation. This part thus pays attention to changing activities and discourses about sharpshooting. Chapter 1 traces sharpshooting's development up to the important moment of expansion in 1925. It shows that leaders, commentators, and local politicians used sharpshooting for their own reasons. Chapter 2 then describes the process from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s by which sharpshooting helped root Nazi ideas in Göttingen. Third Reich officials reorganized sharpshooting's overall structure in Göttingen. This process combined shooters’ longstanding ideals (traditional male authority, unity outside parliamentary politics, community sociability, military

preparedness) with Nazi notions of leadership and race, as well as the mistrust some officials held for “liberal” qualities of associational life. Sharpshooting leaders’ successes and challenges after 1933 indicate that the tensions inherent in this activity continued into the Nazi era. Sharpshooting's dual status as private practice and public demonstration Page 25 → makes it a particularly apt prism through which to study the political meaning of everyday cultural activities. Existing literature has especially focused on the dramatic growth of sharpshooting clubs (Schützenvereine) in the early twentieth century, especially after the Great War.3 Voluntary associations have, since the early nineteenth century, served a variety of important functions in Germany. Important as this trend was, scholars have been less attentive to an important dimension that emerged in the 1920s: the emphasis on sharpshooting as an individual activity.4 Sharpshooting leaders in Göttingen increasingly believed that every man in town should be a sharpshooter, and encouraged more men to join the loose association of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society (Bürger Schützengesellschaft). This affiliation offered access to the shooting range and the ability to compete in the yearly Sharpshooting Festival but did not involve the regular meetings and sociability that membership in a sharpshooting club (Schützenverein) did. This tension between club and individual shooting pushed the gradual reshaping of what it meant to be a “shooter” (Schütze), a Göttinger, and even a German man.5 Each summer the Sharpshooting Festival served as the most important venue for articulating sharpshooting's meaning. It was a major event for the whole town and social ritual of the highest order.6 Participants and media observers turned it into a venue for discussing sharpshooting's meaning and, ultimately, a symbol of Göttingen itself in these troubled times. While scholars have studied political festivals specifically as cultural events,7 my analysis begins with the cultural activity of sharpshooting and explains its political function.8 Sharpshooting was a multivalent activity. Some Göttingers participated regularly, some occasionally. Some watched competitions, while others just went to festivals for the rides, beer, and sausages. Still others wrote about activities, sometimes as local news, sometimes as sports, sometimes as politics. Although the story that follows illustrates middle-class control of sharpshooting, the activities attracted the entire social spectrum of Göttingen citizenry. Sharpshooting certainly drew from and invented traditions, but it also featured modern technology, methods of promotion, and consumption.9 While it stands most obviously in this study of Göttingen culture as middle-class popular culture, the chapters that follow illustrate its broader meaning for public life.

Sharpshooting, Real and Imagined, Before 1921 Sharpshooting traced its existence back to the Middle Ages but became an important part of associational life in Göttingen at the end of the nineteenth Page 26 → century. As in other towns, the Göttingen Burgher Sharpshooting Society, founded 1392, began as a militia to protect and police the town.10 Middle-class men founded the city's first sharpshooting club (Schützenverein) in 1863. The number of associations grew dramatically after World War I due to the intersection of two historical trends: sharpshooting's increasingly symbolic role in city life and the growing importance of voluntary associations in general throughout Germany. This combination made twentieth-century sharpshooting an activity with modern organization and publicity that often focused on the past, attempting to protect local traditions by appealing to popular participation. The 1919 Versailles Treaty's restriction of German armed forces reinforced sharpshooting's background as a semi-military activity, keeping alive an older, masculine notion of citizenship based on military preparedness, not democracy. Heinz Koch in 1921 nostalgically invoked this myth to make sharpshooting into a reactionary, healing tonic for the troubled 1920s. Lower Saxony, the area roughly from Göttingen to the North Sea, was the geographic heart of sharpshooting. The economies and societies shaped by Hanseatic networks of the northwest reinforced connections at the heart of sharpshooting societies—local traditions, civic duty, and public celebration.11 Political consolidation during and after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) turned sharpshooting into a symbolic activity in Göttingen, an early form of competitive shooting and organized sociability that gave participants status rather than civic protection.12 The expansion of associational life and bourgeois society beginning in the late eighteenth century reinvigorated sharpshooting, uniting traditions of public service, new forms of social organization, and leisure activities.13

Beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, voluntary associations enabled middle-class men to break free of traditional social organization, becoming important pillars of secular, bourgeois society in modern Germany.14 Germany's new industrial workers also formed their own organizations for advancement, sociability, and entertainment toward the end of the nineteenth century.15 Sharpshooting's military heritage and official relationship with the city via the Lord Mayor, who was the symbolic leader of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society, parlayed the new energy of associational life to reinforce the idea of sharpshooting as an exclusive activity for local male elites. The Göttingen Veterans Association formed its own Association of Former Marksmen and Sharpshooters in 1913 to organize military men's participation in sharpshooting activities.16 Organizers and supporters after the Great War used this older notion of unity and civic identity against women's increased participation in cultural and public life.17 Many of the same men continued to lead sharpshooting Page 27 → from the 1900s through the 1920s. Lord Mayor Georg Calsow, for example, was head of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society from 1893, when a small minority of men actually shot competitively, until 1926, when hundreds of men and boys from all social groups took part in competitions. The faces on the Magistracy, which regulated activities, and the overarching Burgher Sharpshooting Society also remained much the same, illustrating the continued impact of elites from the Kaiserreich era, even as sharpshooting expanded dramatically after the Great War. Sharpshooting was a predominantly middle-class activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Members came chiefly from the Mittelstand of shopkeepers, skilled artisans, and less-prestigious professionals.18 By the turn of the twentieth century, though, working-class organizations had also begun sending shooters to the yearly Festival. In 1908 a Social Democratic Party member from one working-class club was even elected to the city's top position overseeing voluntary associations, but conservative Lord Mayor Calsow immediately stripped the post of any political authority.19 Middle-class control over the limited expansion of sharpshooting's social base before World War I prefigured the ways in which leaders and supporters would use expanded participation in the mid-1920s to reinforce conservative ideas. The halcyon years before the Great War represented a critical juncture in the development of sharpshooting. The number of clubs and target ranges grew across Germany.20 Sharpshooting associations remained the most influential voluntary association in many towns, either as exclusive “notable” clubs or as broad-based organizations that included most male citizens.21 In Göttingen the various organizations that participated in sharpshooting activities generally worked together during these years under the guiding hand of the conservative elite. The Burgher Sharpshooting Society crowned its first City Sharpshooting King as the Festival's “best shot” in 1911.22 Sharpshooting Festivals themselves became bigger events and important public festivities in many towns. More clubs, more target ranges, a better reputation, and greater participation indicated that sharpshooting activities were changing from old, insider competitions into events for the entire town. The Great War brought these golden years to a traumatic end. Shooting activities nearly ceased altogether, and many active shooters (and potential future ones) fell in the fighting. Amid the difficulties after the war, many sharpshooting supporters in Göttingen looked back at the years before 1914 as a time when sharpshooting seemed to unite the city. The fuzzy memory of sharpshooting as a place where all Germans came together (to celebrate mostly middle-class men shooting guns) held great appeal in the fractured, uneasy Page 28 → years after World War I. When shooters and civic officials began to rebuild sharpshooting in the 1920s, they often based their benchmarks for success on the “traditions” of the pre-war German Empire. Many shooters, for instance, believed that pre-war festivals, which emphasized old-fashioned ranks (Stände) and hoary concepts of citizenship, served as an antidote to the divisive democratic society of the Weimar Republic. In fact many more people took part in and visited Weimar-era festivals than those during the Kaiserreich. But in the volatile 1920s this nostalgia actually shaped sharpshooting's development in Göttingen as much as the real changes in participation and spectatorship did. The Versailles Peace Treaty acted as one of the most important catalysts for promoting sharpshooting after 1919. Though much maligned by most shooters (and Germans generally), its mandated reduction of Germany's armed forces and prohibition of military weapons at target ranges effectively gave sharpshooters a monopoly on shooting and helped foster sharpshooting's paramilitary character. The wartime experiences of millions of German men also helped normalize a cultural activity centered on guns. Changes in the wake of the war and revolution opened new

avenues for expanded participation in political and cultural life. The Versailles Treaty also reduced the size of Göttingen's army garrison dramatically but did nothing to remove the idea that the military was an important part of public life. Göttingers in fact responded to the downsizing by transferring much of their love of military pageantry and exercise onto public sharpshooting activities. In this way, the Great War and its aftermath encouraged trends that had already been nudging sharpshooting into a more important public and symbolic role. The prohibition of military rifles at target ranges also fostered competitive sport shooting, which used small-bore weapons.23 Sports in general became convenient substitutes for military exercises in Weimar Germany. Sharpshooting clubs frequently sprang from gymnastics clubs (Turnvereine), as had Göttingen's first sharpshooting club in 1863. Across Germany in the 1920s, groups formerly affiliated with the armed forces set up their own organizations to promote Volkssports (people's sports) or military sports (Wehrsports) like shooting, riding, and calisthenics, often working closely yet quietly with army officials.24 Conservative and right-wing groups such as the Stahlhelm, Young German Order, and the SA also advocated paramilitary sports as means to subvert the Versailles Treaty and the new Republic.25 Even members of leftist groups like the Reich Banner Red-Black-Gold and Red Front Fighting League trained in military sports for their own protection against conservative paramilitary organizations and in defense of the Republic.26 Page 29 → After the Great War the explosion of sports activities also provided Göttingers with an escape from and vehicle for politics.27 At the turn of the twentieth century a greater number of participants from diverse social grounds began taking part in sports for three main reasons. First, twenty-five new voluntary associations between the 1880s and the start of World War I opened in Göttingen. The fact that nearby villages (which are today Göttingen suburbs) began taking part in Göttingen sports at this time especially expanded the social diversity of participants. Five new sharpshooting clubs from Göttingen and its environs began during the Kaiserreich, raising the number of sportoriented clubs to thirty. Second, workers founded some of these new clubs in order to play and watch sports. And those from the more heavily industrialized areas on the outskirts of Göttingen (especially Grone and Weende) began to change the social complexity of sports. Third, most of the new sports clubs, no matter what their social composition, moved away from the traditional Turner (gymnastics) associations of the nineteenth century.28 Instead, they promoted competitive “English” sports like cycling, swimming, and especially soccer, which were changing the landscape of German sports at this time.29 Göttingers founded eleven new sports clubs and seven new sharpshooting clubs between 1919 and 1925, further enlarging participation and the definition of “sport.”30 Spectatorship grew perhaps more than direct participation. Many of the organizations begun in the first two decades of the twentieth century focused in whole or part on soccer. Some soccer clubs in Göttingen boasted over a hundred members at this time, and games even in this smaller city could draw over a thousand spectators.31 Spectator team sports especially required organizations to coordinate competition, and class and ideology chiefly defined the national cartels that served this purpose.32 As a result the tremendous growth in participatory and spectator sports from the 1880s through the Great War made sports an arena for ideological conflict. Workers in Göttingen particularly used sports to join public life and distinguish themselves.33 Working-class groups also offered women and Jews greater opportunities than middle-class clubs did.34 As was the case in many facets of German life after World War I, the degree of political “neutrality” itself became a political issue for sharpshooting and all sport-oriented clubs. Working-class clubs saw explicit support for the Weimar Republic as a way for their groups to mirror and support democracy, while middle-class organizations generally regarded anything but stiff “neutrality” toward politics (and democracy) as an example of the divisive atmosphere during the Weimar era. The desire therefore that Heinz Koch, the Apolitical List, and others articulated after the Great War for cultural activities to rise above political divisions made Page 30 → “neutrality” a powerful rhetorical tool against the first German democracy. And these conservatives, in turn, viewed support for the Republic from working-class organizations as undermining larger, “fatherlandish” ideas that could unite Germans for a better future. Their discontent with democracy across Germany sharpened this argument. Explicitly or not, sharpshooting and sports generally thus became political issues in the 1920s that were woven into a growing number of Göttingers’ lives.

In this context stable, economically vibrant sharpshooting festivals of the Kaiserreich looked particularly inviting. Leaders and commentators alike tried in the early 1920s to shoehorn the rapidly changing activity of sharpshooting into a mythical vision of what a Sharpshooting Festival should be. In fact, trends beginning in the late nineteenth century—expanding participation, greater spectatorship, broader social base, symbolic political relevance, and popular consumption—had already begun to challenge the pre–world war myth of sharpshooting as a “traditional” activity. So, just as sharpshooting (like sports and cultural activities generally) was offering more and greater opportunities for participation, conservative sharpshooting leaders and their allies in the media were creating a mold for this activity that was intentionally outdated. This tension between rhetoric and reality would shape sharpshooting starting in 1921. Thereafter conservatives gradually directed this energy toward right-wing political ideas.

A “Psychological Necessity,” 1921–24 At Göttingen's first post-war Sharpshooting Festival in July 1921, shooters and supporters made sharpshooting a means to escape from Germany's tense political atmosphere and to comment on the times. Before and during the Festival, local newspapers attacked the restrictions placed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and celebrated a recent visit from General Hindenburg.35 Press coverage of the Festival highlighted Göttingers’ joy at this event and relief from seven years of war and turmoil.36 Discussions about sharpshooting placed the 1921 events within a context of pre-war images of the city, even as leaders expanded the array of activities and entertainment. Organizers and observers stressed that this Sharpshooting Festival was, like those before the Great War, a broadly popular Volksfest “in the truest sense of the word” that would bring Göttingers together.37 Such a concept underscored sharpshooting's various political valences: a manifestation of democracy, a mythologized notion of old-fashioned Page 31 → culture, or an expression of racialist ideology. Newspapers reported large turnouts for all events.38 The grand historical parade that opened the 1921 Festival featured representatives from traditional guilds and trade groups (Stände), sharpshooting clubs, other voluntary associations, and members of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society, all in traditional dress, marching to the music of three bands and carrying dozens of colorful flags. There were even automobiles for the first time. Göttingers decorated their houses and shops with flags and greenery and braved record temperatures (40ºC/104ºF) to line the streets in support. At the traditional opening evening (Kommersabend) that followed, city and sharpshooting leaders welcomed shooters, the many other clubs present, and their guests to a boisterous dinner under a big circus tent at the Sharpshooting Grounds. In the months leading up to the Festival, sharpshooting clubs and sports and veterans associations had staged their own target competitions at the city's shooting range to select members to represent them at the Festival. Those club members, along with individuals shooting under the aegis of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society, then competed at the city's shooting range over the next five days for one pistol-shooting and twelve rifle-shooting prizes. The trophies—large hand-painted targets, small engraved silver medallions, or goblets—were awarded at another big beer-soaked event on Thursday night. For a week visitors swarmed the Festival Grounds each night to visit the booths filled with food and drink and to enjoy the “American” amusement park, complete with roller coaster. For commentators like Heinz Koch this festive atmosphere represented the unity and tenacity of Göttingers in the face of this era's turmoil. Like Koch, organizers tried to display a vision of German society that recalled public life from before the war, portraying the Burgher Sharpshooting Society as an emblem of local traditions and unity. For example, the crowning of the Sharpshooting King (Schützenkönig), the Festival's “best shot,” evoked sharpshooting's patriarchal heritage of town protection and control in a republic that recognized no nobility. At the same time, commentators quickly embraced a newly invented tradition in 1921, a “youth day” held to bring more children (and their parents) to the Festival.39 The nostalgic image of sharpshooting attracted spectators in part because it was coupled with a large dance floor, an amusement park, booths brimming with beer and sausages and souvenirs, shiny automobiles in the parade, and sporting competition—in a word, popular and consumer culture that could help attendees forget their daily problems. (The jealous love triangle that turned into murder on the dance floor one Page 32 → night, though, indicated that the Festival was not completely removed from daily troubles.)40 Newspaper reports also heralded the “modern” amenities there—new traffic patterns, telephones, buses and cars,

fire safety—and remarked on the “thousands and thousands” of visitors from Göttingen and the surrounding area. They repeatedly stressed that the Festival helped to stimulate the struggling local economy and “offered the unemployed a good opportunity for work.”41 Sharpshooting functioned here as both expression of and building block for public life. As the successful 1921 Festival drew to a close, the Tageblatt used the events to discuss national political concerns. An article by DNVP Reichstag representative Heinrich Lind asked, “Should we celebrate festivals at this time?” Lind concluded, Our German Volk has suffered so much financially and emotionally under bondage to France that this really is not the atmosphere for heady celebrations. Now is the time, however, for home-town [Heimat] celebrations associated with memorial commemorations. Indeed, it is a psychological necessity to commemorate and truly venerate our heroes who lie now in foreign soil. It is also a psychological necessity to bow before God Almighty in open nature surrounded by waving fields and gather strength for the great battle under the slogan “Rebuild our Fatherland and Free our Volk.”42 Lind's comments encapsulated the first attempts in the 1920s to construct sharpshooting as a local means for national renewal. In the wake of war, revolution, and economic hardship, sharpshooting advocates forged an effective synthesis of backward-and forward-looking visions of sharpshooting's role in Göttingen.43 With the help of conservative commentators and local politicians, they used “traditions” from the German Empire to modernize and popularize sharpshooting. Even some left-wing sharpshooters and newspaper supporters aided in the promotion of this progressive nostalgia. Beginning in the early 1920s shooters and commentators used sharpshooting activities to exemplify what it meant to be both a “Göttinger” and a “German,” especially as more men from different social groups took part in sharpshooting activities. By looking to a mythical past for inspiration, though, leaders and commentators actually marshaled the egalitarian ideas spawned by the war, Revolution, and new republic to imagine alternatives to Weimar democracy.44 Thus did conservative middle-class elites in Göttingen exert control over the changing, expanding practice of sharpshooting. Page 33 → During the Weimar years, thirteen new sharpshooting clubs formed in Göttingen to offer more direct routes to participation, while numerous other groups fielded their own shooting divisions at the yearly Festival.45 Until the middle of the decade, the vast majority of shooters came from the Mittelstand of shopkeepers, skilled artisans, and minor professionals, and their clubs tended to advocate conservative politics.46 Still, even with similar social composition, Göttingen's first three sharpshooting clubs espoused three different versions of conservative politics and the orientation of sharpshooting.47 The 1863 Club, well established by the late nineteenth century, remained moderately nationalist and favored older weapons and techniques rather than the new, smaller precision weapons used in sport shooting.48 In 1921 forty men organized the “Sharpshooting Club ‘Lower Saxony’” with the vague intention of promoting regional Hanoverian sharpshooting traditions.49 Some members even supported the small but vocal Guelph Party that advocated re-establishing the Kingdom of Hanover. Club “Scharnhorst,” named after the famous Prussian general who had fought Napoleon, began with thirty-eight members in 1923. Growing out of the aggressively nationalist Young German Order, it represented more extreme nationalism. This group also emerged as the first and strongest supporters of competitive sport shooting with small-bore weapons rather than the traditional, social shooting with older rifles common to most sharpshooting activities.50 Although the older “1863ers” usually won local sharpshooting competitions and leadership positions until after World War II, these three clubs together shaped sharpshooting activities and rhetoric about its meaning. Their integral role in sharpshooting's rebuilding, which wedded new organizations and invented traditions, galvanized conservative political ideas in sharpshooting into the 1930s. The context of the liberal Weimar Republic ironically helped make possible the growing influence of these conservative groups in the early 1920s. Laws following the Revolution and in the subsequent Constitution

guaranteed freedom of association and shorter workdays.51 These changes helped prompt an explosion of cultural activities and especially voluntary associations.52 Together with the economic and political difficulties the war had caused, the Versailles Peace Treaty's restrictions on Germany's military also empowered conservative discourses about sharpshooting. Conservatives’ ability to channel changes in sharpshooting throughout the 1920s ultimately reinforced larger connections between modernization and Nazi ideas.53 Persistent political and economic dilemmas colored the Sharpshooting Festivals of 1922 and 1923, providing ammunition to conservative discussions about sharpshooting. On 24 June 1922 right-wing terrorists murdered Walter Page 34 → Rathenau, Germany's foreign secretary, Center Party politician, and defender of Weimar democracy. In the months that followed, Germany's sensitive political situation exploded. A law aimed to protect the Republic from inflammatory writing shut down a number of conservative newspapers, including the Göttinger Tageblatt. In fact, local editor Heinz Koch, who had lavished flowery praise on sharpshooting's return in 1921, had to take responsibility for the inflammatory article that got the paper in trouble, since it appeared in his local section.54 The brief ban stunted coverage of the 1922 Festival that July. Heavy rains discouraged spectators and dampened already sodden spirits. One reporter in the Göttinger Zeitung lamented that the July rains seemed perversely to complement the “national economic bad luck.”55 Nevertheless, in a speech on the opening night, Lord Mayor Calsow maintained that “the unity that the city's various clubs find at the Sharpshooting Festival can be a joyful sign for how our people [Volk], today divided in two camps, may once again be whole.”56 sharpshooting leaders also refocused the “youth day” of the previous year into a “Sharpshooting Festival for Poor Children” to offer some amusement to those least able to afford it.57 Master tailor Heinrich Bode was crowned Sharpshooting King amid a festive if wet celebration.58 Overall the Tageblatt and Zeitung vacillated between, on the one hand, their desire to promote the Festival as a positive, unifying experience for Göttingers to forget their troubles and, on the other hand, their tendency to use the festivities to comment on Göttingers’ difficulties at this time. Although they invoked some old traditions, commentators now could use the first Weimar-era Festival of 1921 for comparison.59 Political and economic difficulties overshadowed the 1923 Festival to an even greater degree. Like most cities in Germany, Göttingen barely managed to survive the political crises and runaway inflation of 1923. Göttingers of all political persuasions protested the French occupation of the Ruhr industrial area early that year and supported German workers’ passive resistance against the foreign “occupation.”60 The runaway inflation of 1923 that traumatized Germany hit Göttingen especially hard due to the city's high number of pensioners.61 Outrage over French occupation gave way that summer and fall to more pressing concerns about food shortages and layoffs at local businesses. Overall the “crisis year 1923,” which peaked in the fall with hyperinflation ($1 = 4.1 trillion Marks), reinforced the link in many Göttingers’ minds between the Versailles “dictate” and dire economic conditions. This association was one of the reasons support for the Nazi Party jumped in 1924, a spike that initiated the Party's slow rise in popularity in 1920s Göttingen. At the 1923 Festival sharpshooters donated 236,800 Marks for the poor and the Rhinelanders suffering under French occupation—a purely symbolic Page 35 → gift, since the total donated only equaled $1.48.62 Normally at least a week long, the 1923 Festival lasted only three days, and newspapers also devoted far less coverage to the events. City Senator Harry Lambach spoke to shooters about the “seriousness and hardship of the present when our brothers in the Ruhr groan under the fist of a pitiless enemy.” He called upon those at the Festival to put aside differences, “so we can again be a single German Volk. Every German must feel that he is a German.” Lambach also recalled a previous French occupation: “the time over a hundred years ago that bears resemblance to the current situation.”63 By calling upon shooters and spectators to take lessons from the German kingdoms’ resistance to Napoleonic occupation, this local official politicized and historicized the image of unity that he believed sharpshooting inspired. Sharpshooting Club Scharnhorst in fact defined itself partly by the history of German resistance to the French, taking its name from a Prussian general who fought Napoleon. Club founders first met in October 1923, when hyperinflation neared its peak, the passive resistance campaign against French occupation in the Ruhr had failed, and communists in Saxony and Bavaria were seeking power through various means. Club Scharnhorst was the first to specify in its statutes that “only Germans” could be members, and they stipulated that members should not

even discuss politics at club activities.64 The Small-Bore Sport Club, which also began in the fall of 1923, shared several qualities with the Scharnhorst Club. Both groups favored new, more precise sport guns (though sport shooting was but one interest among Scharnhorsters). They both boasted middle-class membership and stated loudly that they were “unpolitical” organizations.65 Other clubs drawing from the same milieu promoted different yet equally conservative visions of sharpshooting's ideological meaning. The 1863 Sharpshooting Club and the 1921-founded Lower Saxony sharpshooting Club were competing for members from a relatively close circle of chiefly minor professionals and shop owners. The 1863ers had originally defined modern sharpshooting in Göttingen with its large-bore, military-style guns, emphasis on sociability and status, and symbolic manifestation of sharpshooting's long history of protecting the city. In 1923 they celebrated their sixtieth anniversary and continued to promote this nineteenth-century vision of sharpshooting. Club Lower Saxony members, who also eschewed newer sport shooting, epitomized the nostalgia of the early 1920s, down to their wish to restore the Hanoverian monarchy that had been gone for sixty years. Finally, the Former Hunters and Shooters Club, a middle-class veterans association that started in 1913, highlighted sharpshooting's links to the military and recreational hunting.66 Page 36 → This variety of conservative, middle-class sharpshooting clubs illustrated four characteristics of sharpshooting in the volatile years following the Great War. First, most organizations defined their present work in important ways by their relation to the past. The overarching Göttingen Burgher Sharpshooting Society stressed these links, as well, making much of their 1392 origins. Second, shooting groups affirmed a pre-democratic vision of unity by promoting “traditions” under the steady hand of established, male, militarily prepared leadership. Third, the relatively new phenomenon of sport shooting could invigorate and update this activity but challenged the nineteenth-century notion of sharpshooting as important men with big guns, socializing and shooting like hunters or soldiers. Finally, these clubs demonstrated that opportunities to participate in sharpshooting were growing. Conservative elites used these four ideas to reestablish sharpshooting after the Great War. They relied heavily upon mythical ideas about the past, even as sharpshooting changed. Leaders emphasized, above all, that sharpshooting could serve as a vehicle for unity despite political division. In the following years, during the socalled stable era of the Weimar Republic, sharpshooting grew from a chiefly middle-class cultural practice into a broad activity with participants from all social classes. But while ideological tensions resulting from social expansion would challenge conservative control of sharpshooting activities, expanded participation actually strengthened the idea of sharpshooting as an apolitical means for promoting local unity. Eventually this vision helped turn Göttingen into a Nazi town.

Expanding in Weimar's Stable Years By 1924 sharpshooting had grown into a cultural activity that drew equally from mythical images of the past and present-day contexts. At the Sharpshooting Festival that year one reporter maintained that “in every respect this year's Göttingen Sharpshooting Festival suitably lives up to bygone pre-war Festivals.”67 The format and symbols may have been the same, but ten years after the last Imperial Sharpshooting Festival, sharpshooting's meaning had changed significantly. Since 1921 organizers had sought to rebuild sharpshooting in the context of the ideological and organizational collapse resulting from World War I. By 1924, though, several new sharpshooting clubs had begun, other associations fielded sharpshooting sections, the yearly Festival had become a litmus test for city prosperity and solidarity, and archaic symbols had been redirected into a growing emphasis on sporting competition. Until the mid-1920s sharpshooters and supporters in the newspapers lacked images of what sharpshooting Page 37 → could be other than the “customary form” that was basically a late nineteenth-century contrivance of medieval sharpshooting. The lean and volatile post–World War I years had established sharpshooting as a means of escapism through popular participation. And conservative middle-class elites in Göttingen shaped the activities and discourses about sharpshooting in order to critique the volatile divisions in Germany and the republican politics many of them saw as the cause. Events of the mid-1920s substantially expanded the scope of participation and reinforced the traditional elite's ability to make sharpshooting a vehicle for conservative ideas.

The expansion of associational life in the 1920s marked the culmination of a century of growth in Germany. New sharpshooting clubs highlighted the popularity of voluntary associations among all social classes. Although the middle class continued to comprise the majority of sharpshooters in Göttingen, members of the working class formed their own sharpshooting clubs in the 1920s, which gave them the opportunity to participate more directly in these public activities and work with local elites. During the 1920s the number of sharpshooting clubs and participants in Göttingen grew dramatically. This expansion occurred across Germany, especially in the northern and western regions, where sharpshooting was most prevalent.68 During the Weimar period, Göttingen's Voluntary Association Police registered 267 active clubs, many of which were founded in the early 1920s.69 This “association mania” (Vereinerei) shaped virtually all aspects of life—free time, work, politics, religion, culture, friendship, sports, charitable activity, beer consumption, bowling scores. Voluntary associations were especially common ways for Germans to organize their free time for entertainment and sociability. Of these 267 Göttingen clubs, the largest number fell under the rubric “Sociability, Entertainment, and Singing Clubs.” Police counted 27 active sports associations, including a growing number of sharpshooting clubs. All voluntary associations had to register with local police (provide statutes, leadership, and membership lists), so local officials could keep close watch on sharpshooting clubs. For nearly 500 years, the Burgher Sharpshooting Society had been the city's only sharpshooting organization. Even after the first club appeared in 1863, shooters had continued to use the target shooting range and participate in the Festival through a loose affiliation with the Society rather than as a member of a sharpshooting Verein. New clubs in the 1920s, though, increasingly offered more direct, accessible, and privileged routes to participation. sharpshooting clubs meant much more than just regular practice. Frequent meetings and social events shaped members’ leisure time and their friendships. By the mid-1920s these clubs also began to redefine the activity of “sharpshooting”—part Page 38 → sport, part service to tradition, and part regular sociability. Throughout Germany in the 1920s, sharpshooting associations and activities flourished, as did ideas about what defined sharpshooting and who participated.70 Generally Göttingen clubs were fairly small during the 1920s, with around twenty to thirty members.71 The 1863ers had thirty-six members around this time, and Club Scharnhorst's roster ranged from twenty-five to thirtyeight members, while Lower Saxony listed fifty-seven.72 Some clubs, especially those with regional affiliations, boasted even more.73 Collectively, the clubs made up a critical core of two to three hundred shooters in Göttingen. The Burgher Sharpshooting Society coordinated sharpshooting activities among the associations, especially clubs’ use of the target range and the logistics of the Sharpshooting Festival. Already in 1923, one hundred fifty-six individual shooters who were not members of a club took part in sharpshooting activities under the purview of the Society, a form of participation that would grow steadily for the next fifteen years.74 Middle-class men with conservative views had traditionally dominated sharpshooting. However, this social and political homogeneity in Göttingen changed in 1924 when workers set up two sharpshooting clubs, the Workers Sharpshooting Club and the Association of Proletarian Sharpshooters.75 As vocal supporters of the Weimar Republic and the Social Democratic Party, club members named their best shooter each year “president” rather than the “king” title that all other groups crowned.76 Their use of the Republic's flag in festival parades stood in marked contrast to ubiquitous imperial symbols, paramilitary banners, and, as early as 1924, swastikas that other organizations carried while claiming to be above politics.77 Some workers had taken part in sharpshooting activities since before World War I but were generally unable to move into leadership positions and, until 1924, had lacked their own club. Most individual workers, moreover, could not afford to maintain gun, uniform, and ammunition. Clubs offered collective means to defray such costs.78 The Workers Sharpshooting Club also included at least one Jewish founding member, second-hand dealer and leftist leader Karl Kahn.79 Extant records mention no other Jewish sharpshooters, despite the fact that Jews in Göttingen came disproportionately from the old Mittelstand of merchants and small business owners, who were otherwise heavily represented in sharpshooting organizations.80 Like the Social Democratic Party and Volksblatt newspaper, the workers clubs remained an active minority with limited influence. Members took part in sharpshooting activities but rarely won competitions, certainly never the largest prize of being Festival “king.” Although both worker clubs promoted sharpshooting and physical

education, they also made clear their ideological Page 39 → intents. The Workers Sharpshooting Club required that members “originate from the free workers movement.”81 And the Association of Proletarian Sharpshooters listed as one of its purposes to aid in the “development of class consciousness workers.”82 This overtly socialist ideology contrasted sharply with both the prevailing conservatism in Göttingen sharpshooting generally and middle-class clubs’ specific insistence that sharpshooting be apolitical. These shooters and their supporters in the Volksblatt certainly emphasized the gap in authority between middle-and working-class organizations. But the leaders of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society tried to make these new clubs welcome. Indeed, they seemed to believe that ignoring ideological and class difference would help integrate workers better into Göttingen sharpshooting. As chapter 2 will show, this insistence on apoliticism ultimately enabled conservatives to use worker participation toward more völkisch ends and to support Nazism. Increasingly in the 1920s a common interest in sport shooting brought together groups with divergent political and social interests. Sport shooting (Schießen) differed from traditional sharpshooting (Schützen) by emphasizing intensive training and competition with more precise, small-bore guns. Already in the 1890s some shooters in the region had formed a group promoting sport shooting.83 This organization even allowed some women to shoot.84 The difference between sport and traditional shooting paralleled tensions at this same time between new voluntary associations focused on competitive sports and the older, established Turner clubs. In many German towns, the distinction between (new) sport shooting and (old) sharpshooting divided shooters and eventually provided a set of paramilitary principles on which the Nazis based their support for shooting activities.85 In Göttingen, however, both the right-leaning Scharnhorst Club and the SPD-affiliated Workers Club had always included competitive sport shooting in their activities. And in the late 1920s members of the nominally communist Club Republic used small-bore guns exclusively.86 In November 1925 sport shooters from across Germany recognized the growing national interest and set up the Reich Center for Promoting Small-Bore Sharpshooting in Germany.87 Göttingen shooters founded seven exclusively small-bore sport clubs in the 1920s, and many other sharpshooting and sport clubs fielded sport-shooting divisions.88 While most sport shooters came from the middle-class professions, many shooters, especially the less affluent, could appreciate the fact that small-bore guns cost less to buy and maintain. Newspaper coverage, which had usually divided competitive (Schießen) and “traditional” shooting (Schützen) into sport and local pages respectively, began in the mid-1920s to merge them. One reporter from the regional, business-oriented Niedersächsische [Lower Saxon] Morgenpost argued in Page 40 → 1925 that competitive sports offered the best way to update and popularize sharpshooting, “since we live in the age of sport, and that's exactly what enthralls the broad masses.”89 The 1924 Sharpshooting Festival certainly attracted a broader, if not quite mass audience and a large group of participants. Over a hundred different groups participated in the opening parade, prompting one reporter to rejoice that this Volksfest, “in traditional historical customary form,” had finally recaptured the old sharpshooting spirit.90 The 1924 Festival thus firmly established a mythologized pre–World War I Volksfest as a benchmark for success, though that success now depended upon contemporary methods of promotion and entertainment as much as traditional symbols and rituals. Newspaper articles, for instance, advertised the Festival beforehand, reported preparations leading up to the events, and covered them in great depth. This expanded reporting was part of Göttingen papers’ increased coverage of all cultural activities in the 1920s, as well as enlarged readership. Beyond attracting bigger audiences to the festivities, the newspapers emphasized the growing importance of the Festival for the local economy and cultural life, even for those not directly involved in sharpshooting activities. Organizers and observers placed the 1924 Festival within a larger historical context, as speakers throughout the week emphasized sharpshooting's past and its solid footing in contemporary Göttingen. One commentator looked forward to more events in the “new sharpshooting festivals” that were in the “same spirit” as those before.91 The 1924 Festival also demonstrated that sharpshooting had become an important part of Göttingen's cultural and public life. Shooters had redefined important institutional relations with the military and city government by this point. The Versailles Treaty restrictions had shrunk the military presence in Göttingen and thus its ability to shape sharpshooting. The Sharpshooting Society in the mid-1920s therefore drew upon the historic bonds between Göttingen soldiers and shooters, as well as the interests shared by sharpshooting clubs and veterans associations (Kriegervereine). At the commerce evening that kicked off the 1924 Festival, one of the city Senators asked that

everyone remember how the Sharpshooting Society had taken over city security when the Great War began and now helped keep Göttingen's young men fit. Retired Major Grapengießer emphasized the warm relations between military and sharpshooting associations in Göttingen.92 Although institutional relations between the Burgher Sharpshooting Society and city government had changed little by 1924, sharpshooting and political leaders did recognize changes in sharpshooting that had altered its symbolic meaning in Göttingen civic life. One city elder praised the “dependability Page 41 → of Sharpshooting Societies in German city life.”93 Göttingers visited the Festival not only for the standard amusements of shooting competition, beer, and sausages, but also to see modern novelties like the circus, the roller coaster, and sideshow freaks.94 Even the growing number of prizes awarded—eleven in 1921, nineteen in 1925, and thirty-five in 1934—indicated that consumption also drew more shooters, just as activities at the Festival Grounds attracted more spectators.95 Greater participation in fact strengthened sharpshooting's traditional links to the military and local government. More shooters, spectators, and observers simply broadened the impact of sharpshooting in Göttingers’ daily lives. Conservative leaders of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society may have rhetorically included new social groups by 1924, and sport shooting may have begun to bridge some ideological differences. But at this point leaders and advocates lacked a concrete organizing principle to bring the growing number of shooters together in a politically “neutral” context. Their idea in 1925 to make every man in town a shooter would help accomplish this aim and define sharpshooting in Göttingen for the next decade.

Conclusion: In 1925 By the mid-1920s the yearly Sharpshooting Festival had become a litmus test for civic prosperity and solidarity. While pre-1914 festivals remained the mythical standard of an “authentic” Sharpshooting and Folk Festival, sharpshooting leaders and supporters were developing a successful formula that used elements of modern consumer culture to promote archaic notions about social organization. Directed newspaper hype and increased coverage helped attract larger audiences and emphasized the events’ growing significance for economic and cultural life.96 Sharpshooting could, in some commentators’ minds, counter the effects of mass and consumer culture. A 1925 Morgenpost article maintained that the Sharpshooting Festival represented a “healing process” and antidote to the great “pleasure craving” and “cocainism of the entertainment industry” to which many Germans ran to ignore war and hardship.97 Rather than “heal” this “craving,” though, the Festival gave visitors the chance to consume both established “traditions” and new attractions. Göttingers and visitors from outside the city came for a number of exciting diversions: simulated horse races and steamship cruises, motorcycle races, giant slides, circuses, freak shows, roller coasters, and even jazz music.98 The Morgenpost recognized that incorporating such “new attractions” would help to “maintain this historic, centuries-old Volksfest.”99 Page 42 → The synthesis of expanded participation and traditional elite control illustrated one of the ways in which cultural activities in Göttingen lent support to conservative politics. The ritual of the yearly Festival itself defined sharpshooting's “dependability” but also provided a safe area for some experiment. Like the annual Händel Festival, the Sharpshooting Festival's liminal quality helps explain why evolving cultural activities could reinforce traditional elite control over cultural and political discourses in town. Conservatives constructed sharpshooting after World War I as a means to reclaim Kaiserreich-era social organization, oppose the Versailles Treaty, and agitate for “apolitical” national unity. The mainly homogeneous composition of sharpshooters provided few dissenting voices. Beginning in 1924, however, three developments began to complicate conservative control of sharpshooting's public role. First, advocates of sport shooting began to alter the basic quality of sharpshooting competition. Second, consumers found new ways to participate in public events at the Festival. And third, the presence of clubs with different social bases and ideological motives—especially workers’ clubs—forced conservatives to consider the implications of wider participation. This expansion threw into sharp relief a fundamental tension in Weimar sharpshooting between leaders’ desire to increase participation and the inherent exclusivity of sharpshooting clubs. This tension in fact animated many of the changes in 1920s Göttingen sharpshooting.

Although sharpshooting leaders and local politicians never fully “solved” this dilemma, they did begin to strike a balance in 1925 that moved toward their dream of making every man in town a shooter. Because that balance channeled popular participation into conservative ideas about social structure, it gave many Göttingers a familiar image of what a Nazi state or Volksgemeinschaft might look like. The great changes that began in 1925 exploded out of practices established in the early 1920s, marking a major turning point in the history of interwar sharpshooting in Göttingen. They made this cultural activity a vehicle for making Göttingen a Nazi town. It is to those developments that we now turn.

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CHAPTER 2 From “Something That Concerns Everyone” to Cooperative Coordination, 1925–38 In 1927 the leaders of Göttingen's Burgher Sharpshooting Society constructed a new, unique target-shooting range. The twenty-eight firing lanes of various lengths, sophisticated signal system for reporting results, and special safety features prompted Heinz Koch to call the Sharpshooting Hall “the most modern of such facilities known in Germany.” Sharpshooting leaders intended it to demonstrate Göttingen's progressive ideas about sharpshooting and to increase appreciation of competitive sport shooting. In this conservative-looking, conservative-acting town, the Hall's Bauhaus-style architecture stood out, dramatically highlighting sharpshooting's marriage of old and new trends in the interwar period (see figure 2). Yet even the conservative Koch praised its “stark objectivity” and argued that the “hatless” roof, oddly enough, somehow fit “organically” with the rest of the town's cross-timbered landscape.1 Here modernity and tradition reinforced each other: the Bauhaus-inspired form and high-tech gadgetry updated and promoted the older spirit of sharpshooting, while the familiarity of a well-established cultural and civic activity made the building's novelty more acceptable to otherwise generally conservative citizens of Göttingen. The new hall was to be an important location for sharpshooting leaders’ plan, begun two years earlier, to increase participation drastically. The expanded and modernized facilities provided space for making sharpshooting into what one commentator called “something that concerns everyone.”2 By lowering entrance fees and offering easy routes to shooting in Festival competitions, leaders hoped to make sharpshooting into an activity that truly encompassed all of Göttingen, at least its male population. Although it never reached all men in town, this plan did accomplish two important things: it worked to resolve the tension between exclusive clubs and broad participation, and it offered Göttingers a concrete manifestation of National Socialist ideas. As chapter 1 illustrated, sharpshooting grew in Göttingen after the Great War by recontextualizing mythical ideas about local unity into the volatile atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. Increasing participation to include men from all levels of society enabled leaders and supporters to celebrate sharpshooting as an apolitical unifying force in the face of a political system falling apart. As local elites gradually moved to the right politically in the 1920s, their definition of sharpshooting as vehicle for apolitical unity paralleled the ideas of the Nazi Party. The plan that began expanding sharpshooting in 1925 therefore marked an important moment at which point sharpshooting helped make Göttingen into a Nazi town. This chapter details that process starting in 1925. Page 44 → Sharpshooting leaders used concepts like Volkssport (people's sport) and Volksgemeinschaft (national community) to combine local traditions, sporting competition, and military preparedness. Various organizations, including working-class clubs and Göttingen's Social Democratic newspaper, used these and related notions for their own political agendas. Sharpshooting leaders and media commentators, most of whom espoused conservative politics, used sharpshooting's expansion in the 1920s to promote nationalism, militarism, and male authority at the expense of democracy. The claim that sharpshooting Page 45 → could unite Göttingers held great appeal as German society grew increasingly fractured in the late 1920s. The similar National Socialist aim to create a Volksgemeinschaft therefore resonated with this important cultural activity. And although the Nazi vision of sharpshooting excluded Social Democratic ideas, Nazi leaders found workers’ general support for sharpshooting to be an effective way of garnering their participation in the new regime.3 The Third Reich appeared to be a welcome environment for the majority of leaders and advocates of sharpshooting, who had argued since the early 1920s that sharpshooting united the city against enemies. Overall, sharpshooting did help reinforce the ideas and policies of the Third Reich. Nazi officials continued the Burgher Sharpshooting Society's promotion of shooting outside clubs, going further to attack clubs rhetorically and

sometimes in practice. Ultimately the Third Reich also failed to “solve” the tension between popular participation and club exclusivity that had come with the expansion of the 1920s. The shift in participation and sharpshooting's public meaning began in 1925 and slowly wound down after 1935, when rearmament rendered sharpshooting more symbolically than substantively important. This decade-long process, detailed in this chapter, makes clear that Third Reich changes to sharpshooting grew chiefly from shooters’ own previous plans. The gradual shift highlights, moreover, the ways in which cultural activities helped preview Nazi ideas in daily life and provided an important pillar on which Third Reich policies could build. Local peculiarities influenced this process as much as national political developments.

Every Man a Shooter, 1925–28 Beginning in 1925 sharpshooting leaders and supporters sought to make shooters out of all adult males in town by promoting sharpshooting outside the clubs, attracting young shooters, and fostering competitive sport shooting.4 This move allowed leaders to shape growing interest in shooting, attract more spectators to events, and thus promote the unifying image of sharpshooting they had been advocating since 1921. Dovetailing with leisure activities’ increasing importance in the 1920s, this plan lent greater weight to those pointing to sharpshooting as a model of “apolitical” social organization. While the umbrella Burgher Sharpshooting Society welcomed the founding of new clubs each year, leaders worried about their inherent exclusivity. During the 1925 Sharpshooting Festival sharpshooting leaders and supporters in the press celebrated the social breadth of participants, from professors to Page 46 → workers.5 Just before the Festival that year August Welge, member of the 1863 Club and head of the Society, told assembled representatives from thirty clubs that “in sharpshooting any restriction at all is out of the question” and that “circulating rumors to the contrary must be emphatically stamped out.” More clubs from more social groups were to take part in 1925 sharpshooting activities than ever before—no less than ninety to a hundred sharpshooting and other voluntary associations, Welge promised.6 Yet clubs, by definition, restricted participation. Welge announced, therefore, that any man could become a lifetime member of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society for only 1 Mark, a membership fee that was considerably less than other clubs in town.7 This affiliation did not offer the regular group target practice and sociability of the voluntary associations, but it gave individual shooters access to the shooting range and the ability to take part in the Sharpshooting Festival each summer. A significant portion of the money required to subsidize these memberships—about 450 Marks per year—came directly from the city government, an indication that civic officials also supported this expansion of sharpshooting.8 Welge maintained that this offer demonstrated “the popular [volkstümliche] character of German sharpshooting.”9 This move also strengthened the Society vis-à-vis the clubs, especially the new working-class groups, whose presence threatened traditional elite control of sharpshooting activities in town. While voluntary associations remained the backbone of sharpshooting in Göttingen and continued to multiply in the 1920s, the Society's expansion did prompt more individual shooting in the second half of the decade. One report of 1926, for instance, claims that 300 men shot through the Burgher Sharpshooting Society, double the number from 1923.10 Welge claimed that welcoming any man as a sharpshooter would make the 1925 Festival “not merely a club festival [Vereinsfest] or special opportunity” for those in sharpshooting clubs, but rather, “a true Volksfest, one for the entire population of Göttingen.”11 Sharpshooting organizers and supporters in 1925 explicitly marketed their activities in the local media as sources of local unity. Welge told participants that the “massive participation” at this year's Fest was the result of “the great success of preliminary work by the press.”12 Newspaper coverage of the 1925 Festival increased fourfold from the previous year, detailing both competitions and the many diversions at the Festival Grounds. While leaders stressed the ability to participate in competitions, Göttingers and visitors from outside the city gladly consumed the food and drink and new rides like the giant slide and simulated horse race, steamship cruise, or motorcycle ride.13 In the enormous Festival tent two Bavarian bands kept up to a thousand people dancing Page 47 → late almost every night. Although heavy rains initially dampened booth business, organizers happily noted that by the end of the week, thousands of visitors with a little more money in their pockets had made up for the slow start.14

Greater participation—via more clubs and individual shooters—and expanded activities for consumption demonstrated what one observer called “the popular value of the Sharpshooting Festival.”15 Participation and consumption together enabled conservatives to update, reaffirm, and bolster an older notion of town citizenship that ignored women's recently won full voting rights. At the yearly Festival, in particular, the gendered distinction between those acting (only men) and those watching (women, children, and men who did not shoot) underscored traditional male control of this important ritual of civic pride. One Göttinger Tageblatt commentator opined that fostering sharpshooting was “something that concerns everyone [eine allgemeine Volkssache]” yet emphasized that “it is important to encourage German men [die deutsche Männerwelt] not to ignore the cultivation of shooting.” This reporter argued at the close of the 1925 Festival that idea of sharpshooting as every German man's duty fell on “fertile soil” in Göttingen.16 In his explanation of the Society's dramatic expansion that year, Welge went further to say that “the German Volk's present powerlessness and troubles demand that everyone dedicate greater active attention to the sharpshooting movement [Schützenbewegung].” He closed by exclaiming that “this year's Sharpshooting Festival must become a living expression of the German Volksgemeinschaft!”17 The implication that a popular, male-dominated free-time activity suggested solutions to Germany's problems thus pitted “traditional” masculine sharpshooting against the foil of new “feminized” democracy.18 Women were invited to be spectators and consumers. By expanding yet limiting women's participation in sharpshooting, leaders could channel new free-time opportunities for everyone to their ends. We shall see something similar with the Händel Festival and cinema. Social Democrats, by contrast, saw popular participation and democracy as mutually reinforcing. Yet the presence of their all-male clubs contributed to the notion that men controlled this ritual of civic duty.19 And even the local Social Democratic paper, the Volksblatt, occasionally waxed nostalgic. Those writers too hailed the sharpshooting festival of the past as “a Fest of the people [Fest des Volkes]” around this time, even as they promoted republicanism and denounced the Burgher Sharpshooting Society's monarchical leanings.20 Workers may have participated in shooting festivities, but as one Volksblatt article pointed out, the Society's leadership lacked any worker representation and sheltered “right-wing extremists.” This writer did support the Society's 1925 expansion, though, and praised the attempt at inclusiveness, conceding Page 48 → that the Society had “put every effort into making this [1925] festival a Volksfest.” A “unified Volksfest is not an impossibility,” the reporter concluded, but “first there must be clear and consistent good will on all sides.”21 More conservative supporters saw evidence of this “good will” in the breadth of participation during the 1920s. Above all, they sought to wed the mythical image of a pre-democratic and allegedly conflict-free society with mass participation. They insisted that the Sharpshooting Festival should become a manifestation of the German Volksgemeinschaft or “people's community,” an equation that appeared more frequently in speeches and newspaper reports beginning in 1925.22 Middle-class sharpshooters and newspapers argued that the Festival could reinforce unity and overcome divisions in the city.23 “Göttingen sharpshooting and the Göttingen Sharpshooting Festival exclude no one,” one writer in the cautiously liberal Göttinger Zeitung proclaimed, asserting that “especially in Göttingen, where rank and class difference even today play a rather significant role, we need a festival that knows no division and values everyone simply as participants and Göttingen citizens.”24 In 1925 right-wing supporters went further, especially in the Tageblatt. One reporter there, for instance, claimed that “very few movements demonstrate solidarity as well as sharpshooting does internally and externally” and declared that sharpshooters must put aside political and confessional divisions in order to make their Festival “a living expression of the German Volksgemeinschaft.”25 Social Democrats, by contrast, recognized that this supposedly apolitical call to unity served to reinforce traditional elites and promote the Nazi Party.26 Nevertheless, both conservatives and Social Democrats acknowledged in 1925 the growing importance of sharpshooting's public position in Göttingen. Groups of all stripes also attracted more shooters in the mid-1920s by setting up youth divisions, much as gymnastics clubs had done since the late nineteenth century. Sharpshooting Club Lower Saxony created a youth division in 1923, and the 1863 and Scharnhorst clubs soon followed. Over 100 shooters from ten to sixteen years of age marched in the 1925 Festival parade. In 1926 the Burgher Sharpshooting Society announced an “organizational expansion” to include a new Youth Sharpshooting Division for “young Germans”—young male Germans, that is—between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Any boy could join, even if he was already a

member of another group. Echoing the logic behind the 1925 expansion to make every man a shooter, the low two-Mark entry fee was intended to attract future sharpshooting leaders without discriminating against those with fewer financial resources. The Society called this expansion “striking power” for the “Fatherland movement,” but “in the widest, completely unpolitical sense,” since “it is broadly Page 49 → and doubtlessly known that the Burgher Sharpshooting [Society] is a party-politically neutral, apolitical association.” The Tageblatt's description of this 1926 youth plan duplicated their enthusiasm for the 1925 general expansion. The article assumed that it “would be heartily welcomed by anyone who knows that the party-political fuss of today has hardly shown itself to be very competent in supporting the Fatherland.”27 Like the Harmful Publications Act, passed by the Reichstag in 1926, creating sharpshooting activities to steer youth in the right direction had broad support.28 And even if they did not state it, leaders were surely responding to the growing popularity of cinema. We shall see in part 3 that police worked especially hard in the late 1920s and early 1930s to keep youth under eighteen out of films not deemed appropriate for them. Turning boys on to sharpshooting used free-time activities to bring together traditional conservative ideas and more “progressive” and youth-oriented activities such as sport shooting, thus shoring up leaders’ nostalgic, masculine view of sharpshooting and society in general. The glistening white Bauhaus-style Sharpshooting Hall, unveiled in 1927, served as a locus for promoting mid1920s developments: expanded participation, increased emphasis on sport shooting, and modernization. The new, larger shooting range offered more space for new shooters, both those in clubs and individuals who were part of the 1925 Society expansion. Many of the twenty-eight lanes were designed specifically for the small-bore guns used in sport shooting. Sharpshooting leaders claimed that sport shooting would attract new members and more visitors (and their money) to events. A regional newspaper devoted to sharpshooting in 1928 maintained that increased coverage of sport shooting in local newspapers “could easily supply the movement with thousands of new friends.”29 And the large regional competition that Göttingen hosted the following summer bore out these expectations of economic windfall. Even before construction began, supporters projected onto the Hall the same expectations they had for the 1925 men's and 1926 youth expansions. Leaders at the Burgher Sharpshooting's January 1926 assembly, as reported in the Tageblatt, lamented the “unfatherlandish” assumption that a new Sharpshooting Hall would only benefit shooters, when in fact it would improve the entire local economy. The new Hall would bring Germans together, teach them discipline, and symbolize sharpshooting's “honorable duty” to represent the city of Göttingen. After all, those at the assembly insisted, “cultivating sport shooting is something that concerns the entire Volk.”30 For its part, the city approved of the plan's symbolic and economic advantages. As early as 1924, all the sharpshooting clubs had pledged to support fund-raising, as did several other organizations. In the end sharpshooting clubs collected 35 percent of the Page 50 → building costs, and the city pitched in the rest.31 The debt the city shouldered to complete this project was one of several financial liabilities that weakened its ability to solve pressing economic problems in the late 1920s and thus also one of the reasons Göttingers lost some faith in local democratic politics.32 In sum, sharpshooting leaders undertook three very public attempts to expand this activity starting in 1925. The Burgher Sharpshooting Society's attempt to recruit all male citizens as shooters, first, channeled popular interest in sharpshooting as free-time activity. And amid the widening field of voluntary shooting associations, this move kept a measure of control in the hands of the elite who had long dominated sharpshooting. Second, new youth groups gave clubs and the Society a direct line to future shooters, offering young men alternatives to Weimar mass culture. The new Sharpshooting Hall, finally, illustrated how important sport shooting had become by 1927. The Hall's various attractions were designed, as Heinz Koch maintained, to “carry the joy for sport shooting to the broadest sections of the population.” Göttingen's traditional elite employed this symbol of “a new flowering of Göttingen's ancient sharpshooting” to enhance their control over sharpshooting activities and their meaning in the public sphere.33 Conservative advocates used these new examples of expansion to cinch together connections between sharpshooting as “something that concerns everyone” and “the German Volksgemeinschaft.” The credence lent to this argument by changing policies, new clubs, and media discussions made sharpshooting an especially effective vehicle for turning Göttingen into a Nazi town in the years that followed.

Crisis and Cooperative “Coordination,” 1929–34 At the opening night of the 1929 Sharpshooting Festival, Göttingen Senator August Reuper summed up the

transformation of sharpshooters in the modern era thusly: “Once they were important in protecting the city, today they are important in protecting its unity.”34 A German Democratic Party (DDP) representative on the city's Magistracy since 1919, Reuper had, ironically, just been voted out of power in a divisive local election that gave right-wing parties, led by National Socialists, an absolute majority in Göttingen's local government. His hopeful tone in 1929 highlighted attempts by traditional elites to use discourses about sharpshooting to encourage “unity” in an era that was characterized by anything but. Although it was probably not Reuper's intention, this rhetoric of organic unity ultimately benefited Hitler's party most directly. A letter printed in the Göttinger Zeitung toward the end of the 1929 Festival Page 51 → similarly imagined sharpshooting as a potential bridge between republicanism and the desire for a Volksgemeinschaft. Calling himself “one who otherwise enjoys going to sharpshooting festivals,” the anonymous author wondered why the “beautiful” Sharpshooting Hall had not been flying the Republic's flag and argued that “to realize the Volksgemeinschaft” the Hall should unfurl both republican and imperial colors.35 Social Democrats in the Volksblatt had already mentioned the flag's disappearance earlier in the week.36 Three days later the head of the Sharpshooting Society attempted to smooth over this “minor discord” by explaining that “some boys” had stolen the Republic's flag but that it would be replaced soon.37 While none of the newspapers tell us the final outcome, this story underscored the political significance of sharpshooting's place in public life. These episodes revealed that the Nazis were not the only ones investing sharpshooting with curative and unifying power during the period of Germany's deepening crisis. Liberals and even Social Democrats in Göttingen had seen sharpshooting activities since the mid-1920s as potential vehicles for overcoming the divisions wracking German society. To be sure, long-standing conservative authority and mistrust of Weimar democracy had most infused discussions about sharpshooting's meaning since the Great War. But the liberal visions of Senator Reuper and the anonymous fan of the republican flag indicated that conservatives were tapping into—not merely inspiring—a wellspring of hope for what sharpshooting might do. Such directed hope resonated with Nazi ideology for many Göttingers and made sharpshooting an important pillar for Nazism in Göttingen. Various groups in Göttingen had been since the early 1920s pitting political unity outside politics against Weimar democracy. Toward the end of that decade, the NSDAP articulated this view most often and most pervasively in Göttingen. The financial crisis that began in Göttingen in 1928 and the Great Depression that followed the US stock market crash of October 1929 made Nazi calls for apolitical solutions more appealing in Göttingen. Their disingenuous claim to be above party politics won them growing support after 1929 from Germans who were frustrated by the political wranglings of the Weimar Republic. Other political organizations, such as the Communist Party, also defined themselves against the entire “system” of Weimar democracy and saw their fortunes improve. In this context of anti-politics, the realm of cultural life and free-time activities became just as important a battleground for the hearts of Germans as party rallies or election campaigns. Public rituals like sharpshooting festivals had been important media for promoting notions of local and national unity since the early 1920s. In the vitriolic and often violent atmosphere Page 52 → of the late 1920s and early 1930s, conservative elites in charge of sharpshooting drew even more from this rhetoric. Sharpshooting's ability to serve as both metaphor and medium for political change grew out of developments that began in the mid-1920s. By the 1930s well-established notions about sharpshooting as masculine duty, symbol of civic unity, and carrier of important “traditions” gave conservatives a set of ideas and experiences that could act as an anchor for their ideology. In particular, sharpshooting pointed for these men toward an apolitical Volksgemeinschaft that challenged the political and social fabric of the Weimar “system” with equal measures of reactionary nostalgia, revolutionary vision, and racialist nationalism. Leftists and some liberals, on the other hand, viewed sharpshooting's expansion as a corollary to greater democracy and equality. But Göttingen was a city that gave early and strong support to Hitler's party, where conservative elites had overseen sharpshooting activities and shaped many of the ideas about its meaning. And unlike sharpshooting groups in many Catholic regions, those in Göttingen did not cling to confessional identities that sometimes mitigated the Nazification of sharpshooting.38 In this context the common focus on sharpshooting by disparate political groups helped bolster conservative notions about “unity.” Sharpshooting leaders and supporters, informed by a kind of progressive nostalgia, experimented with new ways of engaging, defining, and promoting this activity while laying claim to archaic ideas about

stability and social organization.39 The Nazi Party's successes in local elections in 1929 (leading a right-wing coalition to an absolute majority) and 1930 (38 percent in the Reichstag election) often drew from similar arguments. During the contentious last years of the Weimar Republic, competitive sport shooting did help bring together various shooters in Göttingen. In some parts of Germany, sport shooting divided shooters along ideological lines, between military and civilian, or advocates of new versus older practices.40 In Göttingen, however, both the rightwing Scharnhorsters and leftist Workers Sharpshooting Club practiced this new form of shooting. Other sport shooters also drew from various social bases. In 1929, for instance, both railroad and postal workers organized small-bore clubs. By 1929, in fact, six exclusively small-bore sport shooting clubs were active in Göttingen. More conservative shooters and commentators certainly supported competitive sharpshooting's military value but did not control the sport-shooting trend in Göttingen. Small-bore target practice was cheaper and thus more popular with less affluent shooters. In 1932 the gymnastics club affiliated with the large Göttingen-based firm Gothaer Insurance Company founded another sport-shooting association. Page 53 → This club, begun at the city's absolute economic nadir, indicated that competitive, small-bore sport shooting's affordability remained one of its most attractive qualities. In addition to the seven new small-bore clubs in Göttingen, nearly all other active clubs fielded small-bore divisions, as did some other sports, Turner, and veterans associations. These groups generally attracted more serious participants interested in the new kind of sharpshooting. Far from dividing shooters in Göttingen, therefore, sport shooting represented common ground that eventually bolstered National Socialist goals for sharpshooting, minimizing the changes necessary to “coordinate” Göttingen sharpshooting clubs and activities in the Third Reich. In many ways, the 1932 Sharpshooting Festival stood as a local response to Germany's growing political crisis and demonstrated resonance between everyday life in Göttingen and Nazi ideas. Events themselves—the competitions, the beery programs under the big festival tent, the amusement park, and other diversions—were much like those of previous years. Yet this festival's meaning and impact differed chiefly because organizers and commentators used festivities to highlight Germany's economic and political crises.41 The 1932 Festival came on the heels of Franz von Papen's assumption of emergency powers on 20 July 1932. The Festival began on 31 July 1932, the day of the national election that gave the National Socialist Party a plurality in the Reichstag and eventually led to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. Ten days before the Festival began, Hitler had spoken to nearly 30,000 supporters in Göttingen, and eight days later another of his speeches was broadcast in the town square. The rightleaning Tageblatt compared the summer 1932 Reichstag campaign atmosphere in Göttingen to a “civil war.” The Social Democratic Volksblatt named it “the election of bloody terror and lies.”42 Conservatives in particular used the deepening economic depression and the Nazi Party's substantial victory (37.8 percent of the national vote and 51 percent in Göttingen) to make even greater claims about what sharpshooting meant for Göttingen. At the opening dinner in 1932, leaders of the Society reiterated a by-now-common theme, that sharpshooting “served the Volk and the Fatherland.”43 The next day Mayor Paul Warmbold spoke in detail at the Sharpshooting Breakfast about the “catastrophic financial crisis” that gripped Göttingen and Germany. He maintained that Germany would grow again when it escaped its present condition of “tributary slavery” and could enter into arms negotiations. “That is no threat,” he continued after enthusiastic applause, “rather it should show the world that we are inspired by a discernable survival instinct.”44 Warmbold was a political figure of standing for twenty years—a Magistracy member since 1911, Mayor since 1926, and the Police Director. Page 54 → His speech lent established elite support to the ideas at the heart of the successful Nazi electoral campaign that summer. Making such claims at the Sharpshooting Festival likewise endorsed the National Socialist belief that political rejuvenation would occur outside the town hall. A Tageblatt report placed these national economic woes in local context by commenting that people came to the Festival that year in record numbers—“Only the money is missing.” The Tageblatt greeted the National Socialist victory jubilantly. The newspaper called the 1932 Festival one of the Society's greatest moments in its over 500year history, since it coincided with such a “memorable” election day.45 On the other hand, the Göttinger Zeitung, uneasy about Nazi ideas, attempted to avoid politics altogether in its 1932 reporting on sharpshooting. The Volksblatt virtually ignored the Festival, so total was its attention to the life-or-death political struggle against

Nazism that summer. The mingling of political rhetoric with reporting on sharpshooting events in 1932 made clear the possibility of a mutually reinforcing relationship between sharpshooting and National Socialism. Conservative shooters, civic leaders, and supporters in the Tageblatt drew upon current Nazi campaign rhetoric about völkisch definitions of the nation to support their long-standing and often-repeated ideas about sharpshooting's ability to exemplify a local unity that ignored political divisions. Such efforts, in turn, helped ground Nazi ideology in Göttingen and introduced a more politicized image of daily life into this familiar and comfortable atmosphere. The revanchist militarism of Hitler's party also benefited from official and unofficial links between shooting groups and government-supported military Volkssports designed to circumvent the Versailles Treaty.46 As National Socialist ideology acquired more traction in Göttingen, conservative designs for making sharpshooting a model for civic duty thus found a popular political analogue in Nazi plans for a new Third Reich. Indeed, many shooters—sometimes even those not sympathetic to Nazism—praised sharpshooting's ability to imagine a society without political strife, one that drew from both local experience and national ideas. Sharpshooting activities themselves did not directly support a particular political ideology. However, the emphasis on expanding participation and apoliticism since 1925 resonated with völkisch ideas that National Socialists used. Rather than act as a Trojan horse for Nazi conquest of this important local activity, sharpshooting organizations and Nazi supporters simply continued, as they had since 1921, to signify sharpshooting by contextualizing it amid current political concerns. The exploitation that followed in the Third Reich was a two-way street. Once the Third Reich became a political reality in 1933, sharpshooting Page 55 → developed through a negotiated process that embedded National Socialist ideology in Göttingers’ everyday lives. Policies that had expanded participation since the mid-1920s transformed sharpshooting's meaning as much as Nazi directives did. National Socialist leaders and supporters in Göttingen gradually altered sharpshooting's organization and function by directing existing trends toward greater militarization and politicization. While the impetus for change sometimes came from outside Göttingen, the transformation of sharpshooting worked through local channels and according to local conditions. Attempts to reshape sharpshooting succeeded chiefly when the Nazi regime's ideas garnered support from shooters themselves and reinforced what had been practiced since the 1920s. The tug-of-war between generally conservative, pro-military groups like sharpshooting organizations and the new regime vividly revealed the complex process of Gleichschaltung or “coordination.”47 Beginning in 1933, Third Reich ministers, police officials, and Party representatives together sought to “coordinate” all voluntary associations, to place those activities and organizations under greater state authority and make them reflect National Socialist ideology. This process of Gleichschaltung aimed to subsume every voluntary association in Germany under a corporate organization to represent individual associations at the highest levels of governmental and party activity and encourage cooperation between groups. Officials hoped doing so would help build the Volksgemeinschaft. Nazi leaders began their coordination of sports, including sharpshooting, in the spring of 1933 by replacing the powerful German National Committee for Physical Education (founded in 1896) with the National Socialist Physical Education Union, under the leadership of Reich Sport Führer Hans von Tschammer und Osten. Third Reich officials then further subdivided and directed individual activities like sharpshooting. Military men headed up both the umbrella sport organization and the sharpshooting branch, reflecting the new regime's desire to train potential soldiers. The Nazi regime's general method of using existing policies and institutions helped government officials exert some control over most sporting activities.48 In Göttingen the new regime continued to try to balance sharpshooting clubs and individual participation. Government officials explicitly relied upon support from existing clubs and even offered financial assistance to some.49 At the same time local officials encouraged individuals to participate by joining the Burgher Sharpshooting Society or to shoot as members of the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth. The number of sharpshooting clubs founded throughout Germany dropped precipitously in the 1930s.50 Thirteen new sharpshooting clubs had begun in Göttingen during the Weimar years; only one, under the Third Page 56 → Reich. Regional and local officials argued that it was now the “duty” of all “people's comrades [Volksgenossen]” to join the Burgher Sharpshooting Society.51 And new rules in December 1933 specified that these “comrades” were only “Aryan”

men.52 Local police continued to regulate voluntary associations as they had since the turn of the century. The requirement for organized groups to register their rules, aims, and membership with police had long kept officials closely informed of associations’ actions. And hot political conflicts in the late 1920s and early 1930s had prompted Republican officials to inspect them even more closely. Ironically, those concerns for the safety of Germany's first democracy gave Third Reich officials greater reach into associations’ daily activities. Third Reich rules on gun ownership and use likewise grew from four Weimar-era laws that gradually tightened access to guns. Third Reich officials in fact passed only two laws restricting gun ownership over twelve years: regulations prohibiting Jews from owning weapons passed after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.53 As he did for other cultural activities, Albert Gnade played an important role in shaping sharpshooting in the Third Reich. He was already an important Nazi figure, having helped to start the Party, SA, and SS in Göttingen. And he was elected to the Magistracy on the NSDAP ticket in 1929. In 1933 Gnade became Mayor (under Lord Mayor Bruno Jung) and Police Director, positions that enabled him to help craft and enforce rules about sharpshooting and most other free-time activities. A speech he gave at the 1934 Sharpshooting Festival articulated the new regime's wish to expand sharpshooting participation at the expense of exclusive clubs. Gnade called voluntary associations collectively one of the “organizational pillars…necessary for the Volk's existence” and groups for which everyone should be “very thankful.” He praised clubs’ “great work” in popularizing sport shooting by promoting “true Volksfests” at the Sharpshooting Festival and thus allowing “all Germans [die ganze Volk]” to participate in this “task.” In the same speech, though, he attacked clubs as divisive and “laughable.” Indeed, even as he tried to excise the “liberal” elements from voluntary associations, Gnade stressed that “the value of the old clubs would not be eliminated, rather, expanded and linked to new goals,” and he praised voluntary associations’ continued growth.54 This somewhat confusing strategy of simultaneously undermining, assisting, and reshaping voluntary associations sought to incorporate any potential threat from these organizations into a Nazified vision of sharpshooting. Much scholarship on twentieth-century German associational life tends to view the Third Reich (like the German Democratic Republic) as a hostile environment Page 57 → for voluntary associations.55 While Hitler's regime did seek to control and instrumentalize sharpshooting associations, most clubs continued to play an important role in sharpshooting and public life. In Catholic regions, for example, Nazi officials attempted to undercut the religious ethos of sharpshooting associations but still had to work with those organizations in a way that also strengthened their established positions.56 Moreover, it was sharpshooting leaders themselves in the mid-1920s who first promoted individual shooting, a trend that gave Nazis the rhetorical and institutional building blocks for changing sharpshooting after 1933.57 Beginning in 1934 the Reich Sport Ministry forced all sharpshooting organizations to focus more on sport and military sharpshooting or else give up the right to participate in sharpshooting festivals. If sharpshooters opted to pursue a more “traditional” orientation that rejected sport shooting, their group had to register with the German Heimat Association as a purely tradition-oriented organization.58 Despite the popularity of sport shooting, in 1933 most clubs still emphasized tradition and sociability over more competitive shooting. Most members did not train vigorously, and they frequently preferred the older, less accurate rifles to the newer, precision small-bore models. National Socialists had always favored modern, precise sport shooting and tried to force all clubs to take up this direction after 1933. As much as anything, this push embodied the new regime's attempted “coordination” of sharpshooting associations and caused tensions in many towns.59 In Göttingen, where advocates of military, traditional, and sport shooting had all generally cooperated in the 1920s, Nazi officials and sharpshooting leaders worked with each other easily to tweak sharpshooting for the new regime's purposes.60 A wide variety of Göttingen sharpshooters, as well, had promoted sport shooting since the early 1920s. Newspapers too emphasized sport shooting and placed coverage increasingly in the sport sections rather than in local news sections.61 During the first two years of the Third Reich, sharpshooting offered one of the few expanding venues for real military training. Military and sport shooting thus created common ground between Nazi and sharpshooting leaders in Göttingen.

At the 1934 Festival Mayor Gnade therefore extolled “men in the sharpshooting movement…to take up the task of maintaining our Volk and blessing our descendants.” Sharpshooters, he maintained, were soldiers both in the traditional sense and in the broader fight against “primitive peoples” and the “profiteering and rapacious Jewish liberal worldview.”62 New regulations from the Reich-wide German Sport Shooting Association allowed only “Aryan Germans” to join sharpshooting organizations or participate in sharpshooting activities.63 This rule effectively barred Jews and other state-defined minorities from Page 58 → participating in sharpshooting any longer. In Göttingen few Jews had been members of sharpshooting clubs, so these regulations made manifest the racialist implications of terms such as Volkssport, Volksfest, and Volksgemeinschaft that had been used since the 1920s to describe sharpshooting activities. In late 1933 Third Reich officials changed associational life significantly by implementing the “Führer Principle,” the dictate that individual groups conform to National Socialist notions of authoritarian leadership. That December Göttingen police and Nazi Party officials forced the Burgher Sharpshooting Society to name Mayor Gnade as “Führer” of the Society instead of an elected representative from the 1863 Club. 64 This appointment paralleled leadership changes across Germany. Reich leaders told all shooting organizations to adopt the Führer Principle “through the traditional or internal business of the club.”65 Celebratory histories of sharpshooting in Göttingen point to this change as evidence of the Third Reich's attack on sharpshooting's “democratic” nature.66 Some clubs may have resented this intrusion, yet virtually all continued to operate publicly in the Third Reich.67 Committed to both National Socialism and “Göttingen's interests” (however narrowly defined), Gnade tried to synchronize the Third Reich's proposed changes for sharpshooting with established institutions, ideas, and individuals in Göttingen. He and his supporters claimed that only in the Third Reich could sharpshooting's real völkisch egalitarianism come to fruition. In December 1933 Gnade unveiled a substantial reorganization of Göttingen sharpshooting—the Third Reich's most dramatic step toward “coordination”—under the motto “Shooting must become a Volkssport.” Expressly politicizing the motivation to participate in sharpshooting, the plan emphasized military preparedness, sport shooting, and Party involvement, especially through closer contact with National Socialist organizations such as the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth. Göttingen police grouped all shooters into four sharpshooting “divisions” (Schützenbanne) that corresponded to different age groups, each one offering subsections for rifle and pistol shooting. By bringing all local shooting organizations “into a unified line,” Gnade hoped to eliminate competition and what he called the “sick class spirit” of associational life's liberal roots while still drawing upon their “great work.”68 This shift did not outlaw voluntary associations but did lessen their role in sharpshooting. Sharpshooting club members, in fact, represented a minority at a February 1934 symposium convened by Gnade to plan for Göttingen's participation in a regional sharpshooting event.69 Gnade's reorganization in many ways used state authority to mandate the expanded participation that sharpshooters had begun in 1925. Indeed, the police description of the reorganization echoed the Burgher Page 59 → Sharpshooting Society's explanation of its expansion nine years earlier, asserting that sharpshooting would be a true Volkssport when all German men from age sixteen to sixty could use a weapon effectively.70 In his powerful capacity as Burgher Sharpshooting Society Führer, Police Director, and Mayor, Gnade used a February 1934 press release to present his vision for sharpshooting in Göttingen and the Society's crucial role: It is the job of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society Göttingen of 1392, under Senator Gnade's direction, to connect with all comrades [Volksgenossen] in the city in an effort to popularize sport shooting. To this end every German comrade should recognize his duty to become a member of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society. Popularizing sport shooting thusly is the only way to put on true Volk Festivals. All the sport shooting clubs in town have promised to help with this important task. By 1 April of this year, the Burgher Sharpshooting Society aims to have united all men, whether skilled with guns or not, thereby using sport shooting to cultivate a true Volksgemeinschaft.71 As we will see during crucial moments in the history of the Händel Festival and cinema, Gnade thus explicitly equated Nazi ideals with male control of the public sphere. Gnade reported to Reich Sport Führer Hans von Tschammer und Osten that “coordinated” sharpshooting would

fulfill the Society's ongoing efforts to expand Göttingen sharpshooting. He wrote that the December 1933 plan would take the “rich tradition of the old sharpshooting clubs” and “elevate what had been more or less a private affair for the affluent into a German Volkssport.” Even more than what the Society had done in 1925, this proposal promised to help defer the costs of membership, insurance, and ammunition. The plan particularly strove to bring more shooters to the Festival. Gnade noted that in early 1934 membership in individual clubs had ranged from 20 to 110 men, already an increase from the previous decade. By the end of that year, though, he claimed that the new “divisions” boasted between 400 and 500 members and that many more men shot individually.72 Expanded and “coordinated” sharpshooting was displayed for the first time at the 1934 Sharpshooting Festival. With the recent, bloody purge of the SA still in the news, the paramilitary training on display at the Festival appeared, by contrast, to be fully integrated into the new regime. Indeed, while emphasizing the SA's importance in the Third Reich, Gnade's speech at the Festival made clear that SA members should “relax” and take part in the festivities Page 60 → “outside of service.”73 The events and rhetoric of the 1934 Festival wove recent political developments together with familiar traditions and myths.74 Luminaries such as Reich Sport Führer von Tschammer und Osten, Regional President Hermann Muhs, and Prussian Education Minister Bernhard Rust all visited festivities that summer. (The latter two happened to be friends of Gnade's.) Muhs told the crowds that updating sharpshooting was “today's holy task.”75 At the Festival tent, bands played only “German” music, and only “German” singing and dancing was allowed.76 Even political symbols themselves became entertainment: the fireworks show on the closing night culminated with a flaming swastika that elicited many oohs and aahs from spectators, according to one newspaper report.77 Organizers, local leaders, party officials, and commentators hailed this Volksfest as the fulfillment of sharpshooting's potential. An explanation of the reorganization from attorney (and future Town Council representative to the Magistracy) Kurt Meister detailed recent changes and their motivations. Sharpshooting, he explained, had been reorganized to manifest “the National Socialist worldview,” so Göttingers could finally celebrate a festival “that exhibited the characteristics of a true Volksgemeinschaft.”78 One commentator in the new Nazi Party newspaper amplified this claim, boasting that no event or symbol embodied German society more than the Sharpshooting Festival, a “Fest of the Volk and the Volksgemeinschaft” and one rooted in “local patriotism.”79 As before, Festival organizers in 1934 made selective use of the past, drawing upon older myths and imagery (vintage cannons, organized hunting, the arming of male citizens, guilds, children's festival, humorous stories, and even Wagner) while emphasizing the events’ contemporary importance. Speakers and commentators also stressed sharpshooting's military heritage and duty.80 A monumental historical parade displayed 3,000 years of German history from the National Socialist perspective and featured members of Nazi organizations, as well as university students, sports and gymnastics associations, glee clubs, professional groups, hunting associations, guilds, veterans organizations, women's clubs, and of course shooters. Even University representatives became deeply involved for the first time. The Rector spoke as usual, but the school also donated a trophy cup and helped establish a special sharpshooting prize for all (male) students, many of whom shot in the competition. Indeed, the number of men shooting at the 1934 Festival jumped appreciably from previous years. As a result of lower entry fees, Gnade's plan, and Nazi Party financial support, over 2,500 shooters from all social circles and dozens of local organizations—about double the number from earlier festivals—competed for a record thirty-five prizes.81 Appropriately enough, Page 61 → Heinrich Knüllig, a twenty-five-year-old stonemason who had only recently joined the Society as an individual shooter, was crowned Sharpshooting King that year.82 At the 1934 Festival supporters and local officials showcased sharpshooting as a local manifestation of National Socialist ideology. By facilitating sharpshooting's “coordination,” these men in fact drew connections between national developments and local “traditions.” Gnade's reorganization thus achieved three important goals that sharpshooting leaders and supporters had pursued for nearly a decade: increasing the number of men shooting at the Festival, integrating military preparedness into sharpshooting activities, and further wedding sport and “traditional” shooting. The outlines of the 1933 reorganization came from government officials, as did the new rules about membership and leadership. But unlike those in many other towns, Göttingen's sharpshooting leaders generally embraced the changes of 1933 and 1934 as opportunities to fulfill plans that had been in the works for almost a decade. The reorganization succeeded, therefore, by the standards of both local sharpshooting leaders and

Nazi functionaries.

A Symbol of Change, 1935 and After Two important events in 1935 culminated the process of “coordinating” sharpshooting in Göttingen and marked the end of a decade of development: authorities closed down the Workers Sharpshooting Club, and Germany began to rearm. Both events indicated the extent to which Third Reich officials brought their policies to bear on this cultural activity. At the same time, these developments make plain that even the Third Reich's “revolutionary” changes to sharpshooting built upon “evolutionary” developments by shooters themselves that had begun in the 1920s.83 The Göttingen Burgher Sharpshooting Society's 1925 expansion had striven to shore up archaic definitions of citizenship by channeling the growing social base of sharpshooting, a change made most obvious by the 1924 foundation of the Workers Sharpshooting Club. They were also seeking to provide alternative means for military training in the wake of the Versailles Treaty's restriction of German forces. Closing the Workers Club could therefore be seen as the final, more explicitly ideological extension of a longer process aimed at minimizing voluntary associations’ role in sharpshooting. Many Göttingen sharpshooters had in the 1920s simultaneously railed against the Versailles Treaty and benefited from its conditions. Germany's 1935 decision to break the Treaty and expand its military also had the bitter-sweet Page 62 → effect of realizing many shooters’ dreams and relegating their significance to the symbolic. Thus, sharpshooting's important role in making Göttingen a Nazi town ironically minimized its part in Göttingen's function as a Third Reich city. Göttingen's Workers Sharpshooting Club clung to a tenuous existence in the Third Reich.84 But the fact that this club continued to participate at all in sharpshooting activities until 1935 tells us that national regulations in the Third Reich took shape according to local conditions. The February 1933 laws “For the Protection of Volk and State” seemed to spell the demise of clubs associated with left-wing parties or those demonstrably supportive of the Weimar Republic. Even before the Nazis came to power, Göttingen police had viewed with suspicion Social Democratic–oriented clubs such as the Water Sport Association and Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold, as well as communist clubs like the Sport Club “Forwards” Fighting Society. The February 1933 laws mandated that police close down such voluntary associations by the fall.85 The Workers Sharpshooting Club, however, managed to survive and participate in sharpshooting activities until 1935, despite its previous loyalty to the outlawed Social Democratic Party and the Weimar Republic and a membership that had included important local leftist leaders. In March 1933, the Workers Club dissolved because, as the executive committee explained, all its members were unemployed and could no longer afford to shoot at all. A month later, though, Mayor and Police Director Gnade acknowledged that the club had been “refounded” with the same name, under much the same leadership, and with the blessing of the Göttingen Burgher Sharpshooting Society.86 Gnade asked August Welge, who was still the head of the Society, to see “if a more völkisch-oriented, dependable growth in membership was discernable” in the reformed club. After visiting several meetings, Welge reported back that, yes, the “nationalist [vaterländisch] activity of the Workers Sharpshooting Club is absolutely ensured” and asked that the government note as much. In November 1933 the Club joined with the Society and the four leading middle-class sharpshooting organizations in calling for all shooters and Germans to vote “yes” in the plebiscite to validate Hitler's growing authority in Germany.87 However, just six months later Welge informed police that two recent visits to club meetings had revealed only 10 percent of members joining leaders in saying “Sieg Heil.” For an already suspect club under close scrutiny, this visible lack of National Socialist zeal probably sealed its fate. Still, the State Police did not close down the club for over two years. Indeed, in his speech at the 1934 Sharpshooting Festival, Gnade specifically praised the club's desire to participate in sharpshooting activities, even with 80 Page 63 → percent of its members unemployed.88 The group was finally outlawed in December 1935 per the 1933 Law to Protect Volk and State that had shuttered other leftist groups. Local and regional police went to great lengths to pay the leadership a fair price for its confiscated goods.89 After its closure former members of the Workers Club may have either joined other sharpshooting clubs or, like a growing number of men in town, participated as individuals at sharpshooting festivals. Other voluntary associations in Göttingen fared much better in the Third Reich, though their relations with Hitler's

regime were not always completely smooth. For instance, two solidly conservative organizations, the St. Hubertus Hunting Club and the Association of Former Corps Students, dissolved themselves in 1937. The latter in particular had been an influential club whose membership read like a who's who of Göttingen elites. Neither police report gives a reason for the closure. Financial difficulties may have been the root, or perhaps Nazi officials hinted that these two organized activities were now well represented by “official” groups within the Reich.90 And we know that Nazi officials closed other sympathetic organizations in the name of fascist unity and control.91 Certainly Nazi antipathy toward Social Democracy shaped the Workers Sharpshooting Club's history. But the Third Reich's desire to subsume activities under state control, which echoed sharpshooting leaders’ push to make all Göttingen men shooters, also drove the Workers Club closure. Ultimately the Third Reich's decision to break the Versailles Treaty in 1935 and begin to rearm had almost as great an impact on sharpshooting as had the Treaty's restrictions starting in 1919. The 1919 Peace Treaty had made sharpshooting into the most important militarized leisure activity in many German towns, placing it in the liminal space between practicing sharpshooting symbolically and employing that skill in a real military force. Hitler's decision in 1935 to ignore restrictions on the German military and embark on aggressive military expansion likewise reconfigured sharpshooting's status in public life. (This process had been under way quietly for a year. And the arms agreement Germany signed with Great Britain in 1935 provided at least tacit international approval.) Many sharpshooters and supporters saw the ability to serve in the military as the final culmination of a decade and a half's worth of rhetoric about sharpshooting's value to the city and the nation. In 1935 the SA began regular target practice at the sharpshooting hall, and in May authorities expanded the shooting range to facilitate more paramilitary practice by students, a group aggressively politicized and militarized by the Nazi regime.92 By the same token, the existence of a real and growing military in Germany ended any illusion about Page 64 → sharpshooting being an ersatz or paramilitary force and relegated it to a symbolic or training function in society. The redirection of sharpshooting activities and public discourses about them in 1933 and 1934 represented an attempt, by both national and local leaders, to make sharpshooting more a part of Hitler's new regime. Germany's 1935 rearmament similarly legitimated the paramilitary quality of sharpshooting that supporters in Göttingen had championed as a way to demonstrate local unity and affirm the national “cause.” The Third Reich's attempt to militarize sharpshooting activities proceeded haltingly, though, and depended upon local relationships between sharpshooters, military officials, and advocates of sport shooting. Soldiers with military designs for sharpshooting headed up both the Reich Ministry for Sport and the subsection devoted to shooting. Since military leaders and Nazi functionaries shared the belief that sport shooting helped train better soldiers, Third Reich officials used state authority to promote modern sport shooting as part and parcel of a more militarized society.93 In 1934 the Reich Sport Ministry insisted that all sharpshooting organizations focus more on sport and military shooting. In some places, especially Catholic regions, the concept of a sharpshooting “brotherhood” with religious connotations prompted a real split between “traditional” versus sport shooters at this point.94 Göttingen sharpshooters did not face such a division, since religious identity had never played a role in sharpshooting there.95 Moreover, sport shooting had been widely supported in Göttingen since the early 1920s, and the local army garrison had taken part in activities since the late nineteenth century. Increasingly after 1934, sharpshooting supporters and government and party officials used competitive sports to translate national goals into local contexts. The 1935 Göttingen Sharpshooting Festival celebrated this link with the motto “In the Spirit of Sport.” That year the Führer of German Sharpshooting, Major van Cleve, spoke at the Festival and told visitors that competitive sport shooting united bodily strength, military training, tradition, patriotism, and duty to serve the Fatherland.96 Local reporting in Göttingen on sharpshooting activities underscored the new focus, as newspapers increasingly covered sharpshooting activities in the sport section, rather than under local news. The papers also changed their language, employing the new terms Schießen and Klubs alongside the traditional Schützen and Vereine. In 1936 the German Sharpshooting Association, the new national organization that oversaw sharpshooting, became a part of the Reich League for Physical Education. The Nazi party organ, the Göttinger Nachrichten, reported that the sharpshooting leadership in Göttingen rejoiced at this final and official designation of sharpshooting as a sport rather than a “traditional” activity.97 Page 65 →

At the 1935 Festival leaders and commentators nevertheless argued that sharpshooting's deep roots in Göttingen (and German) society made meaningful the modern duty about which van Cleve spoke. Next to the traditional Sharpshooting King (Schützenkönig), the Burgher Sharpshooting Society crowned a “People's King” (Volkskönig) for the first time that year. Gnade's 1934 reorganization made entry into one of the sharpshooting “divisions” easier and cheaper, though non-affiliated shooters could also participate in several competitions. Only shooters registered with one of these official organizations could compete for the Sharpshooting King title. Any man, on the other hand, could shoot in the “People's King” competition.98 This new addition to Göttingen's sharpshooting nobility revealed the continued tension between traditional sharpshooting clubs and the new Nazified organization. Officially, every sharpshooting association had been “coordinated” into one of four “divisions,” but the older voluntary associations still met and shot together regularly. In 1935 newspapers began once again to use the traditional sharpshooting clubs’ names when reporting competition results. One report in the Nazi newspaper, however, roundly attacked these established organizations, exclaiming that past “association mania” meant little more than privilege and massive beer consumption for a few. These groups, the piece continued, corrupted sharpshooting's original medieval meaning of arming every man in town. Now the Nazis had resurrected this ideal, to the benefit of Göttingen and the Third Reich.99 Third Reich leaders consciously sought to build their authority upon older symbols such as the Teutonic Thingspiele, Passion Plays, the oak tree symbol, and Germanic myths like the Nibelungen.100 The Nazis similarly connected the “ancient” and “Teutonic” form of sharpshooting to their revolutionary intention of creating a powerful modern Germany.101 During the Weimar Republic, shooters and commentators most often evoked the imagery of the pre–World War I German Empire when discussing sharpshooting “traditions.” In the Third Reich sharpshooting leaders and supporters emphasized connections to even older traditions, such as target practice with live or wooden birds and the Burgher Sharpshooting Society's legacy as a medieval military force. By drawing upon pre-modern sharpshooting practices and myths (and by minimizing sharpshooting's development in the Weimar era), organizers and supporters sought to demonstrate that National Socialism had saved sharpshooting from decline and Weimar-era “decadence.” The Burgher Sharpshooting Society's 1925 expansion had already challenged sharpshooting's exclusivity and the “association mania” of Weimar. But their emphasis on sharpshooting's representing a force for unity that rejected democracy helped forge sharpshooting in Göttingen into a populist cultural activity that bolstered Hitler's regime.102 Page 66 → In 1936 sharpshooters and the media used events of the 1936 summer Olympic Games in Berlin to situate local sharpshooting within larger national discussions about sport and its function as military training. Commentators made liberal use of the ubiquitous Olympic coverage in Göttingen papers to emphasize Germany's long history of competitive shooting, especially when German marksmen took home one-third of the medals awarded in these events.103 The 1936 Olympic Games, which German athletes dominated, began only days after Göttingen's Sharpshooting Festival ended that summer. A Tageblatt report on the Festival called sharpshooting the “center of sporting competition” and suggested that the Olympics would highlight the connection between sharpshooting's history as “ancient Germanic competition” and present-day function as a “people's events [Volksveranstaltungen].”104 Out of twenty prizes awarded at Göttingen's 1936 Sharpshooting Festival, the three most important ones featured Olympic symbols.105 The Olympics thus offered local supporters a national and international framework within which they could place the meaning of local sharpshooting activities. While local newspapers continued to reinforce connections between sharpshooting and the Nazi regime, the actual process by which the state became a part of daily cultural activities was more complex. At a December 1935 meeting of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society's leadership, for instance, Society members complained to local officials on the Board about insufficient municipal funding. One local official, Karl Herting, replied that “the opposition in the Burgher Sharpshooting Society is nothing more than a reaction against the present state!” Springing to his feet, sharpshooter and Society member Karl Tasch cried, “That is a baseless piece of impertinence!” Mayor Gnade had to step in to quell the conflict, but another Society representative obliquely warned Herting, “Don't wrap yourself in foreign furs.”106 Similarly, two and a half years after the 1933 reorganization, Gnade and other officials still worried about its

efficacy and impact. In a May 1936 report to his friend, Regional President Hermann Muhs, Gnade recognized that “the reorganization of course broke with old, outdated traditions and that there was naturally resistance directed from, above all, the complainant Tasch and his supporters.” Members of Tasch's 1863 Club, Gnade reported, “have continued to work against the new formation of sharpshooting.”107 The 1863 Club's own 1988 celebratory history argues as much, too.108 Gnade went on to say that molding sharpshooting the way the Reich Sport Führer wished would require “clubs to be cleaned of members who would ruin this work because of their old social prejudices” but that he doubted that such heavy-handed tactics would Page 67 → work. He reminded Muhs that his “election” as Sharpshooting Führer in 1933 had angered a number of shooters in town, since they could not very well oppose the local leader of the SS. And though Gnade was pleased that the 1933 reorganization did not come across as mere “propaganda material,” he nonetheless worried that the new plan would not succeed or might even undermine the Third Reich's designs on sharpshooting, as had happened in other places.109 By 1935 the Nazi regime had, however, become an important element in Göttingen's sharpshooting activities, both symbolically and actually. In fact, the decline in overt zeal to refashion sharpshooting thereafter signaled that the stable constellation of power overseeing sharpshooting had normalized the Third Reich's function in these everyday activities. Clubs, for instance, no longer constituted a threat and returned to prominence after 1934, alongside the state-sanctioned “divisions.” Individual shooting through the Society declined somewhat as more men and boys shot with military, SA, SS, and Hitler Youth groups.110 Sharpshooting's “coordination” in the Third Reich was, in the end, a process of integration and even mutual cooptation. Nazi officials succeeded in “coordinating” sharpshooting, insofar as they constructed national policies regarding sports and military training that resonated with local traditions and organizations. In many ways, the Third Reich's politicization of sharpshooting expanded this activity's appeal, as well as that of Hitler's regime. Rearmament and the pageantry surrounding the 1936 Olympics reiterated the interdependence of nation and locality. Despite all the rhetoric about sharpshooting's role in building a better army and its place at “the heart of all sporting competition,” it continued to thrive in Göttingen mainly because it remained a vibrant and popular local cultural activity.111 The Nazi regime's greater interest and involvement in sharpshooting only added a layer of significance to local activities that were already imbued with a variety of meanings. When Wilhelm Lange, head of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society, told the big crowd of shooters, city officials, and revelers at the 1936 Sharpshooting Festival Dinner that “an armed populace [Volk] is the goal of the sharpshooting organizations and the will of the Führer,” he reflected as much as enforced a common agenda. 112 The tendency to combine sport, military training, entertainment, and local traditions continued until the outbreak of war in 1939. Local military officials and sharpshooting leaders cooperated closely with each other. When a 1939 law stipulated that only army teams be allowed to shoot in the Festival, the long, cordial relationship between members of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society and Göttingen's garrison allowed local clubs to continue to shoot. Although Page 68 → the war halted most sharpshooting activities, some of the older shooters and younger students managed to cobble together meetings and competitions throughout these years.113 After the fighting ended the Allies banned sharpshooting as a military-related activity. British occupation forces first allowed clubs to begin reforming in 1948, and by 1949 Göttingen shooters were meeting again and had organized a meager sharpshooting festival. In West Germany during the 1950s, sharpshooting grew almost as much as it had during the Weimar years. Many of the old shooters who were active in the 1920s and 1930s drew upon past traditions as part of the post-war rebuilding process. New laws governing associational life in the Federal Republic and greater participation (e.g., the founding of women's and mixed-sex clubs), however, distinguished 1950s clubs from those of the Weimar and Third Reich eras. The two world wars represented more significant breaks than the Nazis’ ascension to power in 1933. Perhaps not surprisingly for an activity with guns, the two world wars acted as significant bookends for this era of development.

Conclusion: Shooting between the World Wars Senator Reuper's 1929 assertion about sharpshooting “protecting [Göttingen's] unity” should perhaps be modified to state that sharpshooting actually helped to create unity—or at least the idea of unity. Starting in the 1920s, that

idea served to update sharpshooting and weave it into the fabric of both the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Connecting masculine military duty and local identity, sharpshooting thus promoted a national community based on a mythic notion of the Volk rather than a democratically constituted citizenry. Although “Volk” in Volkssport, Volksfest, and Volksgemeinschaft carried many valences, leading political influences in Göttingen made these concepts increasingly racially charged in the 1920s. The Nazis’ success at using sharpshooting to promote their ideology testifies as much to the importance of local conditions for national change as it does to the power of ideology. Interwar sharpshooting was always responding to the Great War. At least until the late 1930s, that overwhelming event shaped sharpshooters’ actions and perceptions about their activity. Shooters revised and revamped this activity while Göttingers were still living amid the impact of war, revolution, and the contested peace. Sharpshooting provided Göttingers with both an enjoyable escape from economic challenges and political battles as well as an opportunity to imagine a society without these difficulties. The Versailles Treaty's restrictions Page 69 → on German military forces helped make sharpshooting a popular paramilitary activity, given the almost universal dislike for the Treaty. Like most sharpshooting leaders, the Nazi Party denounced Versailles, promoted militarism, and saw Weimar democracy as a hindrance to German unity. In the late 1920s sharpshooting's function as symbolic and actual means for military training gained more traction among those with revanchist intentions. Third Reich officials, once in power, pushed sharpshooting's military potential even further, often at the expense of voluntary associations. However, Germany's decision to break the Versailles Treaty and rearm in 1935 at once justified and minimized sharpshooting's role in society. In the late 1930s sharpshooting became more of a vessel for promoting “tradition” and assistant to the growing military. These two chapters have traced the interplay in Göttingen between concrete developments of sharpshooting and public discourses about this activity in local media. Göttingers poured a great deal of energy into voluntary associations in the 1920s, dramatically expanding their social bases and scope of activity. These organizations provided the means for greater direct participation in sharpshooting (and a host of other activities). The Burgher Sharpshooting Society particularly reinvented itself in the mid-1920s as the coordinator of all sharpshooting clubs and vehicle for more individual shooting. The Society pushed civic officials to build the new Sharpshooting Hall in response. Long-standing rules about voluntary associations meant that all sharpshooting organizations welcomed local police into more aspects of Göttingers’ daily leisure activities. Close political scrutiny of all organized activities, prompted by Germany's political crisis beginning around 1929, politicized sharpshooting and created the means for the Third Reich to reshape it after 1933. The Burgher Sharpshooting Society and local police actually carried out the “coordinating” of sharpshooting in the Third Reich. The direction came from national and regional authorities but succeeded in integrating Göttingen sharpshooting into Third Reich policies because local authorities could build these new intentions from existing practices. And it did not always work. After all, traditional, conservative, pro-military shooters still sometimes viewed Nazi authority as “foreign furs.” At the same time, this part has explicated the public discussions about sharpshooting's meaning in Göttingen. Sharpshooting leaders, local officials, media advocates, and, to a lesser degree, individual organizations themselves also worked hard in the 1920s to construct an image of Göttingen sharpshooting as a vehicle for unity. All those involved agreed on this point, although the Social Democratic minority differed on what kind of unity. Ultimately, the Page 70 → discursive definition of sharpshooting as manifestation of an older social order, revolutionized by new technology and invigorated by expanded participation, resonated in Göttingen with Nazi ideas. And of course the actual changes sharpshooting leaders made to the activity helped this connection. We cannot know the degree to which Göttingers agreed with this concept, nor can we know the impact it had on their voting or support for the Nazi regime. But local media at least offered Göttingers compelling ideas, backed by their important integrative functions in local life, that helped frame thoughts about the relationship between freetime activities and politics. The link between daily practices and larger ideas made sharpshooting an important venue for taking part in political change. Sharpshooting's ability to display Nazism helped make Göttingen into a Nazi town. While the dramatic political events of 1933 altered sharpshooting and pushed this process forward, these chapters have demonstrated that important changes to make sharpshooting politically significant began in the mid-1920s and grew out of local

efforts. The timing and mechanics of this gradual change were different, we shall see, for the Händel Opera Festival and cinema. But focusing on this gradual process in any case makes clear the role that Germans played in the great changes of the interwar era.

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PART 2 The Göttingen Händel Festival Page 72 →

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CHAPTER 3 Modernism and Baroque as Counterpoint in a University Town, 1920–28 Walking home from the theater on the night of 26 June 1920, Oskar Hagen could feel good about what he had accomplished. His sold-out performance that evening of George Händel's opera Rodelinde marked the first time any of the composer's operas had been performed in nearly 200 years. Hagen had joined the George August University's art history faculty in the fall of 1918 and began directing the struggling University Orchestra (Akademische Orchester-Vereinigung) the next year. Soon after he and his wife moved to town, they put together an ensemble of like-minded devotees who played Händel's music late into the night. They managed to convince the recently formed Göttingen University League (Universitätsbund) that the world needed to hear Händel's sublime operas, especially if tailored to modern tastes. Rushed rehearsals in 1920 were squeezed between the musical season's end and the start of summer engagements. Göttingen's City Theater donated the use of its facilities. Performers received no compensation and slept on guest beds. Volunteers made costumes from old clothes and odds and ends like cigarette-wrapper foil. But despite the rag-tag preparations, reviews bore out Hagen's good feelings. Critics, scholars, and music friends all over Germany immediately acknowledged the success of this local enterprise. Suddenly, small-town Göttingen had a big-city stage.1 The summer Festival revived more Händel operas in the years that followed and made Göttingen internationally famous as the “Händel Bayreuth” and the wellspring of a “Händel Renaissance” spreading across Europe. Festival leaders believed that their use of Expressionist staging and modernist choreography best articulated Händel's essence. During the 1920s this “Göttingen style,” combining Expressionism and Baroque, inspired opera directors and critics across Europe. By 1928, however, Hagen and other principals had left Göttingen, and the Festival foundered artistically and financially. Expressionism Page 74 → and the “Göttingen style” no longer promised to rejuvenate modern music and art. Many critics and scholars increasingly claimed that “historically accurate” (Werktreue) performance best realized the significance of Baroque music.2 The Festival languished for six difficult years. In 1934 Third Reich support allowed organizers to stage Händel again. By 1935 the Göttingen Händel Festival was featured prominently among a Reich-wide celebration of Bach, Händel, and Schütz. In 1937 Reich Music Chamber President Peter Raabe was the guest director of a mostly “historically accurate” Händel performance, one that looked very different from the avant-garde work of the 1920s. Therefore, between 1928 and 1935 the Festival changed significantly, replacing Hagen's modernist aesthetics and liberal textual alterations with more conservative stagings of the complete operas that strove to reproduce the text and aesthetics of Händel's era. Many critics and supporters of the Göttingen Händel Festival had begun to embrace “historical accuracy” in the 1920s, even as Hagen kept promoting modernist renderings of Händel. As well, Festival organizers in Göttingen continued to use modernism in the 1930s, especially through dancing and movement at Festival performances and as a positivist, progressive, yet politically conservative notion that underscored the Festival's development. The history of the Göttingen Händel Opera Festival, in other words, makes clear that cultural purveyors used many of the same ideas to promote their activities in both the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. The political shift of 1933 served chiefly to bring to fruition trends begun in the 1920s. Like the changes in sharpshooting that began around 1925, we can identify 1928 as a turning point in the Händel Festival's history. The Festival's absence—what one supporter called “the big break”—that began in 1928 helped to crystallize ideas and aesthetics that would make the Festival an important pillar of Third Reich culture in Göttingen.3 The Festival gave Göttingers a way to promote cultural experiment and reinforce conservative ideas about “German music” at the same time. In so doing the Festival helped anchor Nazism in Göttingen's musical culture. This chapter explores the Festival's development through 1928. The Händel Opera Festival represented a unique, major attempt by members of the George August University and the middle-class elite to develop a national reputation for Göttingen's music life between the world wars. The

university provided much of the financial support, as well as most of the performers. This and the following chapter therefore explicate ways in which Göttingen's famous university took part in interwar cultural politics. The city's heavy middle-class makeup, which the university's presence accentuated, generally focused cultural activities onto more conservative political purposes, as Page 75 → did the often conservative reporting in leading local newspapers. My analysis nevertheless illustrates that Peter Gay's classic description of Weimar cultural conflict as “Berliners against beefy philistinism” in the provinces fails to account for the fact that modernism could simultaneously promote cultural experimentation and Nazism.4 Most of what has been written about the Händel Festival either focuses on its musicological significance or uncritically celebrates its history.5 The two chapters in this part instead take cues from music history and new musicology.6 My analysis pays more attention to discourses about the Festival—what Brian Currid has called “acoustics of publicity”—and details the Festival's ability to shape ideas about music, culture, and their place in interwar Germany.7 Like sharpshooting festivals, the Händel Festival created a ritualized liminal space in which Göttingers could both question and reaffirm ideas about music's function in society. Germans used cultural activities to take part in political change. This part describes a very public (and still important) set of events to explain how that happened in Göttingen. On that warm night in 1920 Oskar Hagen did not anticipate creating an institution that would help define Göttingen, “German music,” and even Germany. But he did believe Händel could help heal the decimated world after the Great War, especially Germany. The history of the Händel Festival between the wars delineates the cautious, cavalier, and even contradictory uses of this tonic.

The Year 1920 and Before: Händel, Hagen, and Göttingen The difficult local and national context from which the Händel Festival grew presented new opportunities for musical ventures. The end of the Kaiserreich marked the most dramatic rupture in German music life before World War II. Almost overnight in 1919 dozens of noble theaters and their affiliated music ensembles closed down or were taken over by the new republican regime and local governments.8 Across Europe musical activities of all kinds suffered during the Great War and in its disastrous aftermath. Germany's enormous war reparations restricted the Weimar Republic's ability to support musical endeavors. In Göttingen, as elsewhere, cultural purveyors subsequently chose to promote safe programs at the City Theater of well-known plays, operas, and operettas, strengthening musical theater and reinforcing generally conservative tastes in Göttingen.9 At the same time, even limited private patronage in this era of persistent government shortfall opened up possibilities for new and different forms of cultural activity across Germany. Individual supporters and Page 76 → paying concertgoers, for instance, helped create the innovative atmosphere that produced imaginative composers like Kurt Weill, Ernst Kreneck, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Toch.10 These conditions helped shape the development and success of the Händel Festival. For one thing, Göttingen had never been a particularly musical city. It never hosted a court ensemble or a strong tradition of music flowing from the university, as did the similar-sized university town of Marburg, for example.11 Competition between Göttingen's military garrison band, the city theater, local music organizations, and the city orchestra for audiences during the Kaiserreich had prevented any single group from dominating the music scene. Yet all these groups were in disarray after the Great War. Oskar Hagen's appeal to the new University League to fund performances of Händel's operas therefore landed in suddenly fertile soil. Before Rodelinde's debut brought the University League and Orchestra together, the George August University had little direct involvement in Göttingen's cultural life. Even the theater had maintained a fairly cool relationship with the university.12 The Händel Festival changed that relationship and represented the most dramatic extension of the university's funding, prestige, and personnel into Göttingen cultural life. The University League provided the bulk of the financial support for the Festival until 1935. This funding represented a unique opportunity to connect personal and institutional patronage. The University Orchestra remained the Festival's principal accompaniment until after World War II. Under Hagen's direction this collection of students and lecturers managed to earn quite a reputation for an amateur orchestra, performing each summer with some of the leading opera singers of the day.

This reputation depended, first and foremost, on Hagen's detailed preparation of Händel's operas. Although he valued these operas as musical drama, Hagen worked on the pieces as a musicologist. The philological-historical study of music had existed since the late nineteenth century but began to flower around the time of the Great War and after.13 In this context musicologists served as the theologians of the “socially inclusive nationalism” that Celia Applegate calls music in modern Germany.14 Pamela Potter similarly demonstrates that musicology was essentially a German discipline before the 1920s, yet its lack of recognition in the university encouraged its practitioners to build connections with journalists, performers, composers, and amateur organizations.15 Indeed, musicologists fared relatively well in the spartan and volatile Weimar years. Its advocates argued that music best embodied cultural value in Germany, working closely with professional and amateur performers to put this belief into practice.16 The philological nature of musicology pulled it toward Page 77 → research on older music, especially Baroque composers like Händel, Bach, Schütz, Telemann, and Vivaldi. Although these composers had maintained respectable reputations since their death, most twentieth-century music-lovers knew them based only on a handful of pieces from their massive output. Their discovered work sounded novel yet tonally more familiar than modernist compositions. Since many of the great Baroque composers had come from German-speaking principalities, they made rich subjects for musicologists interested in strengthening and defining “German” culture in the 1920s. Most Baroque music had been written for smaller ensembles, so musicologists found in the Weimar years an expanding number of groups who might perform the pieces they discovered and edited. Amateur ensembles and singing clubs had been growing in Germany since the nineteenth century, but the 1920s represented a high-water mark for non-professional music-making. The middle-class German Glee Club Association (founded 1862), for instance, boasted 1.3 million members by 1929. The German Workers Glee Club Association grew from nearly 250,000 members in 1920 to almost half a million in 1928.17 This amateur music revolution was part and parcel of the dramatic expansion of associational life in Weimar Germany, which the previous chapters on sharpshooting detail. Likewise, the tradition of Hausmusik, playing music at home, increased during the economically difficult Weimar years.18 Especially in smaller university cities, professional and dilettante musicologists like Oskar Hagen brought town and gown together by offering regular concerts and providing music for amateurs to play themselves.19 Hagen's proposed performances in 1920 therefore solved a number of issues facing musical life in post–World War I Germany. Drawing on university and civic resources and utilizing mostly amateur musicians, he could stage “new” operas for little money. The sparse Baroque orchestrations would eventually record well on the radio, which broadened the impact of the Festival.20 Hagen believed that performing Händel would in turn rejuvenate opera generally by promoting novelty and familiarity at the same time. Hagen in fact believed broadly in Händel's curative powers. He had first encountered the operas while recovering from an illness in 1919 in Halle, Händel's birthplace. Born in 1888 in Wiesbaden to artistic parents, Oskar Frank Leonard Hagen studied art history, musicology, and composition in Berlin and Halle. In 1914 he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Correggio at Halle University and then worked in the art museum there during the war. He volunteered for military service twice, but medical problems kept him out of uniform. Hagen assumed that Händel had helped him recuperate in 1919 and might also help a weakened Germany recover after the Great War and Revolution.21 This notion Page 78 → echoed the nationalist sentiments of leading musicologists Hermann Abert and Joachim Moser, who maintained that that performing old German music offered a salve for the German spirit.22 Musicologists had tried to “Germanize” Händel even before World War I.23 The war and its aftermath prompted Hagen, like many artists and critics, to formulate his ideas about art into a form of nationalist aesthetic. His art history publications betray elitism rooted in his equation of art with national character.24 Yet Hagen's writings on Händel and the Festival do not themselves reveal a narrow nationalist agenda. His emphasis on Händel's universality and “deep psychology” sought to appeal to the modern person, not just the modern German.25 Hagen, his supporters, and his family have consistently maintained that, more than anything else, an idealistic love of music motivated his founding and shepherding the Festival.26 In Halle, Hagen also developed his broad and eclectic view of art and culture, partly through his relationships with opera director Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard, musicologist Hermann Abert, and architect and scenic designer Paul

Thiersch. All three thought that a common spirit could unite apparently different art forms and different epochs. Hagen's own research interests ranged from Renaissance to nineteenth-century art. Although he especially focused on the earlier period, he often tried to bring “modern” ideas to the study of all kinds of art. Hagen, NiedeckenGebhard, and Thiersch shared an attachment to modernist art and style, specifically psychologically oriented Expressionism, which they likened to archetypes present in Händel's operas. Expressionist staging, Hagen argued, fit with Händel's decidedly “unnatural” characters and style of singing (e.g., vocal coloratura), as well as the opera's overall “atmosphere.”27 Although Hagen revered Händel's musical skill, he primarily saw the Baroque master as a great dramatist and argued that the composer's appeal lay in his ability to convey profound stories and ideas through music.28 Two basic notions motivated Hagen to stage Händel operas in Göttingen and animated his work on the original scores. First, he believed that shortening, rearranging, and even cutting some of the arias would focus character development and the “psychological structure of the action,” making the operas more compelling for twentiethcentury audiences.29 Like the new modernist productions called Lehrstücke (cautionary tales), Händellian opera worked best, in Hagen's mind, when it considered its audience.30 He translated the libretti from the original Italian into German, an alteration common in interwar Germany.31 Hagen maintained, as well, that Händel's lengthy and repetitive (da capo) arias were too demanding for the twentieth-century singer or listener.32 In Händel's mideighteenth-century London, patrons came and left during the performances, knew the stories, and often attended more for the vocal fireworks than Page 79 → the dramatic narrative. Twentieth-century audiences, however, remained in their seats and expected a compelling narrative and character development.33 Challenging the idea of “historical accuracy” from the outset, Hagen saw exact reproductions of Händel's operas as “simply pointless.” He preferred instead to focus the pieces’ psychological development and the “truth of the action” from curtain to curtain.34 In the first production of Rodelinde, for instance, Hagen cut thirteen of twenty-eight arias. Second, Hagen believed that Expressionist staging—lighting, props, and movement—would further draw out the essential significance of Händel's operas for the modern listener. Händel's characters, Hagen, insisted, drew meaning not from the modern psychology of individualism, rather from the realm of human type or, better, symbol…. Here Händel's ideal connects with modern Expressionism. In such opera character stands next to character. A psychological drama develops from the collision of psychologically contrasting types.35 Musicologist Hermann Abert agreed that the essence of Baroque drama like Händel's “lay not in the tracking down of individual psychological problems, rather in the rendering of a series of opposing mental states…from the breadth of human emotions.”36 As a way to highlight this vision of Händel, Hagen maintained that Expressionism “made very good sense in Händel's operas” and “would completely satisfy the modern person's need for strong experiences.”37 Expressionist staging helped make these characters even more universal. Hagen and other supporters claimed that the characters, subject matter, and attention to “psychological development” in Händellian opera could appeal to all people.38 This dialectic of old and new informed the work of many experimental, “modernist” artists during this time. Indeed, Walter Frisch maintains that for many artists of the 1920s, “their engagement with the past is an integral part of their modernism.”39 But unlike the “ambivalent” relationship between Baroque and modernist music that Frisch highlights, Hagen believed that Expressionism and the Baroque functioned very similarly, complementing each other. At the Händel Festival he sought to synthesize the two aesthetics. The music was vaguely familiar Baroque. The sets were fairly novel Expressionism. Their juxtaposition, though, created something wholly new. Hagen believed that Händel's novelty and familiarity together would help modern listeners understand the psychological depth of the Baroque master and his ability to speak to twentieth-century men and women. Although the opening strains of Rodelinde's overture would eventually come to symbolize the Festival's meaning, their sound struck many listeners in 1920 as odd.40 Hagen went to great lengths to explain how the modern listener, raised on Classical and Romantic music, had to grow accustomed to pre-Mozart sounds.41 He nevertheless saw in Händel “the strongest impulse for modern opera composition.”42 Page 80 →

Figures 3 and 4 show the simple, stark settings created by Paul Thiersch, Hagen's friend and architect from Halle. Thiersch lit them with intense primary colors that changed by scene to express specific emotions.43 Like other modernist aesthetics in the twentieth century—Bauhaus and Soviet Proletkult modernism in 1920s or Italian cinematic realism and French New Wave after World War II—the Händel Festival's jarring, stripped-down aesthetics also grew from material want. Especially in 1920, when the Festival's very concept was as experimental as its aesthetics, Thiersch's abrupt staging and lighting were all they could afford. And while the Festival's finances did improve in the 1920s, the ongoing economic challenges interwar Germany faced meant that material restrictions on performances continued to shape aesthetics for most of the interwar era. Even as Expressionism yielded to more avant-garde ideas such as New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) in the 1920s, the intensely psychological staging at the first Händel Festival challenged the sensibilities of concertgoers in Göttingen and across Germany whose notions about art and music still fit squarely into the nineteenth century.44 Page 81 → As we have seen, Göttingen was a generally conservative city that in 1920 did not seem likely to promote aesthetic experiment. Its social and political makeup meant that conservative forces and ideas were more likely to influence discourses about the Händel Festival. Händel went over particularly well, though, in a heavily Protestant town.45 Throughout the interwar era local newspapers stressed the role that local “notables” played in the Händel Festival.46 And the majority of supporters in the University League came from middle-class Göttingers, especially the same politically conservative professors, businessmen, and government officials who mistrusted experiments such as democracy.47 University students—also a reactionary bunch in Göttingen—played in the orchestra, built the sets, and bought discounted tickets for performances. How then did relatively conservative Göttingers react in 1920 to the Händel Festival's mixture of obscure music and modernist staging? Local reviews Page 82 → that first year were, for the most part, very positive. As with discourses about sharpshooting, cultural reviews in Göttingen's newspapers reflected and even shaped the perspectives of many interested concertgoers. Wolfgang Stechow, Hagen's university assistant who would later direct the University Orchestra, claimed in the Göttinger Zeitung that the performance represented “a spontaneous revival, a psychic rebirth that developed organically and was not made, [and] that the purely idealistic striving and enthusiasm of all collaborators in fact demonstrated the necessity of such artistic efforts.” He went on to praise the “unity of artistic effect” and the “music historic premise and modern rendering.” Echoing many of Hagen's ideas, Stechow found the “strongest psychological effect” in the orchestrations’ emphasis on Händel's vocal melodies. He celebrated singers, instrumentalists, the University League's generosity, and the unique cooperation of town and gown. But Stechow reserved special praise for Oskar Hagen, whose “creative interpretation for contemporary eyes” merited “the deepest thanks of everyone who holds a place deep in their hearts for nothing less than the beauty of brilliant works.”48 Another review in the same paper of subsequent performances wrote that Hagen achieved “the same total success as with the premiere” and that his work must be shown widely. Indeed, this writer claimed that with successive performances, “it becomes clearer that the Rodelinde performance defines [Göttingen as] a cultural big city.”49 A reviewer in the Göttinger Tageblatt pushed the issue of “provincial” culture further, maintaining that the subtle orchestrations work well “in our little theater” but “in a big-city opera house would court failure.” Clearly familiar with Baroque opera, this author questioned Hagen's edits and called the use of Expressionist staging “strange,” concluding that “this is no way to awaken Händel's drama.”50 That analysis, though, prompted two adamant responses in the Tageblatt from readers defending the endeavor. Beyond lauding the performance and Hagen's efforts, one of those writers maintained that audience and cast alike recognized the “genuine and far-reaching” effect of the performance and that the opinions of the “dilettante listener” also mattered.51 Positive reviews in newspapers and journals across Germany corroborated this local boosterism. Rising musicologist star Hans Joachim Moser, whose pathbreaking three-volume History of German Music appeared that year, wrote in the (Berlin) Voßische Zeitung that Hagen's performance “right in the Hanoverian provincial university…represented a milestone in the history of modern music renaissance.” He praised orchestra, theater, and above all Händel. Like Hagen, Moser revived Händel's work as “a musical mirror of the soul” and maintained that the productions in Göttingen represented a new cultural path between contemporary opera “snobs” and the

“trash” of operetta and Page 83 → cinema.52 Hildesheim organist and early music conductor Johannes Kobelt enthused in the (Berlin) Allgemeine deutsche Musikzeitung about the music, singers, and production. At one point his review almost quoted Hagen verbatim, remarking that “through the sets the modern person's need for strong experiences is fully satisfied” and that Thiersch's disconcerting scenery served as “the basis for mood” in the production.53 Performances in the summer of 1920 succeeded beyond even Hagen's expectations: all three scheduled performances sold out, as did a requested encore show. The public wanted a fifth, but the singers, who had come to Göttingen as a quick diversion, could not stay any longer.54 The 1920 performances validated the university's gamble on financial support for this project and its venture into Göttingen cultural life. Cooperation between the university and the City Theater—student performers, artistic leadership, money, and donated space—helped anchor Hagen's fairly radical aesthetics and textual alterations to well-established cultural institutions in Göttingen. And this first Händel Festival drew together previously competing cultural institutions to create a uniquely Weimar-era activity. Squeezed between the closing of the usual music season and the start of summer engagements, the summer performances at the Festival created a liminal space for trying something new. These successful initial performances begat a regular festival in the years that followed, creating a rhythm that encouraged experimentation through well-worn ideas and institutions.

Becoming the “Händel Bayreuth,” 1921–24 In 1921 the performances took the name “The Händel Opera Festival.” During one week in July Rodelinde played twice, and Hagen's revision of Otto and Theophano premiered and ran for four evenings. Five of the seven leads from 1920 joined three new professional singers and the University Orchestra again for the 1921 productions. Leipzig musicologist Hermann Abert spoke on opening night about Händel as dramatist, and organizers published a festival program, complete with several pieces by Hagen about Händel and the individual operas. In particular Hagen laid out for these audiences the arguments he had made the year before in academic journals. He situated Händel in the longer history of opera and Baroque aesthetics generally. He claimed that, when compared to Mozart and especially Wagner, the “simple” Händel offered new energy to revitalize opera. Hagen argued that his alterations and Thiersch's staging unleashed the modern, “expressionistic” quality of Händel's dramas, Page 84 → especially his characters. Hagen also addressed any musicological concerns about altering the texts, maintaining that “Händel wrote music dramas for the stage and only for the stage.”55 The University League again lent major financial support, and several leading Göttingen businesses also contributed, realizing that a well-known Festival could be an economic boon. Reviews for both operas in 1921 were generally more glowing than the previous year and highlighted the larger issues at stake in performing Händel operas in the twentieth century. Hildesheim musicologist Johannes Kobelt again celebrated the work of Hagen and Thiersch at reviving and revitalizing Händel.56 Baroque musicologist Theodor Wilhelm Werner in the Hannoverscher Kurier praised the event but remained skeptical about Hagen's modernization of the texts and the productions’ “emphasis on present-day impact.”57 This conflict between musicologically oriented “historical accuracy” and “psychological” Expressionist theatricality that would shape the Festival's history later in the decade had already begun. Media in Göttingen viewed this tension as uniquely positive. Heinz Koch, the leading cultural critic at the Göttinger Tageblatt who reviewed all the interwar festivals, enthused that “Dr. Oskar Hagen's…work has used Händel's operas to shine light onto the modern stage.” Händel “uses delicate and, for our modern sensitivity, often naïve colors to paint psychological sensations with unequivocal simplicity.” Thiersch's sets heightened the impact of this “expressive music [Ausdrucksmusik].” “If,” Koch concluded, “Dr. Hagen manages to extend his vision of Händel's work across the world of German culture, then he may boast to have enabled the rebirth of the ideal of beauty and purity.”58 The chief critic at the Göttinger Zeitung, Max Carstenn, similarly praised the “musical expression of psychological sensations” on the stage and viewed “this even greater success” in 1921 as “evidence of the unbroken power of German culture and the expanding treasure of the national strength of our Volk.”59 Hagen and other organizers in fact imagined that synthesizing Baroque music and Expressionist staging would

change opera and modern music. In the 1921 Festival program Hagen noted “how marvelously far Richard Wagner has brought us,” yet he believed that “the Titan from Bayreuth” continued to cast too long a shadow on twentieth-century opera, hindering its development and setting a dangerous norm by which all opera past and present was judged. Baroque music and Händel in particular encouraged listeners to appreciate different qualities in opera. Hagen especially found fault with Wagner's opaque orchestrations and amorphous structure that seemed to overwhelm singer and story. He claimed that the ubiquity of Wagner's inundating strings and horns were also partly to blame for why Händel sounded so foreign to Page 85 → twentieth-century ears.60 Musicologist Hermann Abert reminded those attending the second Händel Festival that Wagner's “is not the only solution to the problem of musical drama.”61 Wolfgang Stechow had claimed in 1920 that Hagen's revival of Händel also served as a “healthy reaction against the orchestration of a Richard Strauss” and was thus the “root of a spontaneous stylistic appetite of our day.”62 The Göttingen Händel Festival nonetheless drew inspiration from Wagner's influence. By 1922 writers and musicians in Europe and the United States had christened the Festival the “Händel Bayreuth.”63 Thus, even when organizers defined themselves against Wagner, they were happy to make use of this part of his shadow. Indeed, by proudly using the bestowed title of the “Händel Bayreuth,” commentators in Göttingen appropriated legacies and meanings associated with established festivals. Following Bayreuth's success beginning in 1873, yearly festivals began to populate the summer season in the late nineteenth century. Festivals blossomed during the Weimar Republic. They combined traditional musical forms with more modern circumstances and experimentation and gave struggling musicians necessary off-season work. And while Hagen's Expressionist staging of Händel was novel, his adaptation of the Baroque composer to contemporary circumstances actually continued a trend that stretched back into the nineteenth century. Victorian British producers had after all routinely performed the Messiah, written for choirs of thirty and orchestras of twenty, with six hundred people or more.64 Hermann Stephani in Marburg had modified the text, music, and performance of other Händel oratorios before World War I.65 In fact, even in the eighteenth century, not long after Händel's death, enthusiasts were translating his texts for revival performances.66 The term “Händel Bayreuth” also implied that Göttingen was a site of national cultural expression, a venue for promoting the spiritual and curative power of opera that Hagen saw at the heart of his project.67 Ironically, reviewers and scholars in 1921 had already identified this important tension between Wagner as old and Händel as new. Still, Göttingen reporters embraced Hagen's agenda not as a radical attack on one of the pillars of opera but as a necessary corrective. One local reviewer in 1920 countered that Hagen's assertion that Händel's texts are as great as Wagner's simply went too far.68 Nevertheless, even those staging Wagner recognized the challenge of what Hagen called “the development of a new post-Wagner opera reform.”69 Patrick Carnegy calls Hagen's productions “the most significant developments on the operatic stage” before Otto Klemperer's radical work at the Berlin Kroll Opera in the late 1920s. In fact, Hagen's anti-Romanticism helped inspire Klemperer's Page 86 → productions at this pathbreaking Berlin opera house, including those of Wagner himself.70 The ritual of a yearly event enabled organizers to update established cultural practices by recontextualizing them into the contemporary musical landscape and progressive musical experiment. Indeed, Bernhard Helmich maintains that Händel's association with festivals in interwar Germany directly shaped the ways in which his music was investigated and even politicized.71 The Salzburg Festspiel, perhaps the greatest interwar festival in Central Europe, also used a “highly ritualized setting” to promote conservative values.72 Herman Abert opened the 1921 Festival by claiming that the Händel Festival revived essential culture: We may have the firm confidence of our truly musical national comrades [Volksgenossen] that he [Händel] will lead the way back to fundamental musical drama of feeling [urmusikalische Gefühlsdramatik]. These performances will always have an exceptional character, though in the best sense of festivals, which raise us above the dreariness of daily life. That is all we can achieve here, but that was enough for Händel and is enough for us.73 The Festival's multivalent synthesis of Baroque and Expressionism made it part of a larger project that Jacques Handschin in 1927 called “overcoming Romanticism.”74 Throughout the 1920s Romantic music continued to

dominate programs in theaters and concert halls all across Germany. Even when ensembles played new radical pieces, they often slipped them between more established works. The justly praised avant-garde music of the 1920s comprised a comparatively small percentage of performances throughout this period. After the Great War well-worn Classical and Romantic composers (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Puccini) drew greater and more socially diverse audiences, all of whom wanted their own high “culture.”75 Without governmental support and at the whim of the market, directors and musicians had to react to a wide variety of cultural activities siphoning off their audiences. They therefore felt obligated to give the public what it wanted and would pay for, namely, the better-known classics. Not every Romantic composer attracted patrons, however; only the familiar ones fared well.76 By wrapping modernist aesthetics in the cloak of an established composer, the Händel Festival organizers appealed to the cautious support from patrons and audiences for modernism during the Weimar Republic. Like atonal or jazz-inspired modernism, Baroque music often challenged sweeping Romantic compositions Page 87 → with sparse orchestrations, smaller ensembles, tighter playing, and room for improvisation. Händel's music offered a comfortable challenge to the continued viability of Romantic music, which had dominated classical music since the mid-nineteenth century.77 Indeed, the 1919 inaugural performance of the New Music Society, founded in Berlin by the pioneering modern music conductor Hermann Scherchen, featured Händel on the program.78 In the early 1920s Händel Festival organizers, scholars, and reviewers together crafted a narrative that reinforced the Festival's implications: Hagen began playing Händel at home with a few friends, scraped together limited university support, and created the Festival from purely idealistic aims. This genesis story shaped discourses about this Festival that became world-famous within three years of its humble beginnings. Each year that story assumed new dimensions, depending on which Händel opera was premiered, repeated, or showing elsewhere in Europe. It is striking how quickly and firmly a common language and set of ideas developed in local and national reviews on the Göttingen Festival: Händel's “deep psychology,” the “purity” of his characters and their motivations, the initially alien but then comforting quality of music, its simple yet profound nature. While the music and performances mattered, this idea of the Göttingen Händel Festival had quickly taken hold in national and especially local reviews. Its appeal and flexibility facilitated the integration of avant-garde Expressionism in this mid-sized town but also reinforced conservative ideas about music generally. In particular, Hagen's gendered explanations of changes he made to vocal parts illustrated the impact of conservative social assumptions. Because Händel's plots often concerned romantic relations, Hagen (like all others who worked on older operas) transposed male alto and soprano leads into bass or tenor parts in order to avoid what he saw as sexual ambiguity that he believed would ruin the drama in the twentieth century. Hagen assumed, after all, that the “deeper psychology” in Händellian opera came not from the libretto's text but from the composer's ability to render ideas and emotions musically.79 Hagen's versions and all others from the 1920s reflected the continued influence of classical and especially Wagnerian opera, where “mythical” and abstract sexual relationships reiterated stereotypical gender roles.80 Händel had written most male leads for castrati, who usually sang in a uniquely powerful soprano voice. Hagen transposed them into tenor or bass parts, because, he argued, neither the female vocal timbre nor its “Gestalt” could effectively convey the feeling and intent of male characters.81 Here he followed Hermann Abert's “clear example” in transposing parts in Gluck's Orpheus. Hagen maintained it would be an “intolerable sight” to see a woman as king or a hardened warrior, Page 88 → a mistake that would destroy Händel's dramatic intent. The lead King Betrach and warrior Unolf from Rodelinde, he said, were better sung by basses than altos. Hagen allowed that a soprano boy if necessary might sing the part of young Sextus Pompey in Julius Caesar, but the “manly power” of a strong tenor would portray the part better.82 Participants and reviewers likewise consistently associated Händel's “deep psychology” and profound human meaning with one-dimensional gender roles: Rodelinde as “pure woman,” Caesar as “manly hero,” or Otto and Theophano as an oedipal story of maternal devotion.83 These appellations acted as convenient identifiers for those not familiar with the story, making clear that writers found gender difference to be the easiest way to highlight tensions driving the dramatic action. Reviewers connected the meaning of Händel's “soulful” operas with the interaction of male or female characters that conformed to their understanding of gender roles. By constructing “traditional” gender roles in place of potentially ambiguous Baroque sexuality, Hagen and other supporters helped

the Festival's novelty reinforce conservative social values. More than was the case in sharpshooting, women participated in the Händel Festival—as performers, stagehands, and even members of supporting organizations like the University League. But male directors and critics shaped the public discourse about the Festival, and they often used traditional gender assumptions to do so. Here too broader participation lent credence to reactionary ideas. While Oskar Hagen was the prime mover at the Festival, much of the visual work that made the performances uniquely modernist came from Paul Thiersch and Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard. As set designer and theatrical director, respectively, they realized the collective belief in using Expressionism to emphasize the psychological impact of Händel's Baroque dramas. The prize-winning architect Paul Thiersch was born in 1879 in Munich and studied in Basel, Munich, and Berlin. Like Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, Thiersch drew inspiration from avant-garde aesthetics (especially Expressionism) and practical realities of design. From 1915 to 1928 he directed the Crafts School in Halle and also designed sets for theaters in Halle and Leipzig. For the Händel Festival, Thiersch worked as dilettante, like Hagen. Both men shared a belief in psychological connections between genres (music, art, theater, architecture) and aesthetics (Baroque and Expressionism). As he did elsewhere, Thiersch used overdetermined staging—blocky settings, bright colored lighting, swirling or jagged backdrops, bold costumes—to accentuate emotional and psychological tension on stage. In 1922 Hagen's friend and avant-garde director Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard Page 89 → became theatrical director, beginning a thirty-year relationship with the Festival. Born in 1889 in southwest Germany, Niedecken-Gebhard studied in Lausanne and Leipzig. He wrote his 1914 dissertation on eighteenth-century dance with Hermann Abert in Halle, where he met Hagen and Thiersch. He acted and produced at various theaters in the 1920s, including Münster and Berlin. Throughout his career, Niedecken-Gebhard worked with some of Germany's leading modernist dancers, including Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss. Around this time Niedecken-Gebhard explained the value he attached to dance as source of creativity: The fact that dance only serves as source of diversion and despondency indicates that in our generation stirs a new feeling about the body, that ultimately it is valuable property to be cared for and developed, closely connected with the will of all new artistic work.84 His addition of dance and ritual movement to Händel productions helped define the “Göttingen style,” complementing Hagen's focused scores and Thiersch's unsettling backdrops and staging. One review in 1922 remarked that the new dancing style in Göttingen made “backdrop, story and music” into “an insoluble unity.”85 Figure 5, a photograph from the 1922 premiere of Julius Caesar, demonstrates the aim of Thiersch's sets and Niedecken-Gebhard's symbolic movement: to portray characters simply, boldly, and motivated chiefly by emotion. Thiersch and Niedecken-Gebhard thus provided the visual expression of Hagen's vision of Händel as creator of archetypal musical dramas, based on timeless emotional struggles that appealed to twentieth-century audiences. Cultural purveyors, whose writings helped shape perspectives on the Festival's significance, certainly realized the value of this heady synthesis. Both larger middle-class newspapers in Göttingen regularly reproduced the thoughts of the organizers about the operas. In 1922, for instance, the Göttinger Zeitung printed the text of NiedeckenGebhard's Festival lecture in which he claimed that Händel represented the “noblest of present day spirits” because “our era seeks to rise above the danger of small, common artistic forms of sensitive individuality to the universal, the typical, sometimes monumental.”86 Already in 1922 Heinz Koch in the Tageblatt noted Thiersch's complementary “monumental decorations.”87 In 1923, as the Festival's reputation grew, Zeitung critic Max Carstenn called Hagen's Julius Caesar “a work of monumental force, but one in which lives all the worlds of the strongest humanity.”88 And in the Tageblatt that year the critic Dr. Schley agreed that the opera was “somewhat monumental,” especially because of Thiersch's “almost futuristically effective” scenes, which the review called “a bizarre negative exposure rocky area.”89 This idea of monumentalism, we shall see, would help define the Festival in the Third Reich. Page 90 →

Local papers in 1923 especially stressed the Festival's national importance. Max Carstenn in the Zeitung wrote that in these performances “we see especially clearly the great value that Oskar Hagen's calculated risk has won back for our German culture.”90 The 1923 Tageblatt reviews likewise used the now-familiar components of the Festival to celebrate its significance. Gender roles, Dr. Schley wrote, defined characters: Thyra Hagen-Lesiner (Hagen's wife and a former professional singer, who had performed since 1920), for instance, made Rodelinde “psychologically and physically a woman who holds her fate in her own hands but remains fully Woman, fully Feeling.” The sets “concentrated the action extraordinarily onto psychological process on the stage.” The performances fully updated Händel, “for today, in the era of psychoanalysis, this work has an effect that is through and through modern.”91 The Göttingen Händel Festival, Schley concluded, “has, from an historical experiment, become a holy play [Weihespiel], to which we must attach inestimable meaning for our cultural life [and] for the spiritual rebuilding of our Volk.”92 Another review in the Zeitung claimed that, despite the usual cultural conservatism of smaller towns like Göttingen, the Festival there revealed “a very serious cultural will” to make modernism matter.93 National reviews likewise generally commended the overall effect of the Page 91 → Festival, if sometimes finding fault with its dilettantism. In 1922 the popular novelist Vicki Baum, for instance, wrote in the Berlin Voßische Zeitung that “in little Göttingen grows something great.” She described the work of Niedecken-Gebhard, Thiersch, and especially Hagen as uncovering “musical treasures” and called their version of Julius Caesar especially “the music drama of our time.” As proof of the Festival's broadening impact, she mentioned that “a string of larger stages (including Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hanover)” planned to stage Händel.94 A Swiss review in 1922 enthused that “one can congratulate Göttingers for the fact that their city is the home of exemplary Händel cultivation; festival organizers can already look back with satisfaction on several years of work as pleasant, progressive expansion of their goal.”95 Reviews also remarked on the unique audience at these early Festivals. In 1922 Heinz Koch wrote that the theater was sold out for performances of Caesar, despite the fairly high ticket prices. He called the crowd “an illustrious society that brings together top artistic and intellectually interested circles, not just from Göttingen but from all of Germany.” In addition to many professors and students, Koch noted the presence of leading newspaper critics, no fewer than six directors of the best German theaters, and members of the nobility, as well as large numbers of guests from Holland, Sweden, and the United States.96 Of those at 1920s Händel Festivals eminent Händel scholar Rudolph Steglich said they were a “unique audience…not typical of a big city or small town.”97 Ultimately, these novel performances worked well in Göttingen for three main reasons. First, by using the University Orchestra and professional singers, the Festival fused popular amateurism with the reputable professionalism that regular theatergoers and critics expected. Second, even if the Expressionist staging raised some eyebrows among cultural conservatives in Göttingen, Händel's reputation as a champion of Protestantism helped allay concerns. But most important, the immediate attention that the Festival brought to Göttingen garnered financial and symbolic rewards for the city. The Festival created therefore a creative cultural space in which experiment and tradition reinforced each other. Despite conflicts that soon emerged, the Festival's meaning throughout the interwar years continued to grow from this synthesis that Hagen, Thiersch, and NiedeckenGebhard created in the early 1920s.

The “Göttingen Style” versus “Historical Accuracy,” 1924–28 By 1924 the Festival—now named the Göttingen Händel Opera Festival—spearheaded a Händel renaissance spreading across Europe. Halle, Münster, Hanover, Karlsruhe, and Kiel also hosted Händel Festivals in the 1920s. As Page 92 → well, Händel's operas (and often Hagen's versions) played in Berlin, Zurich, Munich, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, and Bern. 98 This resurgence of Händel's operas thrived in smaller towns, especially university towns, because of the necessary cooperation by professional artists, amateurs, and musicologists.99 Niedecken-Gebhard noted, similarly, that smaller stages pushed new dance further but “for the large opera institutions this issue of dance is harder to solve.”100 In the 1924 Göttingen Festival program musicologist and director Hermann Stephani, who had been working on Händel oratorios at the University of Marburg for twenty years, claimed that the successful resurrection of Händel's operas represented a “fundamental change in opera” [Opernwende], one that the Göttingen Händel Festival had begun and continued to lead. The

1924 program in fact named the Festival the wellspring of opera reform across Europe and even “the pulsing life of modern artistic machinery.”101 In the 1923–1924 season alone 121 performances of Händel operas had been staged in eighteen houses across Europe—compared to 4 each year in 1920 and 1921 and none for some 160 years before that!102 Enthusiasts in Leipzig even began hosting a Workers Händel Festival in the mid-1920s.103 This revival of Händel's works meant that in the four years since Hagen had first staged a Händel opera, the performances in Göttingen had become important reference points for those interested in both early and new music. During the mid-1920s, debates about how best to stage Händel expanded the significance of performances in Göttingen. In the midst of the Weimar Republic's most stable period, these discussions anchored national, potentially politically volatile discussions of culture's meaning to local experience. Much cultural production in 1920s Germany was explicitly “political” or intensely politicized.104 Discussions about staging Händel in Göttingen, on the other hand, quietly reinforced politically conservative trends in town by using novelty to support tradition. Debates on early music reflected the fact that in the age of the phonograph, radio, and cinema, listeners in the 1920s reacted differently to Baroque opera than those of Händel's day, or even of the nineteenth century.105 Cautiously progressive ventures like the Göttingen Händel Festival thus furthered a long tradition of adapting Händel's works to new cultural, economic, and political conditions.106 The Göttingen Festival and the “Händel Movement” generally integrated Händel into twentieth-century cultural trends by editing the texts, using dance and rhythm, involving communities through amateur performance, favoring festivals, and blowing up psychological tensions in Händel's operas into a kind of monumentalism.107 Critics hailed the 1924 premiere of Hagen's adaptation of Xerxes as the Festival's greatest accomplishment yet, a thoughtful and witty production that Page 93 → belied its 200-year age. One reviewer in Göttingen raved that Xerxes was “so modern, in the best sense of the word.”108 Especially more conservative commentators had made such remarks before. One reviewer in 1923 noted that, unlike some frivolous modernist “drivel,” Festival performances demonstrated “a very strong will and sense of quality.”109 It helped, of course, that taxes on the Festival also brought 1,451 Marks into the city's coffers, proving that some modernism brought acclaim and a financial windfall to Göttingen.110 In 1922 Heinz Koch had likewise implied that a special kind of modernism was at work in Göttingen, claiming that “the music is full of wonder” and at points “seems totally modern.” Koch insisted in fact that Hagen's work to resurrect Händel “has saved the fundamental importance of German culture.” Echoing Hagen, Koch wrote that Händel inspired new musical composition. He said the Göttingen Festival represented “a new direction that, like Strauss, moves away from the confusion and hashish of sensationalism, from today's Bacchanalian of nerves [Nervenbachanal] to the pure heights of a spiritualized and genuinely divinely simple, eternally pure and majestic expressive art.”111 Koch likewise celebrated this form of modernism as revealing “today's thirst” for the great “German life of the mind” and the “spiritual power and greatness of the German soul.”112 These sentiments from a right-wing critic highlighted the fact that modernism could promote conservative political ideals.113 These thoughts, moreover, highlighted the multivalent qualities of the Händel Festival: it was modern and pushed contemporary composition forward while also glorifying familiar “German” culture. National critics in 1924 continued to herald Hagen's pioneering work but increasingly placed Göttingen performances in the larger context of a broad Händel and early music renaissance. The Baroque musicologist from Hanover, Theodor Werner, praised Xerxes that year as revealing “the shimmer of a religiously certain humanity.” While he revered Hagen as “the courageous, clever initiator [Urheber] of the new Händel Movement,” Werner faulted his “unfamiliar hand” on some of the translations. Instead, he commended Niedecken-Gebhard's “divinely gifted talent” for using dance and Thiersch's world-famous “beautiful (unreal) costumes” and “successful images.”114 In a lengthy piece on Xerxes and the 1924 Göttingen Händel Festival generally in the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, musicologist Rudolf Steglich (also from Hanover) found positive things to say about Hagen's venture, the singers’ ability to master Baroque techniques, and the work of Niedecken-Gebhard and Thiersch. However, Steglich attacked Hagen's text, exclaiming, “if only all these powers could have been trained on Händel's ‘Xerxes’!” Indeed, he wondered if Hagen's Xerxes was a “new version” or a wholly new work.115 Page 94 →

Steglich's 1924 question, it turned out, intimated even greater change in the Göttingen Händel Festival, since Oskar Hagen departed the following year. Hagen had joined the Göttingen University faculty in 1918 as a lecturer and quickly finished his Habilitation that year, making him eligible to become a full professor. But despite his repeated attempts and support from the university and faculty, he was never promoted. The decision from the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art, and Education in March 1924 gave no reasons, but one colleague confided later that it did not bode well for future prospects.116 Just as music scholars like Steglich had begun to question Hagen's adaptation of Händel's arrangements at this time, more conservative faculty members at Göttingen's university raised mild concern over Hagen's modern approaches to art history.117 The University of Wisconsin, on the other hand, viewed Hagen's “very modern” perspectives on art as evidence that he could help them build a new and progressive art department. They began courting him to come to Madison in 1924.118 Wisconsin offered Hagen a chaired professorship in art history as part of a broad program designed to bring German learning to American universities and facilitate better relations between the two nations. The university president asked Hagen to start a new art history program in Madison and gave him ample resources to do so.119 In 1925 he accepted, given the unlikelihood of finding a permanent position in Germany.120 Hagen did not go happily to the United States, in part because it meant resigning his leadership of the University Orchestra and Händel Festival. Hagen fretted over the direction of “his” Festival and continued to advise Thiersch and Niedecken-Gebhard through letters after emigrating.121 Wolfgang Stechow took over as director of the University Orchestra.122 Hagen's departure in the spring of 1925 forced a break in Festival events for a year, since no one else had an opera ready to premiere, a standard Hagen had established at the first five festivals. Hagen's departure coincided with a growing aesthetic conflict in the “Händel Movement,” which Steglich had also noted, between those who “updated” Händel and those who wished to perform his works as completely and aesthetically close to the original as possible. The latter, “historical accuracy,” grew from the notion of “authenticity” that scholar-director-instrument maker Arnold Dolmetsch had begun to promote in the early twentieth century.123 Throughout Europe and the United States, scholars and performers increasingly in the 1920s sought to perform “early music” (roughly that of the mid-eighteenth century and before) the way it would have been played at time it was written. Rather than performing Bach, Händel, or Monteverdi, for instance, with instruments and techniques common in the late Romantic era, advocates of “historical accuracy” used period instruments (or reproductions) that performers would have Page 95 → used during the Baroque era. Hagen's musicological revival work and sparse orchestrations certainly promoted this aesthetic agenda and initially received praise from scholars of early music.124 Hagen, though, always saw Händel's operas chiefly as dramatic works and believed that Händel resonated best with twentieth-century audiences when the operas were edited and staged to maximize dramatic effect. Altering the original score and staging the performance with modernist aesthetics, however, flew in the face of the musicological intentions of a growing number of early music performers.125 Both sides agreed that Händel could help rejuvenate German culture in the difficult 1920s. Even before the Great War, performers and critics had seen the performance of early music as a way to “heal” a degenerate, sick, corrupt culture.126 Hagen, too, considered Händel opera a way to heal himself and Germany after the war. In 1921 Heinz Koch had contrasted the “purity of Händel” with the “psychopathic erotic of Strauss.”127 Like other critics in Germany, Koch too would come to embrace “historical accuracy” as the purest way to present Händel. Walter Frisch calls this kind of performance “historicist modernism” and defines it this way: Musical techniques from the remote past are used prominently and vigorously as a way of achieving a distance from late Romantic styles. Historicist modernism is not nostalgic or conservative in any traditional sense. It represents an attempt to bridge a historical gap without denying it, collapsing it, or retreating over it to return to the past.128 In this particular context, however, Frisch's “historicist modernism” did lessen the progressive potential of Hagen's edited modernism, thereby reinforcing conservative ideas about music in Göttingen. Although the conflict between the “Göttingen style” and “historical accuracy” in the 1920s never assumed overt political-ideological characteristics, the gradual move in Göttingen toward more historical performance helped define “German music” as something fixed and in need of studied celebration rather than something dynamic and driven by the need to be

relevant. Such ideas paralleled the views of those on the political right. Hagen remained devoted to the idea that updated and edited Händel worked best in the twentieth century (as has his family right up to the present day). Unfortunately he was forced to watch the unfolding debate, with its political implications in Germany, from the other side of the Atlantic. His successor as Director of the Festival, Niedecken-Gebhard, gradually synthesized the “Göttingen style” with “historically accurate” performance. Page 96 → When the Festival resumed in 1926, performances continued the “Göttingen Style” that Hagen, Thiersch, and Niedecken-Gebhard had pioneered. Increasingly, though, modern dance and imagery promoted the founders’ vision more than the broader concept of altering and adapting Händel to the mentality of twentieth-century audiences. As well, Heinrich Heckroth replaced stalwart Paul Thiersch in 1926 as set designer, though he too used modernist aesthetics in his staging. The 1927 and 1928 productions even featured modern slide projection as part of the sets. In addition to using movement in the operas themselves, the 1926 and 1927 Festivals included dance performances choreographed by and featuring the modernist dancer from Berlin, Jens Keith. The 1926 Festival reprised Hagen's version of Otto and Theophano. But more significant, the premiere that year of Franz Notholt's edition of Ezio marked some movement toward the direction of “historical accuracy.” In the 1926 program Notholt went to great lengths to defend his longer and more accurate version of Ezio. He removed very few arias, because, he explained, “cutting arias means amputation.” Like Hagen, though, he transposed some vocal parts to maintain traditional gender roles, since women could not sing male “heroic roles.” Moreover, he addressed musicological concerns about structure by assuring readers that he tried to maintain Händel's sonic integrity by doubling the castrati parts in the higher strings. Finally, Notholt asserted that Händel's operas could speak for themselves without psychological or literary interpretation.129 By relegating such “interpretation” more to staging and movement than to the score, the Göttingen Festival managed to foster both Hagen's vision of Händel and the historical accuracy that Notholt and a growing number of scholars advocated. Local critics and supporters wove these changes into an expanding narrative about the Festival's origins and implications. In particular, Alfred Bertholet—religion professor at the university, longtime Festival participant, and head of the Festival Board of Trustees—laid out the genesis story in the 1926 program. Hagen began, Bertholet explained, with only a dream and some friends. He needed a violin and invited Bertholet to join him, his wife, and a few others at the Hagen home in playing Händel's opera music. Hagen's personal invitation helped Bertholet realize the value of Händel's forgotten music. And the strength of Hagen's ideals convinced the university and then local patrons to support the endeavor. The story went on to praise the role of Händel's music and the yearly Festival in renewing all of Germany and to state that Göttingen remained at the center of this movement.130 Subsequent Festivals grew more in status than creative production. The 1927 Festival reprised Notholt's Ezio and premiered a version by Darmstadt Page 97 → scholar Josef Wenz of Händel's Radamisto. Wenz's explanation of his changes echoed many of Hagen's. He emphasized the drama and the need to edit the score to make the opera more relevant to modern audiences, although he recognized the tension in such work: “Next to the danger of inserting too much ‘modernism’ is another danger of losing the life of a piece for the sake of pure ‘feeling of style.’”131 The 1928 Festival was the first not to debut a new Händel opera. They performed Hagen's popular version of Julius Caesar. Hagen was made an honorary member of the Festival Association in 1927 and continued to attend the performances. He joined in 1927 and 1928 a large number of important individuals from across Germany (nobility, scholars and university leaders, government officials, military officers, and a growing number of successful businessmen) who supported the Festival as part of the Honorary Committee. Hagen's vaunted position as inspiring founder mythologized him and thus kept him removed from the Festival's actual direction. He resignedly—though not quietly—watched the Festival rely more heavily each year upon its reputation and less upon actual innovation.132 Those involved with the Festival in the later 1920s emphasized less Hagen's aesthetic and musicological ideals

and more the Festival's amateurism and inspiration. The fact that the Göttingen Händel Festival began literally in Oskar Hagen's home pointed to its roots in Hausmusik (playing music at home), which venerated practical musicological discovery, not aesthetic updating. For the performances in 1920, Hagen had used his amateur University Orchestra because of scarce financial support and the risk that staging obscure music represented. The first year's soloists likewise performed gratis, despite coming from some of the best opera houses in Germany. Yet even in the best interwar years with sold-out performances, strong university funding, substantial backing from private supporters all over the world, and eventually government support, the Festival never hired a professional orchestra or chorus. Students and volunteers also built many of the sets and helped with other organizational tasks. Throughout the interwar period, lay participation remained a crucial source of energy and popular support for musical performance, especially at this Festival. Some professional participants likewise stressed the ideals behind the Festival's inception. Tenor Georg A. Walter, principal with the Berlin and Stuttgart operas, sang in more Göttingen Festival performances than any other soloist between the world wars (his son even sang a lead role in 1934). As one of the few singers attuned to Baroque technique in 1920, he naturally gravitated toward this opportunity to sing Händel. He maintained that the 1920 premiere of Rodelinde marked a turning point in his career. In his 1928 ruminations on Page 98 → singing Händel, Walter agreed with the consensus among many reviewers and scholars that Händel's “soulfulness” and deep meaning had profound relevance to modern life. Indeed, he believed that Händel's simple, direct style had the potential to reform the entire “German art of singing.”133 This desire to remake opera more generally united those advocating edited modernism and historical accuracy. Although the broad impact of the “Händel movement” in Germany faltered in the late 1920s, proponents managed to bring Händel back as a regular part of many theaters and concert programs. While the growing number of Händel opera performances in the 1920s paled next to those of the most popular Classical and Romantic opera composers (e.g., Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini), they made Händel a regular once again on many European opera stages, including Berlin, Zurich, Munich, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, and Bern.134 Aesthetics and idealism about music's effect certainly motivated Hagen and his compatriots, yet these cultural purveyors also responded to market pressures to make audience members into consumers. Mass culture such as cinema, radio, and the phonograph acted as catalysts for opera and classical music, and Hagen and others articulated as much in Göttingen.135 The Göttingen Händel Festival and the “Händel Movement” integrated new cultural trends into their activities in a variety of ways. Both Hagen's edited Expressionism and “historical accuracy” served to market Händel after the Great War. The Göttingen Festival's modernist staging used visual aesthetics and score edits to “update” Händel, just as “historically accurate” performances drew upon modern discovery and research by musicologists. Despite arguments about text and staging, both sides agreed with Hagen's claim that “it is the secret of artistic vitality that a truly translated art work constantly reveals new sides of its meaning.”136 The common desire neither to embrace nor escape the modern world but, instead, to reform it by discovering “new sides” of Händel ultimately promoted more conservative notions about the function of culture, notions that would come to fruition after 1928.

Conclusion: In 1928 The 1928 performances marked the end of a major era in the Händel Festival's history. The Festival would not stage another Händel opera for six years but mounted a significant theatrical Lay Festival in 1930. Although we can recognize with hindsight the break that 1928 represented, this year marked an important turning point in the Händel Festival's history for another, more important Page 99 → reason. By that point in the late 1920s, a wide array of supporters (and detractors) was promoting Händel's music as the solution to modern problems. Hagen and his fellow organizers had of course first staged Händel in 1920 in order to “heal” Germany much the same way the composer's music supposedly had done for Hagen himself. By 1928 the synthesis of Hagen's edited modernism and historically accurate renderings of Händel had made this curative power more important than aesthetic innovation. Indeed, the Festival's history in the 1920s illustrates that aesthetic progress could support such sentiments well. Seeking inspiration from past Masters did not inherently promote conservative or right-wing

politics. David Dennis has shown, for instance, the ways in which supporters of all political stripes sought to harness the power of Beethoven's music in this era.137 But the Händel Festival's preservation work could lend support to those who valued safe, venerated music of the past over potentially contentious modern culture. More to the point, from the perspective of cultural conservatives, the Göttingen Händel Festival made clear that contemporary creativity worked best when it promoted past Masters. Hagen saw this formula another way. He wanted his innovative approach to Händel to inspire contemporary composition.138 But many critics and scholars viewed Hagen's work as a way to define “German music” through the celebration of past Masters. Contemporary critic Walter Benjamin and historian Detlev Peukert have remarked on the political ambiguity in modernism generally and especially in the application of modernist technique.139 Hagen's departure meant that the Festival's modernist tendencies could become merely “modern” or just techniques for discovery and promotion that were free from any potentially progressive rejection of the past and critique of the present. Conservative politicians and Nazis in particular drew support from these locally rooted ideas, especially as other problems in the early 1930s shook Göttingers’ faith in their modern society. Ultimately that connection helped revive a foundering Händel Festival and make it a pillar of support for Nazism in Göttingen.

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CHAPTER 4 Aesthetic Changes, Political Transformation, 1928–38 “Even the greatest local patriotism,” Göttinger Zeitung critic Max Maaß confessed in April 1930, “should not hide the fact that with the last performances in summer 1928 a certain dead point was reached, that stagnation had set in.” He concluded, “The Händel Renaissance was something that had made its triumphant march across all the great stages. Göttingen had fulfilled its duty.”1 Like Maaß, Heinz Koch acknowledged that the impact of the Expressionist “Göttingen style” had begun to wane in the late 1920s. Koch continued to emphasize the importance of the Händel Festival to the opera world. Still, he wrote in 1927 that the “cubist” set designs did not help the somewhat lackluster performance, and he maintained in 1928 that the diminished influence of “the Expressionist phantom,” the ailing Paul Thiersch, improved that year's performances.2 Another critic at the Zeitung, however, praised the 1928 Festival, as did reviewers in Göttingen's other newspapers.3 National reviews also extolled the Festival's successful staging of Hagen's version of Julius Caesar, dramatic scenes from Händel and Bach cantatas (which were broadcast on the radio), and a concert of instrumental Händel music.4 Reviewers' ambivalence about the Händel Festival's direction reflected both a growing conflict about “historical accuracy” and general concern about the economic distresses that weakened the Festival's place in local and national culture. The Festival in Göttingen did not stage another Händel opera between 1928 and 1934. In the meantime a Lay Festival of mostly non-musical theater in 1930 and individual concerts made clear that amateurism, local support, and the love of established Masters were becoming more important defining features of the Festival than modernist aesthetics. Artistic leaders did continue to use Expressionist staging and dramatic movement into the 1930s, though. Niedecken-Gebhard's eventual merger of modernism and “historically accurate” performance pushed the Händel Opera Festival toward a more conservative, Page 101 → monumentalist aesthetic that fit better with Nazi ideas about “German music,” emphasizing Händel's “German” significance rather than his universality. During this transitional period between 1928 and 1934, the Händel Festival echoed National Socialist ideas, which grew from aspirations to policy. In 1934 Festival leaders employed Third Reich support to return the Händel Festival to the stage. The year 1928 thus marked an important turning point in the history of the Händel Festival. Aesthetic conflicts over staging Händel that had begun in the 1920s culminated that year in a perceived crisis. Financial difficulties plagued the Festival in 1927 and 1928, weakening its ability to continue into the subsequent world depression. As political support for National Socialism grew in Göttingen after 1928 and the economy worsened, changes in the Händel Festival illustrated the appeal Nazi ideas held for many Germans who supported opera and classical music across Germany. And more generally, the Händel Festival gave voice to Nazi ideas about “German culture,” thus rooting those notions in the everyday cultural lives of Göttingers. This shift helped make Göttingen into a Nazi town. Eventually in the mid-1930s the Third Reich began to influence the Händel Festival and similar events in Germany. But that authority in turn came partly from the fact that officials needed events like the Händel Festival to define “German music.” Scholars have stressed this complex, often contradictory constitutive characteristic of music in the Third Reich.5 Certainly officials reshaped musical activities after 1933 and used them to strengthen the Nazi regime. Yet Pamela Potter has recently argued that we may better understand the broad ways in which Nazism became a part of Germany's rich musical history by jettisoning the simplistic image of Third Reich musical life as totalitarian dystopia.6 As this chapter and book illustrate, this process of building support for the Third Reich was complicated and halting. Still, the Händel Festival helped make Göttingen into an important city of the Third Reich. Like sharpshooting, the Festival's history reveals the process by which Göttingen citizens crafted activities that paralleled Nazi ideas. Yet the Festival's international reputation also allows us to see the role that local cultural purveyors played in developing “German” music for Third Reich policymakers to promote to the world. This chapter traces the history of the Händel Festival in Göttingen from its low point in 1928 to its national success in the 1930s as a celebrated venue of “German music.” Despite aesthetic and ideological shifts during this

time that supported conservative ideas, the Festival continued to draw upon Expressionism. Rather than an aesthetic break, supporters drew an unbroken line of greatness from Hagen's novel work in the 1920s to national acclaim of the 1930s, Page 102 → emphasizing Händel's value as a German Master, Göttingen's setting, and amateurism. Festival leaders and supporters wove the experimental nature of early 1920s Festivals into a larger narrative about the Festival's meaning for the city and nation. Conservative thinkers and politicians drew fruitfully from the importance of classical music in Germany before and after the Nazis assumed power in 1933. By focusing on the decade from 1928 to 1938, this chapter reveals that process. The “dead point” that Max Maaß noted in 1930 turned out to be an opportunity to remake the Händel Festival, building upon political transitions in Göttingen that would ultimately give the Nazi Party enormous influence on cultural life.

Continuities Despite “the Big Break,” 1928–33 The writings of musicologist Rudolf Steglich on Händel performance trace the development of scholarly interest in performing complete, “historically accurate” Händel. A leading expert on Baroque music, especially Bach and Händel, Steglich held positions with various journals and universities before assuming direction of the University of Erlangen's Musicology Seminar in 1930, a position he held until he retired in 1956. Over the course of the 1920s, Steglich gradually came to support fewer and fewer cuts in Händel's original texts. In 1921 he praised Hagen's “great contribution” to the performance of Händel music and acknowledged that the Expressionism in Göttingen accentuated the Baroque Master. But he worried that Hagen's cuts tampered with the operas' essential structures and the “spirit” of Baroque drama.7 In 1924 Steglich went further and faulted Hagen's work on Xerxes for deviating from the opera's basic principles. Those altering Händel's texts he called “plot fanatics who prioritize naturalist psychology” rather than musicological integrity.8 Steglich celebrated Händel's growing presence in the 1920s on opera stages across Europe.9 In 1928, though, he blamed Hagen's changes to Händel operas in part for the “current crisis” in the field of Händel research and performance. In a substantial piece in the inaugural edition of the Händel Yearbook that year, Steglich noted that Niedecken-Gebhard's performance of Ezio had flopped in Berlin and that Alcina had even been parodied in Leipzig. He also found the 1928 Göttingen and Kiel Händel Festivals to be disappointing. Finally and fully breaking with Hagen's principles, Steglich argued in 1928 that it was fundamentally impossible to reconcile contemporary tastes with musicological work on a text. He admitted that the Göttingen Händel opera began “on a solid music-philological base.” But Hagen: Page 103 → sought to work on each Händel opera from the perspective of the present day, that is, considering the feeling of the contemporary listener. Ultimately, though, it is impossible to unite contemporary and philological-historical perspectives. The result is almost always a compromise by which the present honors the past merely through the power of habit.10 Steglich's textual conservatism helps explain why musicologists in interwar Germany often lent support to political ideas that drew inspiration from the celebration of “German music” by established Masters rather than innovative aesthetics. Although conservative critics such as Heinz Koch had supported Hagen's Expressionism in the 1920s, the “historically accurate” performances Steglich favored raised fewer potential concerns for those who believed avant-garde aesthetics to be too international or degenerate. In 1927 Koch had, for instance, contrasted sharply the Händel Festival's tasteful use of modernism with the jazzy modernism of Ernst Krenek's Johnny Strikes Up the Band (Jonny spielt auf), which he dismissed as “nigger music.”11 Indeed, like Steglich, Koch had raised some doubts earlier about Hagen's aesthetics, disparaging some scenes in 1921 as “over-Expressionistic.”12 In 1922 right-leaning musicologist Joachim Moser, whose research pioneered the search for “German music” in the 1920s,13 began a rival Händel Festival in Halle that embodied the belief in “historically accurate” performance. The aesthetic and intellectual “crisis” that Steglich depicted in 1928 also stemmed from financial problems. These financial concerns, too, had political implications. For a few years in the mid-1920s, the Göttingen Händel Festival had benefited from an improved financial and relatively stable atmosphere in Weimar Germany. The renown of Händel performances in Göttingen attracted financial support at the expense of the fiscally unstable

City Theater.14 The 1927 creation of the Händel Festival Association had even expanded economic support beyond the traditional base of professors, students, bureaucrats, other professionals, and pensioners. However, as Steglich pointed out, the Festival overextended itself in 1928: events that year cost more and earned less than previously.15 The resulting debt, which coincided with economic downturn in Göttingen, precluded a 1929 festival and would demand significant government support in the 1930s.16 From the start in 1920, organizers had wed financial necessity with their aesthetic vision. Simple sets cost less and projected “psychological” Expressionism. In 1928 Festival organizers allowed artistic innovation to outstrip resources. Steglich's critique of the Göttingen Festival's interpretation of Händel thus acquired economic potency too. We have already seen that right-wing forces in Göttingen used economic troubles to garner Page 104 → greater electoral support in Göttingen at this time. Like the Händel Festival, Göttingen's government racked up debt in the late 1920s—in part because it built public facilities for sharpshooting and swimming—and was therefore less able to respond to the deepening economic crisis that began in 1929. The DNVP and NSDAP had grown in the mid-1920s into important political forces in Göttingen by drawing strength from doubts about the efficacy of democracy. Local and national elections in 1929 and 1930 then illustrated that many Göttingers looked to the right, especially the Nazis, for solutions to economic dislocation. In this context the Händel Festival's fiscal challenges and growing ambivalence about edited Expressionist performances pushed leaders to rely more on their tradition of amateur performance of established pieces than on innovative adaptation. Hagen was gone, and Paul Thiersch died in November 1928. Niedecken-Gebhard had certainly developed the Festival's modernist aesthetic but became increasingly comfortable with “historical accuracy.” More “historically accurate” performances reinforced conservative interest in the Festival as a means to promote the city and “German music.” In this way, the Festival's synthesis of novelty and tradition, local and national interests gave conservatives and eventually Nazis a set of well-researched, institutionally established principles to aid in their cultural politics. Conservative cultural advocates had already organized in Göttingen the People's Stage League (Bühnenvolksbund) by 1928 to promote more “Christian-nationalist” theater as a bulwark against cultural decline that members blamed on permissive Weimar democracy.17 And in an era when the broad concept of “political music” inspired critics of all political stripes, public music events became potential vehicles for promoting political ideology.18 Hagen had, after all, conceived of the Händel Festival in the first place as a means for “healing” Germany, thereby placing his otherwise universalist notions about Händel at the disposal of nationalists. Festival leaders chose not to hold a festival in 1929 but later that year sought the support of Händel Society members for a modified festival in 1930.19 Despite a baleful economic outlook in 1930, Niedecken-Gebhard and others on the Festival Steering Committee decided to mount a very different, chiefly theatrical Lay Festival as a less expensive and easier alternative to previous opera festivals. They sought to capitalize on the Festival's amateur traditions and roots in homemade music (Hausmusik). By 1930 upward of two million Germans sang with amateur choral groups, and over a dozen national publications alone promoted music at home.20 Göttingers performed music in at least eighteen clubs, and those numbers only grew as the economy worsened.21 Page 105 → And as its genesis story proclaimed, Hagen and his wife began the festival with performances in their home. Festival leaders in 1930 stressed that the Lay Festival cultivated the “cultural possessions of our Volk” and would help ameliorate the “current crisis in theater.”22 Amateur performers (mostly university students) staged fairly traditional versions of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Goethe's Urfaust, and a concert featuring instrumental and vocal works by Händel, Vivaldi, J. S. Bach, and C. P. E. Bach. Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard and modernist choreographer Jens Keith continued the “Göttingen Style” of movement, but these events clearly signaled a departure from previous Festivals. Niedecken-Gebhard maintained that the 1930 “Göttingen Festival” continued the idealism of the Händel Renaissance that began with Hagen's work. He reminded visitors in the program that the very concept of a “dilettante” meant for music lovers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “a lover of the fine arts” generally. And while “the dire financial straits of our Volk forced us to abandon” the idea of a Händel Opera Festival, the Festival leaders sought to stage performances “that were ‘Göttingish’ in the best sense.”23 By calling amateur performances of classical texts the defining quality of the Händel Festival's work, Niedecken-Gebhard helped

validate the conservative political implications of “historical accuracy.” For some participants and supporters, in fact, amateur performance of “classical” theater represented an “expression of a conservative-völkisch cultural ideal.”24 Certainly the public presentation of the domestic, “feminized” world of Hausmusik reinforced male control of public musical practice.25 Niedecken-Gebhard himself came to equate amateur performance and nationalism. In March 1933, he would in fact break a five-year contract with the New York Metropolitan Opera as stage director to return to Berlin in order to continue his work with the “holy task” of lay performance.26 Interestingly, national and international critics responded positively for the most part to this “creative pause,” while disappointed local writers emphasized the limits of the Lay Festival.27 One reviewer from Magdeburg, for instance, called the Lay Festival performances “a new way for German theater,” while another from Berlin pronounced them “the work of the future.”28 Göttingen reviewers in 1930 viewed the Lay Festival as an embodiment of a noble amateur spirit but did not praise events with the same enthusiasm and detail they had lavished on previous opera festivals. Still, longtime Göttinger Zeitung critic Max Maaß reminded readers that “the lay player is no artist but rather just laity. He gives himself and can only play roles in which he finds perhaps a hidden side of himself.”29 Heinz Koch linked the performances with previous ideals and traditions but recognized the difficulty amateurs had with, say, Page 106 → Goethe.30 Local writers reviewed the Festival concert more positively.31 The Göttingen University League, the Festival's greatest financial backer since 1920, though, distanced itself from the 1930 Festival's lay approach.32 In the Festival program Karl Brandi, well-known historian and head of the University League nevertheless reflected on the Festival's decade of success and hoped for better days. More prophetic than he would have liked, his piece was aptly entitled “The Big Break.”33 Events of 1930 did represent a significant shift in the Festival's trajectory, perhaps even the “crisis” or “dead point” that observers had identified. Certainly it worsened the financial situation. The estimated Festival budget of April 1930 expected to pay out 13,900 RM and bring in “conservatively” 15,000. Instead, costs totaled 16,050 RM, while income only amounted to 8,659.34 The Lay Festival addressed concerns about the efficacy of the “Göttingen style,” modifying and focusing the aesthetics of the 1920s. Events of 1930 continued the Festival's tradition of experiment through the safe content of venerated Masters. These performances of popular, respected playwrights and composers lent even greater authority to cultural historians and musicologists who promoted conservative cultural politics between the world wars. The 1930 Festival made clear, moreover, that aesthetic experiments like Expressionist staging or movement could in fact support nationalist visions of culture's role in society. This synthesis “solved” the debate about historical accuracy versus edited Expressionism in Göttingen by making the latter a tool for promoting the former. That connection became the crux of narratives, starting in 1930, to describe the Festival's evolution. In February 1931, some members of the custodial Festival Association established the Göttingen Händel Society to take over the cost and planning of Festival and related concerts. This move aimed to expand the economic base of the Händel Festival by adding members and even offering them discounted tickets to future events, if they loaned the Society money at favorable rates.35 The impressive list of 366 members included many important local and regional elites but still relied most heavily on university professors. This group's relative wealth and influence boded well for the new Händel Society.36 Organizers began 1931 expecting to stage a full Festival, complete with three performances of Xerxes, a concert, and two dance productions. They hoped the opera would be broadcast on the radio.37 Eventually, however, the new Society managed only three vocal and instrumental concerts that year, one in May and two in July, none of which even used the name “Festival.” They reprised some of the old symbols and even played Rodelinde's overture, which had become Page 107 → an ode to the events of the 1920s.38 In 1932 as well the Society staged a couple of “Summerfest” concerts and one dance evening. They held no performances in 1933. Festival leaders did, however, quickly and effectively respond to the dramatic political events of 1933, demonstrating that they understood very well how to ingratiate themselves with the new Nazi regime. In the months that followed Hitler's January 1933 appointment as Chancellor, gradually turning the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, Walter Meyerhoff made several important alterations that helped the Festival garner the new regime's support. Meyerhoff was the head of the Regional Court (Landgericht) and directed the Göttingen Händel Society from 1931 to 1971; he used his many connections to promote the Händel Festival.39 He quickly purged

the Society's leadership, invited influential Party and government representatives to join, established relationships with Nazi organizations (especially the leisure group Strength through Joy), and extolled the “German” qualities characteristic of Festival activities and Händel's music generally.40 In May 1933, he asked (Hildesheim) Regional President and Nazi “old fighter” from Göttingen Hermann Muhs to become the Honorary Head of the Society, and Muhs accepted. Meyerhoff told officials that Jews such as Walter Stechow (Director of the University Orchestra) and a prominent math professor's wife who had been on the Society's Board of Directors had been replaced with, among others, a professor active with the Nazi Party's Combat League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur) and a student Party leader. Meyerhoff's overtures that summer wove together well-worn ideas about Göttingen's “reputation as a festival city” and the new vocabulary of the Third Reich. He wrote to Nazi officials: Particularly the events of recent months, which have begun to eliminate music alien to Germans [volksfremder Musik] and to reflect Germany's valuable genetic heredity [Erbgut] in art, make clear the necessity and relevance of the Göttingen Händel Society's goals…. The Society has always been fundamentally supported by the nationalist-oriented circles of the university and the citizenry of Göttingen.41 Meyerhoff's strategic promotion of the Festival's reputation eventually garnered the political and financial support necessary to revive the Festival. He drew from the trend since the mid-1920s to celebrate rather than experiment with venerated composers. This posturing provided a familiar vehicle for making National Socialism a part of Göttingen's cultural life.42 Manfred Brauneck Page 108 → in fact argues that festivals generally served conservative ideology.43 Activities like the Göttingen Händel Festival helped exemplify “German” music, while pushing Jews out of musical life. That July Meyerhoff explained to Niedecken-Gebhard that Stechow had to go because of “political revolutions.”44 Meyerhoff's consoling note written to Stechow on the same day said that “it was just better that you didn't come” to the last Society Members meeting: “I suggested your reelection [as Director of the University Orchestra] but recognized, as you did, that it's safer just now to abandon your reelection…. We hope that in a few years that we won't have to take such things into consideration.”45 However, four months earlier Meyerhoff had already assured President Muhs and others that Stechow had stepped aside.46 As a war veteran and “half-Jew” by Third Reich standards, Stechow held on to his professorship in Göttingen until 1936, at which point he joined Oskar Hagen in the art department at the University of Wisconsin.47 Extant records do not detail the experiences of other Jews affiliated with the Festival, though some of the dozen other Jewish members listed in 1931 left at various points after 1933.48 Karin Busemann maintains that at least one Jew remained a Händel Society member throughout the duration of the Nazi regime.49 Changes in musical life across Germany likewise relied as much on personal relations as they did on Nazi ideology. Intense conflicts, for instance, between Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg and substantive policy differences between the Reich Music Chamber leadership of Richard Strauss and Peter Raabe shaped the extent of Nazi influence on German musical life after 1933.50 The sweeping 7 April 1933 Law for the Reconstruction of the Civil Service dismissed Jews from all public positions, including state-funded music ensembles and universities. Until the year 1935, though, when the Nuremberg Laws were passed and Peter Raabe replaced Richard Strauss as Head of the Reich Music Chamber, individuals could obtain exemptions with help from a well-placed friend or colleague. Membership in the Reich Music Chamber was necessary in order to play officially in musical ensembles performing in public. These rules provided the vehicles for excluding Jews from musical life. A November 1933 law defining the Chamber's parameters required all members to pass a “reliability and suitability” test and was often used against Jews but did not explicitly exclude them as a matter of course. And even once “Jewish” had been meticulously defined by the Nuremberg Laws, the actual implementation of Reich Music Chamber regulations continued to progress in fits and starts, and depended upon local conditions.51 Third Reich policymakers also presupposed a dichotomy between “Jewish” and “German” music, but the regime never fully delineated what either term meant, despite eager help by some musicologists.52 Page 109 → Only in November 1938, after the terrible Kristallnacht pogroms against Jews in Germany and Austria, could the Reich Music Chamber claim to be “Jew-free.”53

Meyerhoff, Niedecken-Gebhard, and others may not have explicitly forced members out, but they acknowledged that associating with Jews could present difficulties and thus did not make Jews feel welcome in the Society after 1933. Certainly Jews were unable to sing or play in the Festival, since they were denied membership in the Reich Music Chamber. And Meyerhoff knew well that amateur and professional performers in the Festival had to be members.54 Meyerhoff's tireless attempts to solicit private funding in the early 1930s did not resuscitate the Festival during the Weimar era. But his experiences in a conservative city as an important judge and head of the Händel Society prepared him well to solicit public funding in the Third Reich.55 In a lengthy July 1933 letter to NiedeckenGebhard about the Festival's future, he discussed ways to make use of the current situation, in which “political revolutions make uncertain the fate of musical theater.” He wrote obliquely that “it seems risky in this unsettled time, when everything is over-determined by politics, to put on bigger things, whose attachment to the current times might be doubted or falsely understood.” He said, moreover, that they should work toward performing a Händel opera “in its most unchanged form.” In other words, performing an unedited, “historically accurate” Händel opera was less likely to be “falsely understood” in the Third Reich than Hagen's Expressionist staging.56 Meyerhoff thus used Nazi ideology to push further developments of the 1920s. Niedecken-Gebhard's monumentalist tendencies helped bridge the aesthetic gap between modernism and “historical accuracy.” Authentic and accurate production of older music was in fact by the 1920s a more “progressive” aesthetic and musicological principle than Expressionism. The Händel Festival had always exhibited some monumentalist qualities.57 Beginning in 1920 performances had tried to re-imagine the past and continued doing so, even as leaders sought to be more “historically accurate.” The larger-than-life Jungian archetypes that Hagen drew from Händel's characters turned individuals into monuments to certain qualities, especially on a smaller stage. Already in the early 1920s some reviewers recognized this tendency.58 On a much broader scale, the Thingspiele and mass productions Niedecken-Gebhard directed in the Third Reich employed monumental aesthetics to exemplify the regime's new mass politics. The Händel Festival gradually moved in this direction beginning in 1927 and especially in 1930, using “modern” theories and practices to monumentalize “German” culture. This synthesis animated many Third Page 110 → Reich projects.59 The ideological and financial support that Meyerhoff, Niedecken-Gebhard, and others secured reinforced this aesthetic development, helping to stage both Händel and Nazism in Göttingen. Between 1928 and 1933 leaders, in sum, redirected the Göttingen Händel Festival in three important ways that lent support to Nazism's contemporaneous growth. First, they limited the impact of edited Expressionism and began embracing “historical accuracy” as a potentially safer aesthetic in a charged, changing political climate. Second and subsequently, leaders and supporters in the media emphasized the Festival's celebration of rather than experimentation with “German music.” And finally, financial difficulties made organizers more desperate to secure public funding and support. Together these conditions, starting in 1928, made the Händel Festival a vehicle for promoting more conservative ideas about musical life in Germany, thereby helping to make Göttingen into a Nazi town.

Enter Händel on the National Socialist Stage, 1934–35 “Once Again Händel's Music Rings Out!” proclaimed a page-and-a-half feature on the 1934 Festival in the Göttinger Tageblatt that summer. This collection of articles and pictures linked the “brilliant days” of 1920s Festivals with the upcoming events, expanding the familiar genesis story to include the 1930 Lay Festival and musical life in the Third Reich generally. The author bemoaned the difficult years of the late 1920s and early 1930s but explained that “in the mean time, the German soul has been freed from the shackles that hindered all plans and hopes.”60 For the Händel Festival these “shackles” might have been any number of things—debt, absence of leadership, aesthetic uncertainty, or lack of financial support. But subsequent articles in Göttingen's newspapers stated or implied that the political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic was chiefly to blame, while new Third Reich cultural policies had “freed” the Festival. The Nazi regime's desire to promote “German” culture and its willingness to spend money to do so offered cultural purveyors like those in Göttingen new opportunities to improve their activities. Organizers in 1934

emphasized Händel's music more generally by dropping the word opera from the Festival's title and calling it “The Göttingen Händel Festival” (as they had from 1921 to 1923). Nazi ideologues and sympathetic musicologists found more to commend in Händel's oratorios, which remained better-known than his operas.61 As a result, Third Reich Festivals in Göttingen featured operas and oratorios, Page 111 → as well as other smaller concerts, offering supporters a familiar, expanded ritual that expressed local and national progress. And while the Expressionism of the 1920s gradually gave way to more staid “historically accurate” aesthetics in 1935 and after, the Nazi-era Festival continued to feature the “modernist” staging and especially dance associated with the “Göttingen style.” Organizers and cultural critics together employed Nazi ideas about “German culture”—not novel themselves, but newly empowered—to re-establish the Festival.62 Meyerhoff and Niedecken-Gebhard had learned in the late 1920s to draw from those trends for financial and promotional support. By 1934 Meyerhoff's persistence and ideological accommodation had elicited political support from the new regime but not financial assistance.63 For its first festival in six years, the Händel Society staged a relatively inexpensive affair, spending nearly 20,000 RM less than for the big festivals of the late 1920s and at least 10,000 less than in the years that followed. As before, the Händel Society's 485 RM contribution and 500 from the University League represented the largest donations.64 During preparations for the events that summer, Meyerhoff continued to smooth over important relationships with Nazi organizations and individuals. He personally petitioned Mayor Albert Gnade, who was head of the local SS group, to allow his men in the productions to attend additional rehearsals.65 He also defused a small yet potentially explosive turf war threatening to prevent Fritz Lehmann, the Musical Director, from leading the Festival.66 Meyerhoff thus used the Festival's reputation, the new regime's support for established “German” musical activities, and his own considerable connections and acumen to revive the Festival in 1934. Newspapers reported that “enthusiastic” audiences welcomed the “resurrection of the Göttingen Handel Festival” and its “expression of the most profound, painfully beautiful depth of the German soul.”67 Explicitly linking 1920s and 1930s festivals, the esteemed historian and Chair of the University League, Karl Brandi, included 1934 events as part of Hagen's pioneering work, which he called a “boundlessly delightful storm of countless melodies that poured down upon our city.”68 The familiar Göttinger Zeitung cultural critic Max Maaß stressed the 1934 Festival's synthesis of professional and amateur, praising the cast as “a community [Gemeinschaft] of laymen and artists.”69 This use of National Socialist rhetoric helped place the Festival into the new political atmosphere and make Nazi ideology a part of discussions about its work. This public discourse reiterated the personal influence exercised by Nazi leaders such as Regional President Muhs and Party District Leader (Gauleiter) Thomas Gengler on the Händel Society's steering committee. In addition to an instrumental and vocal concert in 1934, Niedecken-Gebhard Page 112 → and the Festival leadership chose for the first time to stage an entire Händel piece, the pastoral opera based on stories from Ovid, Acis and Galatea.70 This decision represented a compromise between Hagen's edited Expressionist operas and the growing trend to stage Händel unabridged and in authentic Baroque style. Staging this unique work that was neither opera nor oratorio pointed to interest in less cosmopolitan or “decadent” vocal pieces such as Händel's oratorios.71 Although the performance featured less dramatic action than past operas, Festival leaders nevertheless staged scenes with props, lighting, and at least symbolic action. Organizers stressed that “our performances hold true to the original and change nothing to the form [Gestalt] left to us,” while they retained qualities characteristic of the 1920s Festivals. In particular, Niedecken-Gebhard continued to use the “Göttingen Style” that emphasized movement.72 He drew upon a mixture of Greek drama, Baroque monumentalism, and Expressionist dance in his “movement choir,” using motion to accentuate the music and underscore Händel's significance.73 How listeners reconciled hearing about “the pleasures of the plains! / Happy nymphs and happy swains / Harmless, merry, free, and gay / Dance and sport the hours away” only a week after the murderous purge of the SA known as the “night of the long knives” must unfortunately remain a matter of speculation. By 1934 the Expressionism that had inspired Hagen was no longer the avant-garde aesthetic that it had been in 1920, yet it still smacked of a dangerous, degenerate modernism for some Nazis. Alone, the charge of “modernism” in music and theater did not usually bring disfavor in the Third Reich.74 In most cases, reasons other than their aesthetics landed artists or composers on blacklists or in jail, usually their Jewishness or politics.75 The

“Degenerate Music” exhibit the Reich Music Chamber mounted in 1937 and 1938 in particular demonstrated the regime's greater commitment to attacking racial or political enemies than to defining clearly aesthetics it considered problematic.76 Modernist dance in particular found a comfortable place in Third Reich cultural politics, because its abstract qualities could promote the regime's support for eugenic-oriented physical activity.77 Niedecken-Gebhard, who directed as much dance in the Third Reich as music, worked closely with National Socialist officials, including Goebbels, to stage a variety of regular and festival productions. He was particularly well-known for his “mass productions” at major national events in the later 1930s such as the opening festivities of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.78 He collaborated with other Third Reich–approved modern dancers, especially Mary Wigman.79 In 1940 Goebbels appointed him director of German Dance Stage in Berlin, and he was Special Representative for Dance and Opera Artistic Affairs in Leipzig from 1941 until 1945. Page 113 → Although the performance of Acis and Galatea in 1934 may have reversed Hagen's belief in the necessity of trimming Händel for maximum psychological impact, the Festival's continued use of modernist dance in the Third Reich points to a synthesis of aesthetics from the 1920s. Indeed, the gradual shift in Händel Festival performances starting in 1934 toward “historical accuracy” grew out of existing trends in musical theater and musicology that were already evident in Göttingen as early as 1926. Niedecken-Gebhard and Meyerhoff's concern not to appear too “contemporary” in 1933 was essentially playing similar cultural politics “in a sharper key,” to borrow a phrase from another era.80 Heinz Koch, who continued to review Festivals for the Tageblatt, explained the Festival's evolution from Hagen's dramatic alterations to “historical accuracy” in the Third Reich. Already in the 1920s productions elsewhere had come closer to Händel's own text and staging, such as Hermann Roth's 1925 performance of a Händel “original” in Leipzig. The lengthy pause between the 1928 and 1934 Festivals, Koch assured readers, had given time for the germination of Acis and Galatea. And at last the Festival and the public were ready for a full Händel piece. Indeed, to shorten Händel's repeated da capo form (in which each aria is essentially sung twice), Koch argued, would be like reading just one-third of a Goethe poem.81 Like many critics, Koch had lionized Hagen in the early 1920s for forging a “new way” in German music with dramatic alterations and modernist staging.82 Toward the end of the decade he too began to question the value of modernist aesthetics at the Festival.83 By the mid-1930s Koch had come around to the widespread belief that Händel should be performed completely and with limited aesthetic interpretation. In 1934 Koch wrote that Hagen had brought “Händel to our time with very strong changes” to the text and production to appeal to the “modern sensibility…. The text, however, we may not consider from modern, dramatic perspectives.”84 Like many reviewers in 1934, Koch's nationalist cultural tendencies and his boosterism helped him link the Festival's pathbreaking work of the 1920s and its new direction in the Third Reich.85 The 1934 Festival's success reinforced supporters' assumptions that cautious experimentation at the service of established German composers made the Festival welcome in the Third Reich.86 In 1935 organizers used this validation to return the Festival to national and international prominence. The Festival that year was part of the Reich-wide Bach-Händel-Schütz Celebration, commemorating the composers' 250th—or for Schütz, 350th—birthdays. Amid twenty-one cities putting on concerts and Festivals in honor of these Baroque Masters, commentators all over Germany paid special attention to Göttingen as the home of the Händel Page 114 → Renaissance.87 Such acclaim, facilitated and promoted by Third Reich leaders, helped anchor National Socialist ideas in the musical life of Göttingen and Germany writ large. The 1935 Göttingen Händel Festival at last presented “Händel without compromise” in two concerts, an oratorio, and the premiere of one of Händel's operas, all “in the style of his time.”88 The 23 June 1935 performance of the comic opera Partenope marked another premiere of an opera not seen in 200 years, the first one in Göttingen since the 1927 revival of Radamisto. But in marked contrast to that earlier premiere, the 1935 Festival staged Partenope in its complete form (though still translated from Italian into German) and in a manner that would have resembled productions in the 1730s, when Händel wrote the opera. Figure 6 illustrates this shift plainly, especially when

compared to the images from the previous chapter. Critics from all over Germany celebrated this “authentic” production. In the Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten one writer emphasized that in a production that was “fully historically accurate and without a single deletion,” in fact, “Niedecken-Gebhard crafted a production style in which the static character of the aria blurred the cultural will of various epochs through the static aria.”89 In other words, historical accuracy—not edited Expressionism—made Händel's characters come alive. A review in the Hessischer Kurier from nearby Kassel marveled at Music Director Fritz Lehmann's “ability to achieve such a deep and lasting success with a magnificent four and a half-hour opera filled with seven- to eight-minute da-capo arias.”90 Göttingen's 1935 Händel Festival aided the Third Reich's attempt to define “German music” positively in two ways. First, grouping Händel, who had lived most of his adult life in England, with two other respected “German” Baroque composers made Händel's fame a vehicle for defining the appeal and superiority of “German” music.91 Such a genealogical trick connected subsequent composers—Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and even the contemporary Richard Strauss—with their “German” roots in Baroque music. Third Reich officials had to overcome years of conflict about the meaning of some composers, such as Beethoven, whom every political group in Germany had claimed as their own.92 Wagner, on the other hand, came ready-made to support Nazi cultural policies, given his rabid nationalism and violent antisemitism. Hitler in fact never missed a pre–World War II Bayreuth Festival, and it became a defining event for National Socialist cultural life.93 And even more than the Händel Festival, right-wing support for this unambiguously German composer opened some creative space for modernist interpretations of Wagner, something producers had been doing since the start of the twentieth century.94 Third Reich policymakers found it much easier to point to successful musical activities as “German” than to define “German music,” especially when those activities connected the regime's ideology to popular classical music.95 Plus, the assumption that Händel's German origins meant more than his English career echoed Third Reich racial policies. Page 115 → Second, the Göttingen Händel Festival helped Hitler's regime define “German music” by reviving more of Händel's forgotten operas, a service heralded by scholars, commentators, and cultural policymakers across Germany. Rather than emphasize Hagen's use of modernism to highlight Händel's universality, promoters and reviewers in the Third Reich stressed the continuity of accomplishment in Göttingen and Händel's appeal to Germans. Musicologists such as Rudolf Steglich, who had disavowed Hagen's modernism in the 1920s, supported the Festival unequivocally in 1935.96 More than just praising the Händel Festival, though, Third Reich officials actively encouraged more conservative interpretations of Händel's work. The Reich Culture Chamber, for instance, that year sent participants twelve pages of detailed directions on how to promote all aspects of the Reich Bach-Händel-Schütz Celebration to organizers in charge of the individual festivals.97 The Regional President and Party District Leader remained Page 116 → on the Händel Festival Board, and, in 1935 they made the powerful Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust honorary head of the Festival. More significant, that year government officials at all levels also offered substantial financial support for the Händel Festival. The city government, the Reich Music Chamber, and offices of Muhs and Rust together gave 5,000 RM for events in 1935. This public funding covered over a third of the total expenses and represented considerably more than the University League had ever given.98 While Germany continued to suffer economically, like the rest of the West, in the mid-1930s, some Third Reich economic measures had marginally improved the government's financial ability to aid cultural programming. In a broad appeal for new members sent out earlier that year, the Händel Society had highlighted the significance of this economic and political assistance as a way to demonstrate the value the Third Reich placed on music and the Festival's important place in promoting German art: “This call goes out to everyone who embraces the Third Reich's will to promote German art and who can preserve and strengthen Göttingen's name as a place for cultivating Händel: ‘become a member of the Göttingen Händel Society.’”99 Members of Nazi organizations such as the SA, German Labor Front, and Strength through Joy received discounted tickets to 1935 concerts, as did the military, veterans’ organizations, and other groups favored by the regime.100 Reviews noted their presence.101 Such discounts represented very real attempts to draw larger and more diverse audiences, and to ensure that Third Reich policies helped shape this expansion.

Although Festival leaders did not aim to expand their activity as widely as sharpshooting leaders did, the urge to wed Nazi cultural aims with enlarged audiences was similar. Reviews for the 1935 Festival illustrated the ways in which organizers and commentators sought to draw a line between performances of the 1920s and the 1930s. Such connections minimized aesthetic change and emphasized “tradition”—that of Händel and of the Festival—as integral to the broader aims of the Bach-Händel-Schütz Celebration. One report stressed that Göttingen, “the city from which the Händel Renaissance came,” held a “special position” in the Reich-wide program because it “represents a new musical idea.” Fifteen years earlier Oskar Hagen had “surprised” and changed the music world. And in 1935, the article from Hanover intoned, Göttingen was “for the second time the vanguard of our musical future,” thanks to the Festival's current leadership.102 The differences in these two “vanguard” positions were clear: one used novel aesthetics to revive unfamiliar music and challenge assumptions about culture, while the other used retroactive productions to celebrate a venerated composer and the cultural policies of an expanding regime. Yet like so many Page 117 → commentators and the Festival organizers themselves, this writer underscored the continuity of the Händel Festival's progressive aims. One critic from Dresden emphasized that Niedecken-Gebhard's vaguely discernable “inclination toward the modern” served Händel's work well and challenged the “heavy Baroque” style with which such music was sometimes performed.103 Unlike “Hagen's idea” of “bringing the work closer to our contemporary feeling,” though, the 1935 Festival's performance of the complete opera Partenope demonstrated that Göttingen was “where love of Händel and pure service to his artwork come together.”104 Reviews like this one in the Hannoverscher Zeitung also celebrated the important role played by Nazi luminaries like Executive Director of the Reich Music Chamber Heinz Ihlert and Reich Minister Bernhard Rust in facilitating the Göttingen Festival's work. Despite everyone's claim to perform Händel in a way “completely true to the original and uncut,”105 the castrati parts remained in the bass, ensuring that at least gender roles still reflected modern sensibilities. The common refusal to consider different renderings of sexuality in Baroque opera did in fact unite the aesthetics of the 1920s and those of the 1930s.106 Indeed, reinforcing traditional gender roles in ways that shored up male control of the public sphere also bridged Festival events of the 1920s and 1930s. The Göttingen Händel Festival's premiere position in a Reich-wide celebration of Baroque music in 1935 illustrated the function of “progressive,” even modernist culture from the 1920s in the Third Reich. Success in the 1930s attested to Festival leaders' ability to contextualize this legacy in the Nazi regime. Under Meyerhoff's direction, Festival leaders removed Jews from the ranks of those involved. They worked closely with leaders of the Nazi Party, local and national governments, and the Reich Music Chamber, garnering their financial and political support. They promoted fairly conservative aesthetics, even if, as in the case of “historical accuracy,” those aesthetics reflected the most current state of international scholarship and performance style. Festival leaders and supporters thus built upon existing ideas, institutions, and personal connections to promote “German” music and the vague yet potentially violent cultural policies of the Third Reich.

The Händel Festival and Personal Politics in the Third Reich, 1936–38 In a 1976 interview, Walter Meyerhoff said of his work for the Festival in the Third Reich: Page 118 → Yes, I continued the Händel Festival unchanged. I also wasn't pestered about it. For me it was a realm into which I could retreat and where I was not monitored at all, and of course no one else had a grasp of the subject. I was therefore left in peace. When asked if the Festival was part of the Reich Music Chamber, he answered, Yes, we were members, but that was purely a formality. They didn't interfere with things that they didn't understand. They would have been happy to see us try a little harder, as we did previously, to make it [the Festival] a feather in their cap.107 In fact, his intimate involvement in the cultural politics of the Third Reich had helped ensure the Festival's success

in the 1930s. As head of the Regional Court, Meyerhoff likewise claimed to have felt no political pressure, nor did he ever feel compelled to join the Nazi Party.108 On the other hand, Willi Rehkopf, a senior teacher (Oberstudienrat) at Göttingen's academic high school (Gymnasium) and head of the University Orchestra Association from 1926 to 1947, insisted in a similar interview that he had to join the Nazi Party in 1933 to ensure the University Orchestra's very survival.109 Together, these two recollections of the Third Reich's cultural politics point to the various ways in which cultural purveyors used ideas and relationships to their advantage—both long-standing ones from the Weimar era and new ones in Hitler's regime.110 This history of the Göttingen Händel Festival makes clear the connection between established cultural activities and Third Reich cultural politics. Meyerhoff and Rehkopf exploited the Festival's fame and its effective promotion of “German music” to obtain financial support and publicity from the Third Reich.111 And while some Nazi officials tried to shape Festival activities, most Party and government leaders recognized the need to let Meyerhoff, Niedecken-Gebhard, and others run events themselves.112 Rehkopf cited his close relationship with Wolfgang Stechow, a Jew and Hagen's successor as University Orchestra Director until 1933, in this 1976 interview as a way to qualify his support for the regime's actions. Meyerhoff remained silent on the issue of Jews in his interview. Both men, in other words, claimed that their own efforts—not Third Reich politics—helped the Festival succeed in the 1930s. However, when trying to explain the removal of Jews from the Festival organization and personnel, Rehkopf explicitly blamed political pressure. In fact, the Händel Festival thrived and changed in the Third Reich in large part because these leaders used personal connections to work closely with Hitler's regime. They had learned those skills in the Weimar years. Their Page 119 → personal leadership revealed therefore important continuities between Weimar-and Nazi-era festivals. As artistic director, Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard guided the Festival from earliest Expressionist experiment beginning in 1922 to epitome of “German music” by 1935. He synthesized in the Third Reich potentially conflicting aesthetics: modernist dance characteristic of the 1920s “Göttingen Style,” “historical accuracy,” and the monumentality of his Thingspiele and other massive stadium Festivals. His work in Göttingen, Berlin, and with other Händel festivals promoted an image of the composer that Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg claimed exemplified “heroic,” “manly,” “moral” “German music”—concepts similar to those that commentators had used to describe the Händel on stage in Göttingen since 1920.113 These accolades perpetuated Hagen's emphasis on Händel's “deep psychology,” as seen through sharp gender differences, in order to excise ambiguity from “German music.” Subsequent Händel Festivals used the 1935 formula for success: presenting quality amateur-professional performances, working closely with government and Party officials, promoting Händel as “German music,” and combining various aesthetics into a distinctive but relatively conservative style. The 1936 Festival, by then a week long, featured the acclaimed large works of the previous two years, Acis and Galatea and Partenope, both staged in “Händel's style.” Also on the program in 1936 was a performance by Göttingen's military band, newly strengthened by rearmament begun in 1935, two other concerts, and a dance program sponsored by the Nazi Party leisure organization, Strength through Joy. The 1937 and 1938 Festivals premiered the operas Scipio and Ptolemy, respectively, bringing to nine the total number of Händel operas revived in Göttingen before World War II. Financial difficulties (a deficit from 1938 and running debt stretching back to 1928) and big plans for the twentieth-anniversary Festival in 1940 limited the 1939 Festival to only three concerts and no new works. Yet even this abbreviated Festival prompted over fifty reviews in newspapers from across Germany.114 After 1935, Händel Festivals continued to rely significantly on funding from local, regional, and national governments, as well as the Reich Music Chamber. Public funding paid at least one-third of the expenses for most Third Reich Festivals. Private money from the Händel Society, University League, or individual donations then made up for the few hundred Marks that these subventions and the income from ticket and program sales failed to cover.115 Such financial support underscored the degree to which the Händel Festival owed its revival and renewed success in the 1930s to the Third Reich.116 And in 1937 Meyerhoff also invited Mayor and Police Chief Albert Gnade, the important Nazi local official we have already seen shaping a variety of activities in town, to join the Page 120 → Händel Festival's Board. This cooperation brought the Nazi regime and the Festival even closer together. Meyerhoff's 1976 recollection that the Third Reich left him alone suggests, therefore, that the reality of

close cooperation simply seemed unobtrusive because he and the officials with whom he worked agreed on how to run the Festival. They probably knew each other anyway. Events of 1937 illustrated particularly well the Festival's integrative function in Göttingen's cultural life. That year marked the 200th anniversary of the George August University's founding, and planned events conjoined the university's rich history and accomplishments with National Socialist ideology.117 As the university's most prominent cultural activity and one of the Reich's better known musical events, the Händel Festival brought together town, gown, and state in a ritual that helped define Nazism's role in cultural life. The Board organizing the university's celebration made sure that it coincided with the 1937 Händel Festival that year and that the Festival premiered a new opera.118 At the height of his power and influence, Reich Music Chamber President Peter Raabe came to Göttingen to direct one of the concerts. He called the Festival a “national cultural work of supreme value.”119 Local and national reviews in 1937 used the simultaneous events to promote the intellectual and cultural traditions of Göttingen. For example, in the introductory paragraph to a full page of Festival coverage in the local Nazi Party newspaper, the Göttinger Nachrichten, cultural critic and veteran Festival supporter Gustav Adolf Trumpff wove together several important themes: Third Reich financial subvention, Hagen's “noble ideas and artistic enthusiasm” during “the time of basest German humiliation and psychological need,” the Festival's revival in 1934, and the University's celebration. Trumpff went on to say that, although previous Festivals had revealed Händel's more “playful” side, this year's “heroic music” carried a “special weight” appropriate for the University's anniversary.120 National critics such as Hanns Meseke, whose reviews appeared in newspapers across Germany, echoed these ideas. He claimed that “amidst the manifold suggestions for the practice of German musical and theatrical life, this year's Göttingen Händel Festival carries an especially honorable representative task.”121 He too stressed the connection with the University's celebration in almost all of his pieces, as did many other reviewers.122 The respected music journal Die Musikwoche claimed that Göttingen's scholarly and cultural atmosphere had shaped “the overall interpretation of Händel for our time.”123 By this point coverage of the Festival simply used Hagen and the “Händel Renaissance” that flowered in Göttingen during the 1920s as sources of inspiration rather than symbols of distinctive aesthetics. Even the few critics who contrasted Page 121 → Göttingen's “new direction” since 1935 with the edited versions of the 1920s only sought to highlight the gradual progression toward an “uncompromised” Händel.124 This Whiggish narrative strengthened the Festival's identity as manifestation of “German music” and contemporary musicological trends. The war that began just months after the truncated 1939 Händel Festival overshadowed many cultural events in Germany and prevented anything more than occasional Festival-related concerts until 1946, when Göttingen's City Theater once again staged Händel opera. Starting in 1946 Niedecken-Gebhard and Fritz Lehmann, who had been the Händel Festival's music director since 1934, oversaw five successful Festivals in Göttingen. NiedeckenGebhard died in 1954. Sporadic successes in the 1950s weakened the Festival once again. Oskar Hagen remained in Madison and built Wisconsin's art history program. Increasingly frustrated by the Festival's repudiation of his aesthetic ideals, he broke off all contact with those in Göttingen after World War II. He even sent back his honorary Göttingen citizenship. When he died in 1957, it was some months before anyone in Göttingen even knew. His family has maintained a strained relationship with the Festival ever since. Walter Meyerhoff continued to lead the Göttingen Händel Society until his death in 1976. In the 1960s, the Göttingen Festival staged a series of Händel oratorios and then returned to operas in the 1970s. Under John Elliot Gardiner's direction in the 1980s, the Festival again became one of the premiere Baroque opera festivals in the world and has strengthened that reputation since Nicholas McGeegan took over in 1991, followed by Laurence Cummings in 2011. The post–World War II history of the Festival thus reflects the continued ascendance of “historically accurate” performance, even as organizers distanced themselves from the Nazi past starting in the 1970s. As with sharpshooting we can see some longer continuities across the twentieth century. From that vantage it becomes even clearer, though, that the world wars demarcated an era of interwar development. It is worth noting, in closing, that Göttingers continued to perform music tenaciously, even during the nadir of World War II. Indeed,

one group staged Bach's St. Matthew's Passion while waiting for American troops to occupy the city in April 1945.125

Conclusion: The Göttingen Händel Festival in Weimar and Nazi Germany Already in 1923 one commentator in Göttingen argued that the Händel Festival had developed from a “historical experiment into a holy play (Weihspiel) to Page 122 → which is attached inestimable meaning for our cultural life and for the spiritual rebuilding of our Volk.”126 This estimation sounds like many of the narratives drawn during the Third Reich: the Festival's experimental beginnings gradually grew into more celebratory functions that helped define “German music.” The Händel Festival's history between the two world wars illustrates that both avantgarde and celebratory performance styles could promote conservative culture and political ideology. Commentators and festival leaders made modernism into a positivist, progressive, yet politically conservative aim. Rather than challenging the rightward movement of politics in Germany or bowing to pressure, the aesthetics at the Göttingen Händel Festival helped prefigure and reinforce those developments, ultimately lending important cultural support to Nazism. Performances gave conservative commentators and politicians a set of established ideas on which to base their promotion of “German culture.” At the same time, Festival leaders learned during the 1920s how to make use of various patronage sources, especially when resources became increasingly scarce after 1928. I have therefore pointed to 1928 as a turning point in the Festival's history and another important moment in Göttingen's development into a Nazi town. Even before the economy crumbled in the early 1930s, Festival leaders had to come to terms with limited resources and the fact that Oskar Hagen's original experimental ideas could not sustain the Festival. Their subsequent solution to the “dead point” starting in 1928 focused the organizational and aesthetic characteristics of the Händel Festival in ways that promoted more conservative culture. Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard and especially Walter Meyerhoff proved to be exceptionally sensitive to the changing cultural politics of the early 1930s. But their changes beginning in 1928 did not merely respond to political shifts in Göttingen. They helped demonstrate the value of commemorating (and trying to define) “German culture,” even before the Nazi regime made that a policy goal. Their work, as well as that of Oskar Hagen, also made clear ways in which individuals shaped larger cultural and political developments. Faculty and students at Göttingen's university played important parts in rooting National Socialism in Göttingen and across Germany.127 As a public extension of the high culture supported by this elite institution, the Händel Festival strengthened the conservative and eventually pro-Nazi function of the university in Göttingen. Likewise, the importance of the Händel Festival as a concept underscored the role of critics, scholars, and discourses in defining the meaning of cultural activities. The Festival's significance came from both participation and spectatorship, even more than was the case for sharpshooting or cinema, which were characterized more exclusively by participation and spectatorship, respectively. Händel Festival events around 1928 especially demonstrated that this dual nature could promote Nazi ideas and policies. Page 123 → Although some musicians and critics suffered from the Third Reich's attempts to change German music life, many musical activities continued in the Third Reich or, like the Göttingen Händel Festival, ultimately benefited from Nazi support.128 Michael Kater maintains that the process of “Nazifying” music in Germany synthesized aesthetic styles and enabled the opportunistic use of institutions by both musicians and Third Reich officials.129 The story of the Göttingen Händel Festival in the 1930s bears out this general analysis and testifies to the crucial ways in which existing ideas and individuals shaped this process. The Festival flourished in the Third Reich for three primary reasons. First and foremost, Festival leaders and organizers managed to secure essential political and financial support from local, regional, and national governments, as well as National Socialist organizations. Second, it drew upon the sustained interest in Germany for amateur music that the Nazi regime encouraged, using the 1930 Lay Festival to bridge the gap between activities of the 1920s and 1930s.130 Finally, the Festival's gradual implementation of “historically accurate” principles echoed the beliefs of many musicologists and advocates of early music and fit well with Nazi ideas about “German” music and culture generally.

The Göttingen Händel Festival changed significantly over the interwar era. The process of that change shows the ways in which continuity—in this case, personal and aesthetic—helped transform cultural activities as much as abrupt political shifts did. Throughout the interwar period the Händel Festival, like sharpshooting, created an ongoing liminal space in which participants and commentators could define local and national musical life. Rituals imbued individual events with greater significance. The Händel Festival enabled organizers and supporters to use their definition of musical life—part amateurism, part progressive aesthetics, part established Master—to shape attitudes about music and theater in Göttingen and Germany. This definition and influence helped integrate National Socialist ideals into cultural life in Göttingen and Germany, even before 1933. Apparently “external” factors in Festival activities—Expressionism, “historical accuracy,” amateurism, Nazi cultural politics—in fact grew from specific individuals, institutions, and needs in Göttingen. The history of the Festival thus reveals the complex and multivalent process by which cultural activities in interwar Germany integrated external ideas into their activities and helped shape German culture. Like this book's other case studies, this example illustrates the need to understand local conditions in order to grasp the meaning and experience of cultural practices. Finally, we turn now to cinema's history in Göttingen, which shows the way local purveyors made external cultural products in particular a part of local life. Page 124 →

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PART 3 Cinema Page 126 →

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CHAPTER 5 National Products That “Serve the Public Good,” 1920–29 Almost immediately after the November 1918 Revolution that created the first German republic, revolutionary leaders realized the unique problems that cinema posed for Germany and searched for ways to control it effectively. In January 1919, the Worker and Soldier Council of Dortmund asked the Prussian Ministry of Justice in Berlin “whether cinema owners couldn't be forced to keep children away from unsuitable movies through some existing or to-be-written regulations,” given that cinema owners “exercise a harmful influence on children's minds.”1 The August 1919 Constitution that created the Weimar Republic reiterated this concern by excepting cinema from the otherwise liberal right to free speech in Germany. Article 118 stated that “every German is entitled, within the bounds set by general law, to express his opinion freely in word, writing, print, image or otherwise…. There is no censorship, but in case of the cinema, other regulations may be established by law.”2 Three months later Germany's Minister of the Interior concluded that it fell to local police to enforce this constitutional mandate. He wrote, “local police are authorized without hesitation to shut down inappropriate films before they are screened” and indeed “it is the duty of local police directories to do so.”3 Finally, the May 1920 Motion Picture Law, which served as the basis for all cinematic regulation until 1945, enshrined this setup in Germany: national regulation through local policing.4 As the mass culture par excellence after World War I, cinema drew the attention of politicians from all parties. Its regulation in interwar Germany was more centralized than that of any other cultural activity. Still, the burden of enforcement fell to local police in both the Weimar and Nazi regimes. National offices might determine if a film could play in Germany, but police in Göttingen enforced the decision. And, equally important, local statutes shaped the price of tickets and the context in which a given movie played. Moreover, local Page 128 → newspapers introduced Göttingers to films, movie stars, and the film industry generally. Since Göttingers’ experiences with cinema involved much more than just going to movies, these cultural arbiters helped mold perceptions about cinema in Göttingen.5 This part uses the development of cinema between the world wars to illustrate the important role that local institutions, ideas, and individuals played in shaping mass cultural consumption. More than sharpshooting or opera production (or playing sports or any other cultural activity), moviegoing involved the local consumption of national (or international) products. Cinema made imagery that had been created elsewhere a part of Göttingers’ daily lives. At the same time, local conditions—regulation and media discourses—mediated Göttingers’ readings of mass culture. And cinema's ubiquity, popularity, and power to deliver ideas made it a political issue. Indeed, mass cultural consumption and mass political participation required large numbers of Germans to behave similarly: to watch the same films in dark movie theaters and to vote for the same list of political parties and candidates on election days. Yet in both cases, it was in their own towns, neighborhoods, and streets that Germans behaved thusly. Studying the function and reception of film in Göttingen highlights the impact of local experience on mass culture and politics. Ultimately the cultural space in Göttingen that developed over the course of the 1920s enabled more conservative voices in town to make cinema a popular tool for strengthening their ideas and politics. The year 1930 marked an important shift in the history of German cinema, something other scholars have noted at the national level.6 These two chapters will demonstrate that perceptions about cinema in Göttingen did in fact change in 1930 in ways that reinforced the growing popularity of Nazism. Specifically, cinema owners, government officials, and newspaper critics created an atmosphere in Göttingen favoring safer films that reinforced rather than challenged the status quo. Reactions to three movies that year—The Blue Angel, Westfront 1918, and All Quiet on the Western Front—especially illustrated how cinema helped bolster Nazi ideas about nation, society, and cultural life. Likewise, the ways in which cinema functioned in the Third Reich after 1933 drew from these developments that came together around 1930. This chapter therefore traces the development of cinema as the most important form of mass culture in Göttingen after World War I. Its regulation served to

animate and emulate mass political changes in the 1920s. The following chapter will then illustrate how cinema's shift around 1930 anchored the ideas of Nazism in Göttingen and enabled the Third Reich's expansion into daily cultural life. Most scholarship on German cinema has centered on national developments Page 129 → or cinema life in the big cities (often the same thing in most treatments), despite the fact that the majority of moviegoing took place in the provinces.7 Researchers tend to analyze either the institutions like studios, professional organizations, and governmental controls, or the films themselves. The separate treatment of these two sides of cinema has strengthened the strong scholarly divide between Weimar and Nazi cinema. Structural examinations usually contrast democratic Weimar institutions with the pervasive fascist power of the Nazi Reich Film Chamber and Goebbels's intense and direct involvement in movie policy.8 Analyses of film aesthetics, on the other hand, often lump together a handful of films by means of an external ahistorical aesthetic construction like Expressionism, Realism, kitsch, or racist propaganda.9 These chapters explore both the institutional and aesthetic reactions to cinema in one city in order to explain Germans’ experience of cinema during both regimes.10

Codifying Mass Culture, 1919–21 During the years immediately following the Great War, cinema became the most influential form of mass culture in Germany. Government officials at the national and local levels moved quickly to control its impact. Göttingen officials passed a series of laws in the 1920s that encouraged cinema owners to work closely with the city government. These regulations laid out the local application of the 1920 Motion Picture Law and were the basis for regulating and promoting cinema until 1945. They also codified civic leaders’ treatment of movies as entertainment and not “culture,” a perspective left over from the early days of cinema. In particular, tax policies promoted a reactionary perspective on cinema that placed the civic government squarely in the business of movie consumption. The tremendous expansion of cinema in the 1920s, in other words, occurred through regulations and relationships that originated in the Kaiserreich. Movies had played in Göttingen since November 1896, but only as visiting or temporary events (Kintopp) until the Eden and Central theaters opened in 1910. The two cinemas, with 285 and 350 seats respectively, were among the first 500 movie houses built in Germany.11 Across Germany cinema began chiefly as a working-class, urban form of entertainment that many elites mistrusted and tried to control.12 To regulate this growing national and international business Prussia in 1912 first enacted statewide regulations, which provided the precedent for the Motion Picture Law of 1920. Government and reformer attention may have begun in reaction to class fears, but middle-class Page 130 → reformers in the early twentieth century also began to see mass culture as an educational tool and economic opportunity. Feature-length films attracted more middle-class audiences and piqued the interest of cultural critics. By the time World War I broke out, cinema had begun to shed its lower-class image and was growing into a true mass culture that many people, regardless of social or geographic origin, experienced in their own localities.13 The pressures and possibilities during the Great War created the mold for what cinema would become in the decades that followed. Motion pictures benefited from the imposed austerity, as other forms of entertainment like dancing were forbidden on principle.14 More important, the army general staff began to control and then use cinema for propaganda. After prohibiting foreign movies in 1916, the Reich government in 1917 founded the large film company Universum-Film-Aktiensgesellschaft, or Ufa, which would become the most powerful film concern in Germany until 1945. Although Ufa was privately owned, the Reich government controlled one-third of its shares and influenced companies that held the rest. After the war a succession of leading corporations and banks controlled Ufa and maintained its dominant role in German cinema. The imperial government and general staff created Ufa to produce propaganda shorts and feature films but also intended the film company to win more of the international film market than the 15 percent share that Germany held before 1914. The War Ministry strictly regulated the entire German film industry. They banned films they deemed to be out of step with the war effort and encouraged ones that fostered social and political integration. Officials supported a “star system,” encouraging the growth of mass entertainment even beyond films themselves.

By the end of the fighting, the German government had developed a fairly sophisticated approach to film and its role in society that employed both restrictions and incentives. This combination would shape regulations after 1918.15 After the war, cinema's popularity exploded. In 1920 there were 3,731 movie theaters in Germany, and by 1929, over 5,000. In Göttingen, with a population just over 40,000, there were two cinemas at the start of the decade, and four new ones open before 1930. Around the middle of the 1920s, between one and two million Germans went to the movies every day; the average German adult visited a movie house 6.6 times per year; and the industry brought in 500 million Reichmarks per year.16 A number of factors helped contribute to this expansion in Germany: improved technology, initial isolation after the war, a flood of popular American films in the 1920s, more focused business practices, a quota system that supported the German film industry, the star system, new filming techniques, expanded newspaper coverage, better distribution Page 131 → and marketing, and the film industry's dual commitment to elite and popular films. In the challenging years after the Great War, movies also remained the most popular escape from daily difficulties. Initially, the post-revolution lack of censorship allowed German filmmakers to offer some titillating motion pictures. Some fly-by-night producers created a rash of “enlightenment films” that used sexual hygiene as a thin veil for what often amounted to pornography: Opium, The Girl and the Men, Lost Daughters, Hyenas of Lust, Wedding Night in the Woods, Love that Gives Itself for Free, and Vows of Chastity.17 Such films often screened in makeshift or established cinemas only as long as they could keep outraged reformers or police away. These movies revived reformers’ old fears and caused moral panic across the political spectrum, giving rise to the beginnings of a broad censorship code.18 By late 1919 the new Republican government had already begun to reestablish censorial control. Using language that could have come straight from a conservative 1910s middleclass reformer, the Social Democratic Minister of the Interior in 1919 promised to fight “against the further poisoning of the people's soul by trashy cinema.”19 The new Motion Picture Law of May 1920 that resulted from these concerns established clear nationwide regulations for the first time in Germany. Individual cities had begun censoring films and restricting access, especially for young people, in 1906, and by 1914 these controls had coalesced in some areas into statewide regulation or deference to Prussia's censorship board in Berlin.20 The War Ministry's control of cinema policy had demonstrated how centralized policy could combat perceived threats and bolster the film industry. Despite minor objections by some liberals (e.g., the German Democratic Party) and those on the far right and far left (who opposed its commercial implications), the majority of political parties (especially Social Democrats and the Center Party) agreed that censorship offered the easiest solution, an already familiar procedure that avoided the contentious issue of nationalizing the film industry.21 Although the new Motion Picture Law reacted against sexual and violent films, it ultimately aimed to preserve established moral values, the business status quo, and some middle-class control.22 The law set up Censorship Boards (Prüfstellen) in Berlin and Munich, one of which had to approve every domestic or foreign-made film shown in Germany. The Boards were to ban movies that “endanger public order or security, injure, abuse, or morally offend religious sensibilities, endanger German reputation or Germany's relationship with foreign states.” Within these confines, though, the Boards were to remain objective and could not prohibit a film “based on political, social, religious, Page 132 → ethical, or world-view [Weltanschauung] tendencies. Permission may not be denied because of reasons outside the content of the films themselves.” Filmmakers could remove objectionable scenes and resubmit the edited version to the Board.23 In the end, censorship was rare. The threat of punishment—a large fine or prison—hanging over filmmakers’ and cinema owners’ heads discouraged most unacceptable films. No more than 2 percent of the films made in the 1920s were banned each year, often less than I percent. Even politically charged movies, like those from the Soviet Union, fared better in Germany than they did, for instance, in France.24 The 1920 Motion Picture Law became the basis for all governmental control of cinema through World War II. Given the rarity of censorship, the law's greater impact came from its labeling films and giving local government the right to tax films based on those labels. Even when Third Reich leaders replaced it with a new law in 1934, the

criteria for control changed very little. The Nazis also built upon another important feature of the 1920 law: the definition of “valuable” movies and governmental incentives to encourage them.25 Cinema owners had always paid local taxes on either individual ticket prices or on their total intake for a given day. During World War I the national government had encouraged local authorities to offer theater owners tax discounts for playing favored films like patriotic newsreels or documentaries and nationalistic feature films. Tax policy remained in local hands before, during, and after the war. In 1916, though, the national government began to judge which films were considered “valuable” and thus potentially deserving of tax relief. Lowering taxes allowed cinema owners to attract more patrons to a less popular, “valuable” film or to keep ticket prices at the normal rates and earn greater profits on a popular, “valuable” movie. The 1920 law and subsequent regulations codified this policy of cooperation between local and national authorities in defining entertaining versus “valuable” movies. The Motion Picture Law also divided movies between those acceptable for all ages (above six years) and those for adults over eighteen only.26 As they had during the Kaiserreich, local police remained in charge of controlling cinema censorship, attendance, safety issues, and taxation violations. The Göttingen Magistracy's remarkable consistency in personnel from before World War I through World War II paralleled cinema regulations, which were rooted in laws and assumptions from the turn of the twentieth century. The new centralized authority of the 1920 Motion Picture Law thus reinforced older methods of defining and regulating mass culture in Göttingen. All forms of entertainment had paid some taxes in Göttingen since before the 1890s. But starting in the 1910s, the city government paid more and more Page 133 → attention to popular cultural activities like dancing, sports exhibitions, fairs, varieté theater, and especially cinema. By the turn of the century, Göttingen officials had carved out a small but steady and much-needed fund of money in the form of entertainment taxes that every local government thereafter closely guarded or tried to expand. Local cultural proprietors worked closely with city officials to minimize their tax burden and negotiate license restrictions, safety issues, hours of operation, concession sales, advertising, building size, and a number of other specific regulations on leisure events. While the city never formally distinguished between different “types” of cultural activity in its laws, officials controlled dance venues, varieté theaters, and movie houses more strictly than the City Theater, orchestra concerts, or art exhibits. During the first three years of the Weimar Republic, the Göttingen government established most of the rules, regulations, and procedures that would shape cinema for the entire interwar period. The Göttingen Magistracy revised its entertainment taxation rules five times during the Weimar Republic and twice under Hitler. Regulations of 1920 expanded upon ordinances passed between 1911 and 1919 and stipulated how cinema owners paid taxes on film screenings.27 A June 1921 national law established the broad contours of entertainment taxation, within which localities retained considerable room for making their own rules.28 However, authorities in Hanover and Berlin ruled that Göttingen rates were still too high to fit within the acceptable range laid out by the new national regulations and forced the Magistracy to rewrite their rules.29 Here we see the tension between the Weimar Republic's vision of cinema as valuable industry and the Göttingen Magistracy's early twentieth-century desire to control it. Resulting from a combination of local, regional, and national pressures, Göttingen's subsequent November 1921 tax policies reveal the multi-layered context in which entertainment policy functioned.30 And they settled a number of issues about how those relationships worked. The updated Göttingen ordinances echoed national regulations in form, if not spirit: they lowered tax rates but gave no indication of buying the national officials’ argument that the entertainment industry needed relief. They also taxed movies by the individual ticket price.31 The ordinances, finally, stipulated that some events could be tax-free: those in schools, ones that helped youth or promoted physical fitness, and events in private homes, excluding voluntary associations. The new rules especially helped encourage the use of film in schools. Within a year a group of pedagogues would organize a new voluntary association in Göttingen for this work. National and regional governments delineated the broad outlines of cinema taxation, while allowing localities to set their own entertainment tax laws. Page 134 → These conditions reinforced the idea that culture was a local activity that was loosely directed by outside forces. Leaders across Germany recognized the need to coordinate national and local regulation of mass culture. In this case, outside intervention ultimately strengthened the position of local cinema owners vis-à-vis local officials. But the

new rules also enhanced city officials’ ability to influence cultural products originating from outside Göttingen. National and local laws after the Great War recognized that cinema was becoming the mass culture in Germany. They tried to define, restrict, and harness it. Göttingen's regulations in the early 1920s placed cinema at the intersection of theater-owners’ business concerns, local government's revenue needs, and national politicians’ desire to protect Germans from “trashy” mass culture. These rules recognized competing ideas about what role cinema should play in society. Unlike other exploding mass cultural activities, such as sports, cinema offered no real opportunity for participation. It was simply a mass cultural product to be consumed. Scholars have shown that Weimar moviegoers could read films in various ways, some of which encouraged liberation or the imagination of a different society.32 However, the reactionary vision of cinema codified in Göttingen's early 1920s laws encouraged theater owners to show more conservative, edifying films. And regulations certainly reinforced the idea that popular mass culture should generate tax revenue. These initial laws defined cinema regulation through the Weimar and Nazi periods, weaving conservative politics into the fabric of moviegoing in Göttingen.

Educating Entertainment, 1922–26 In 1922 the industrialist Gotthelf Leimbach and several other like-minded members of Göttingen's cultural elite in Göttingen established the Educational Film Association and the Volkshaus Theater.33 They sought to promote “educational” and (elite) “cultural” movies, namely, informative and general interest documentaries and feature films based especially on “classic” literature or historical themes. Their motivations combined social concern, noblesse oblige, and optimism about cinema's edifying potential, echoing many of the desires of pre-war reformers. Since the 1910s, committed middle-class reformers had sought to mold cinema to their ideas about culture or to use the new medium for educational purposes.34 By the early 1920s cinema had already proven to be a commercially successful form of mass culture and thus a potential source of tax revenue. The conscious attempt by Leimbach's group to sponsor educational and high cultural films helped conservative leaders and cultural purveyors Page 135 → (especially in the newspapers) embrace the value of cinema. Cinema owners in the 1920s increasingly learned how to use national ratings and regulations and the work of national lobbying groups to improve their businesses. The mechanism for regulation created in the early Weimar years required cinema owners to communicate regularly with local officials to take maximum advantage of the rules for showing films. The effect of reformers like Leimbach, therefore, was to bring cinema owners, local police, national regulations, and local media even closer together. As a result, this constellation made local interests an integral part of cinema's development in 1920s Göttingen. Leimbach owned a successful fine optics firm in Göttingen and modeled his cultural educational practices after the great optical industrialist Carl Zeiss from Jena. Leimbach and his co-founders created a school where instructional films could help workers and non-professionals better themselves.35 They also established this school as a venue for scholarly lectures and multi-media presentations (lectures, slides, movies, recorded music) that covered a wide variety of topics like art, literature, science, travel, medicine, and hygiene. Oskar Hagen, for instance, gave a lecture on the Sistine Chapel. Local elites thus strengthened their connections with each other through a common desire to make use of motion pictures. Eventually the Volkshaus began to show entertaining movies as well as educational ones. With 350 seats, it was the city's second-largest movie house and an important part of the local cinema scene, especially during the mid-1920s. Politicians, including the Prussian Minister of Welfare, supported the project. Initially this wedding of elite and mass culture proved very successful and attracted a broad audience. In its first year alone the Volkshaus counted 55,000 visitors.36 Together, the Educational Film Association and Volkshaus Theater served three main purposes: to encourage the use of movies in school classes, to show instructional films that taught vocational skills, and to present their vision of “culture” through movies and lectures. In 1925 a number of businessmen and educators expanded Leimbach's efforts by founding a Göttingen branch of the national cultural and educational Urania Society. Under the direction of the respected pedagogy professor Hermann Nohl, the Urania Association brought together industrialists like Leimbach, all of whom wanted to use new media to educate the masses. The Göttingen group grew quickly and within seven months boasted 403 members.37 They convinced the city to let them use an empty Youth Office to show educational and “cultural”

movies. Like the Volkshaus, the Urania (which seated 334) showed scholarly and educational documentaries as well as entertaining “cultural” feature films. Both the Volkshaus and Urania parlayed their educational Page 136 → programming to obtain tax exemption for shows. But because these movie houses also screened entertaining movies, the Magistracy was not easily convinced that their performances automatically merited tax discounts. In each case, it took repeated requests, explanations, and appeals to national laws to satisfy the Magistracy's notions of what qualified as “serving the public good” (gemeinnützig).38 Indeed, Leimbach eventually had to show the city that his Volkshaus performances met the criteria of the newly established Central Institute for Education and Teaching in Berlin, which pronounced certain films culturally, artistically, or educationally “valuable.”39 Called the “Lampe Committee” after its director and former geography teacher, Felix Lampe, this wing of the Prussian Education Ministry grew in 1924 to cover all of Germany (save Bavaria, which kept its own similar body). It was even more conservative and arbitrary than the national censorship boards.40 The need to appeal to outside bodies for local tax relief highlighted the fiscal conservatism driving decisions in Göttingen about cinema. Appealing to the “Lampe Committee” reinforced Göttingen leaders’ preference for educational documentaries, historical dramas, and, above all, films that eschewed controversial political topics. The political leanings of Göttingen's Magistracy—nationalist, skeptical about democracy, and “apolitical”—meant that local tax policies cut down the number of films in Göttingen that challenged middle-class authority and nationalist assumptions about German society and history. Still, elites did more than just limit performances. The cinema reform movement in nearby Hanover during the 1920s, for instance, used modern marketing to sell its version of cultural conservatism. Other Hanover reformers wanted to use educational documentary films in schools. One historian has called this movement an “anachronism of the culturally conservative” pre-war reform movement.41 Beyond continuing cultural policies reminiscent of worried 1910s reformers, these elites also sought to capitalize on cinema's enormous popularity, to use mass culture to promote their vision of society. The Volkshaus and Urania modeled the effective use of local and national ideas about mass culture in order to strengthen established elites. Commercial movie theater owners also worked this system to lower their taxes, albeit as a means to increase profits. Photographer Walter Klie ran Göttingen's largest movie house, the Central Theater (450 seats) until 1923, when he sold it to Fritz Hoffmann, who owned the theater until his death in 1964. Ernst Heidelberg took over the Eden Theater (295 seats) in 1919. Both the Central and Eden were centrally located in downtown Göttingen and were successful enterprises throughout the interwar era, in no small measure because the owners worked closely and often with local authorities. As we will see in Page 137 →chapter 6, such relationships were essential to the survival of movie houses. Given the high temperatures of projectors and the flammability of celluloid film, the police closely monitored equipment and the training of projectionists. Legitimate concerns about fire hazards brought police to cinemas regularly and afforded them opportunities to monitor content, as well. To obtain tax discounts cinemas had to submit requests in advance of screenings. For non-commercial theaters like the Volkshaus and Urania, which did not show movies continuously, these discounts probably lowered their costs enough for them to exist. For the Central and Eden the discounts helped improve profits, decreased pressure on less popular films to perform, and gave owners a little maneuvering room. Hoffmann and Heidelberg also used “valuable” or “educational” screenings to show local leaders that their theaters contributed to the general good of Göttingen's culture, thus buying cultural capital to use in their many minor conflicts with local authorities. Police wrangled constantly with all four theaters about whether films were educational or just entertaining and about the amount of taxes theaters could afford. National and local regulations laid out in painstaking detail the taxes paid on tickets in various price ranges. But the regularity of discussion about taxes on tickets revealed the impact of flexible definitions of what “served the public good.” This situation made constant negotiation with local officials as much a part of the business of running a movie house as paying the electric bill. But unlike the electric company's fixed rates, the various means of determining a film's “value”—local, regional, and national regulations or missives from lobbying groups—required those who ran theaters, especially for profit, to cultivate good relationships with local authorities. The first film that the Volkshaus managed to convince the city “served the public good” and thus deserved a tax discount was Fritz Lang's two-part saga Die Nibelungen (1924), a ghostly marriage of Expressionism and

Germanic myth. Theater owners across Germany had already begun to make use of new “culturally significant” tax discounts for feature films in 1922 (e.g., Fredericus Rex, one of the many cinematic odes to Frederick the Great during the interwar years). Lang's epic elicited one of the longest reviews we find in Göttingen newspapers before 1927. The Göttinger Zeitung critic called it “a masterpiece of German film art,” something not paralleled in German film, maintaining that all “friends of film” in Göttingen would welcome its return and that large numbers had attended the performance.42 Almost all of the sparse coverage on cinema in Göttingen up to this point consisted of advertisements and ballyhooed advance notices from studios. This rare review indicated that some critics had Page 138 → begun to appreciate cinema's value, at least when it portrayed classic stories. Films labeled “culturally significant” represented a minority of movies played in Göttingen. German studios made numerous popular movies in the mid-1920s, and many more came from the United States. In the five or six years after the Great War, Hollywood became a permanent feature in German and Göttingen cinema life, as both model and foil. More than jazz, automobiles, dancing girls, or any other stereotypically “American” export, Germans identified Hollywood films with the United States. Motion pictures were in fact both the medium and the message of “American” modernization. After Germany finally lifted the ban on foreign films in 1921, Hollywood began to send films to Germany, especially after the stabilization of the German Mark in 1924. Initially German filmmakers believed they could take on the American behemoth by offering their own national style—Expressionism, historical epics, chamber drama, realism. But by mid-decade films from the United States had eliminated German production of comic shorts and controlled about 40 percent of the feature film market in Germany. The popularity of American movies and Hollywood's tendency to lure away German talent to the United States forced the German film industry to assimilate parts of the “Hollywood style”: “happy ends” (a popular English-language term in the press), a star system, clear narrative structures, and grandiose sets.43 Hollywood's positive and negative functions influenced many features of German cinema life in the interwar period, even in Göttingen. The dominance of American movies, loved or despised, encouraged broad support of the German film industry among German critics. Nationalists tried to restrict Hollywood access to the German market and bolster the German industry through patriotic motion pictures. Leftists argued for a more thoughtful, experimental, and non-commercial cinema in Germany. Many filmmakers, critics, and ordinary Germans accepted the importance of their domestic industry as something worth protecting, even if they loved American films, too. The dearth of cinematic reporting in Göttingen for much of the 1920s did not exempt this town from the national concern with American movies and “Americanism.” Newspapers simply did not yet value mass culture as culture (Kultur), whether American or German. They chiefly viewed cinema as advertising business. But when critics in Göttingen finally began writing about cinema in the later 1920s, they too exhibited the love-hate relationship with Hollywood that many Germans had already developed. Concern over American films in Göttingen comprised part of city officials’ more general worry about mass culture in the 1920s. We do not have concrete opinions from Göttingen's government about American films. But Page 139 → their preference in cultural regulations for “classic” literary movies and nationalist epics pointed to a wariness of Hollywood products. Lawmakers increasingly used tax discounts to encourage some films and generate tax revenue from others. The city revised entertainment tax regulations again in 1925 for this very purpose.44 Ernst Heidelberg argued that the cinema taxes were too steep in such dire economic times and that the rates treated cinema unfairly by lumping it into the broad category of mass diversion. He was frustrated that the Magistracy failed to recognize that, like theater, cinema had become an important cultural pillar in Göttingen. And in fact, unlike theater, at least cinema made an effort to educate average people, he claimed: “Today cinema is indispensable for the broad masses, because it offers absolutely necessary entertainment and diversions from daily troubles, thereby making artistic and scholarly material accessible to these broad masses.”45 At this time city officials still viewed cinema much as they had since it began in Göttingen, as second-class culture. But politically and economically, they could not overlook the impact of this popular activity and therefore devoted more energy to its regulation than other forms of entertainment. Police monitored film content and length, advertising, admission costs, projection machinery, film storage, projectionist training, hours of operation, age of audiences, building renovations, and ticket tax rates, all of which required very regular interaction.46 Taxes also remained the most malleable cost for theater owners and the one most subject to their relationship with local authorities.

In August 1926, the Göttingen Magistracy reiterated its policy of support for “artistic” motion pictures by revising the city's entertainment tax ordinances yet again.47 The new rules established a simple flat rate for ticket prices and a complicated system of discounting “instructional,” “artistic,” or “broadly educational” (volksbildend) film programs based on the percentage of such movies shown on a given day. The new rules also recognized the “Lampe Committee's” authority to define which films qualified. Despite the relatively high tax rate of 18 percent (vs. 15 percent suggested nationally) and the byzantine system of discounts, all parties liked it. Heidelberg and Hoffmann could lower their tax burdens regularly by playing “accepted” films.48 The Volkshaus and Urania theaters paid virtually no taxes under the new system. And the city government gained a clear mechanism for attracting more “cultural” feature films and educational documentaries and for reaping financial rewards from all other kinds of movies. Popular films—mysteries, melodramas, adventures, comedies—remained the mainstay of movie houses in Göttingen. Ironically, though, the city government's promotion of “educational” and “cultural” films helped hasten the Volkshaus and Urania's decline in the late Page 140 → 1920s, as the commercial cinemas took advantage of the financial incentives to show those films. Despite its clear preferences, the Magistracy seemed to realize that all four movie houses were playing plenty of educational fare and did not approve the opening of yet another “educational” movie theater in 1927.49 These regulations formalized relations between cinemas and city and remained mostly in place until 1945. They strengthened the Magistracy's conservative view of cinema as either “educational” medium or revenue source. Even when other voices in the media began to shape discourses about motion pictures in the late 1920s, this more conservative view of cinema helped determine the films that were shown in Göttingen. Moreover, the conservative tendencies of leading cultural critics in the Göttinger Tageblatt and Göttinger Zeitung reinforced such assumptions. By 1927 cinema owners and local officials had created a mutually reinforcing relationship that melded national ideas and imagery with local regulation and meaning. Although often in conflict, these two sets of players in Göttingen shared a common interest in promoting cinema and expanding its reach in town. Up until this point newspapers had likewise supported this agenda by informing the public about film screenings and occasionally writing positive articles about movies. When newspapers finally began covering cinema in detail, they helped reiterate the conservative vision of cinema's role in town that regulation, policing, and cooperation had produced.

Mass Culture as Accepted Culture, 1927–29 Göttingen critics discovered cinema in 1927. Newspapers had always supported cinema as a local business. But in 1927 cultural critics at Göttingen's daily papers began taking this mass culture seriously enough to write significant reviews about films. A steady growth in the coverage of the industry, stars, and technology of film followed. In the final years of the 1920s, local media thus began to shape perceptions in Göttingen about cinema. Given that cinema had been for some time the most popular and most ubiquitous cultural activity throughout Germany, the Göttingen papers were coming late to the game. They had not played any role in developing the regulation system that cinema owners and local officials had crafted by mid-decade. Increased newspaper coverage therefore acted only as so much cheerleading for an already successful activity. At the same time, reviews and articles gave Göttingers a wider perspective with which to view something they already loved. Göttingen newspapers did not have to convince readers to go to the movies. But they did increasingly influence Page 141 → the meaning viewers ascribed to cinema. And the general cultural conservatism of reviewers at the largest Göttingen papers meant that their input helped bolster the established conservative regulation of cinema in town. As cinema became an increasingly important lightning rod in Germany's “culture wars” and a more important means of defining and shaping mass politics, this media conservatism lent support to those on Germany's political right.50 The precarious position of German cinema in the mid-to late 1920s also allowed conservative German businesses to shape the national industry. After the 1924 Dawes Plan stabilized the Reichmark and brought foreign investment back to Germany, national cinema flourished, especially through consolidation. The number of domestic films, for example, rose significantly. By 1927 Germany was producing more films than any other European nation and ranked third in world film production, behind the United States and Japan.51 However, the need to secure financing for these many and, in some cases, very expensive productions drove German studios

into the arms of big businesses, which more and more aligned themselves with right-wing politicians. Even the giant Ufa had to sell controlling interests in 1927 to right-wing press magnate Alfred Hugenberg, whose popular DNVP promoted nationalism and, eventually, Adolf Hitler.52 On the one hand, this consolidation tightened and limited studios’ creativity. Hugenberg, for instance, made no pretense about using Ufa to promote his party and ideas. On the other hand, the influx of financing (however brief) helped engender a creative outpouring of important and popular films such as Metropolis (1927), Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (1927), Asphalt (1929), Pandora's Box (1929), and The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929). Along with milestone Hollywood films of this time like The Jazz Singer (1927), German cinema's synthetic quality at this particular moment—aesthetically unique yet shaped by Hollywood formulas, pathbreaking yet popular, able to take financial risks yet beholden to profits—caught the attention of cultural purveyors in Göttingen. The industry of film and the industry of writing about film had grown up together. In the 1890s and early 1900s film coverage amounted to little more than marketing. And even when it broke away from the studios and the job of promotion, film writing continued to focus on aesthetics and technology in a way that differed from other forms of cultural criticism. Before World War I established cultural critics in Germany's cities looked more favorably on film writing when it imitated theater criticism, much as they preferred the developing feature-length movies that often amounted to filmed stage performances. Some conservative critics even saw the growth of movies as a potentially broad Volkskultur (“people's culture”) rather than mass culture. They hoped cinema Page 142 → might become more organically rooted in German society and other forms of traditional middle-class culture like literature, music, theater, or associational life. Likewise, in the 1910s critics began distinguishing between higherquality “film” (Film) versus pedestrian “cinema” (Kino). By the mid-1920s, critics had connected cinema to middle-class culture (theater, music, art) by highlighting its aesthetics and consumer value, and writing about cinema still combined these two elements. Those who tried to popularize cinema during the Weimar Republic mixed serious analysis with appreciation of sensation. They touted it as an activity that both reflected modern life and provided an escape from it. Writing about film, as Sabine Hake explains, was “a focal point for problems in modern mass society.” She argues that “discourses on film functioned simultaneously as symptom and cause for the crisis of bourgeois culture, and they contributed to the negotiation of social and political differences by alternately providing an instrument and a projection screen.”53 As we have seen with other cultural activities, newspapers gave Göttingers a language with which to discuss cinema. Some scholars argue that film criticism had little impact on moviegoers, since they were less likely to read or follow reviews than people who visited the theater.54 But discounting reviews overlooks the critical importance of daily newspapers in Germany during this period. Especially in a smaller city like Göttingen, newspapers served a variety of essential functions beyond reporting the news. They announced new government regulations, notified people of upcoming events, served as a forum for discussions ranging from international politics to caring for pigs, published public transportation schedules, gave weather reports, listed employment opportunities, and offered many other important local services. They also advertised upcoming movies and gave show times. Since the 1910s Göttingen's newspapers had been advertising show times and occasionally printing previews. Starting in 1927 their cultural sections began to treat cinema more seriously as a cultural activity. This upswing resulted from several converging factors: the personal interest of two important local cultural critics, several high-profile and popular movies, a potentially stronger and more nationalist film industry, and aggressive promotion by Göttingen's cinema owners. Marketing and promotion had always been important: most coverage in Göttingen newspapers before 1927 amounted to advance announcements (Voranzeige) from the cinemas (i.e., the studios) or short, pat, exuberant reviews that also encouraged attendance. Even this kind of coverage only began to appear more regularly starting in about 1924. In the late 1920s cultural critics started using more established theater and concert models to review films, in part because more theatrically oriented movies caught their attention. Page 143 → By 1927 all four Göttingen daily newspapers ran occasional film sections, although the larger Tageblatt and Zeitung covered more than the Volksblatt or Niedersächsische Morgenpost. In 1925 the biweekly publication of the city Tourist Association (Fremdenverkehrverein), Göttingen Life (Göttinger Leben), started including movie

showings as part of its regular listing of cultural events in the city. Eventually they too began reviewing films and writing about cinema. In the late 1920s advertisements in all publications grew in size, frequency, and flashiness. Like the advance notices, the ads usually ran a couple of days before a movie opened in Göttingen. Both frequently noted how well movies had done nationally or in Berlin, situating local moviegoing within a larger context. Still, none of the papers published much by Göttingen writers about film until 1927. Critical response in Göttingen to cinema more or less changed with a single event in February 1927, when the Göttinger Tageblatt's leading cultural critic, Heinz Koch, saw F. W. Murnau's Faust. The movie played at the two-year-old Urania theater and helped make it arguably the most important movie house in Göttingen around this time. Much as Fritz Lang had done in Die Nibelungen (1924), Murnau wove tradition and experiment together in Faust. Rather than following Goethe's story, the film told the older saga of Faust's bargain with the devil in exchange for his youth. It focused more on Faust's relationship with the young Gretchen than on the weighty moral issues at stake in Goethe's masterpiece. By 1927 Koch was already well-known in Göttingen for his insightful theater, concert, dance, and art reviews, as well as serving as local editor for the arch-conservative Tageblatt. As we have seen with sharpshooting and especially the Händel Festival, Koch exemplified high cultural conservatism but remained open to new cultural expressions when they came wrapped in established traditions. His many reviews made his one of the best-known bylines at the biggest newspaper in town. Since film fell under the purview of local news and culture, Koch also determined the degree to which the Tageblatt covered it. The silent, ghostly Faust got Koch to think about cinema as a medium, especially vis-à-vis the theater he loved so much, prompting him and his newspaper to pay more attention to film. Faust was Koch's first movie review, and he followed a pattern similar to his theater and music critiques. The review revealed genuine surprise, as if the chief editor had asked him to review just this one film and Koch marveled at how much he appreciated it. He began with some skepticism, expecting to find that Faust without words would be “blasphemy.” Like many who saw this movie, he had to get used to the fact that Murnau filmed the old saga, not Goethe's play. Koch was impressed, though, by the story's power when rendered Page 144 → through silent acting, especially Emil Jannings's Mephisto, and he conceded that Murnau had given the old saga a “totally different face.” Then, as in his many other reviews, he praised important structures in the piece—the story, the cast, staging, the direction. Although he found the heavenly prologue to be “supreme cinema kitsch,” Koch concluded proudly that “this Faust film is a great achievement, a thrilling experience, born of German character [Wesen], German heart [Gemüt] and German technology. One must see it!”55 As local editor, Koch likely assigned reviews. He must have enjoyed this first film review (or at least seen the value in his taking the time to do it), because he began reviewing movies regularly thereafter. Faust also elicited a more substantial response in the other newspapers than previous films had. An extensive preview article in the Göttinger Zeitung asserted that the “Gestalt” was understandable even to a “totally unliterary viewer” and that the filmed version expressed the story's finer points. The Göttinger Zeitung’s editor and occasional cultural critic, Max Maaß, also reviewed the film. While he did not like the film's different take on the story, he enjoyed pictures, technique, and acting.56 The Volksblatt likewise gave Faust one of its longest film reviews of the entire decade, stressing how anxiously Göttingers had awaited the movie's arrival but expressing general disdain for the tendency in motion pictures to simplify great stories into black and white issues, romantic tales, and beautiful pictures.57 The reaction to Murnau's film underscored cinema's transition from popular diversion to respected culture in the eyes of those who considered themselves purveyors of culture in Göttingen. The Urania Theater's respectable status as an “educational” theater helped appeal to elites, as did Faust's revered subject matter.58 Göttingen reviewers took cues from positive advance notices and pre-showing writing but nevertheless remained somewhat skeptical about cinema, offering their own interpretation of the film. Even in their differences, newspapers’ responses to Faust echoed the city government's cautious, elitist support of cinema. The disappointment in the Volksblatt and Zeitung reflected a preference for theater or cinema that emulated stage productions. Koch, too, liked theatrical film but also showed that conservative critics could appreciate novel films based on established or familiar stories. All three Göttingen papers took Faust seriously and began covering cinema more thereafter.59 But the fact that the most conservative of these newspapers celebrated Murnau's modern adaptation of the saga

points to the fact that some conservatives realized that cinema could promote their ideas to the masses. Overall, the coverage of Faust marked the beginning of the cultural elite's recognition of cinema's Page 145 → significance and the Göttingen press's crucial role in shaping moviegoing and opinions about cinema and mass culture. Immediately after Faust closed, a very different movie captured the same people's attention, Fred Niblo's Ben Hur. Though also based on an older story, the successful American film could not have been more different than Faust. It received even more preview press in Göttingen, especially a number of exclamatory descriptions about the movie's enormous sets and number of cast members, cost, and global origins. Göttingen Life featured a big frontpage picture, and the Zeitung called it the “greatest film of today.”60 Heinz Koch's review in the Tageblatt was the largest in any Göttingen newspaper to date. Like his critique of Faust, he was surprised to have enjoyed the movie so much. Koch approached the movie and all that surrounded it cautiously but thoughtfully. He reflected on the state of film in 1927, especially in comparison to the theater, and concluded that, unlike Faust, Ben Hur's size and ability to capture human life pointed to a new and better direction for cinema. He maintained that film was not a picture, but a moving picture and represented a very different arena than spoken drama. Fred Niblo understood this distinction and broke free from the “chains” of theatrical expectations.61 The Zeitung also built the film up but did not review it as favorably.62 Local reviewers sometimes took cues from syndicated writing about cinema that appeared in the Göttingen newspapers. Indeed, syndicated pieces from outside Göttingen helped shape and expand Göttingers’ syntax for thinking about cinema. Just as local reviews may have influenced perceptions of individual films, reports on larger trends in the film industry informed what Göttingers thought about cinema in general. Reporting on national events connected the activity of moviegoing in Göttingen with the growth of mass culture. As early as 1924, the Tageblatt ran the serialized column called “Berlin Pot-Pourri” by the Berlin writer Adolph Stein, occasionally at first and then every week or two by around 1927. Published under the pseudonym “Rumpelstilzchen,” Stein's column described daily life in the capital by relating anecdotes and reporting about politics, culture, or other events.63 His personal, sometimes ironic and humorous, rabidly nationalist and occasionally antisemitic point of view fit well with the Tageblatt's editorial slant. Stein's writings about cinema (small reviews, descriptions of big Berlin premieres, and ruminations on the German film industry) were often the first impressions Göttingers had of the film industry. He filtered most of his thoughts through an obsession with the strength of the German film industry. Heinz Koch's Faust review reiterated favorite themes for Stein about using both established ideas and new Page 146 → technology to bolster the German film industry. For example, when the right-leaning press tycoon and DNVP leader Alfred Hugenberg bought back control of Ufa from Paramount and MGM in 1927, Stein saw the move as the only thing that could save the ailing and bloated German industry from American studios. He cited Hugenberg's effective leadership (which was not too effective in the end) as evidence that authoritarian control worked better than a democratic parliamentary system.64 Although the Volksblatt wrote about cinema less than the Tageblatt, the SPD paper likewise wove ideology into its cultural coverage. They too stressed Hugenberg's politics when he “rehabilitated” Ufa but feared this nationalist's control of Germany's largest film studio.65 Ufa's release in 1927 of Metropolis in fact crystallized the hopes and concerns of critics across Germany. The biggest German film of 1927 and one of the most influential of the era, Fritz Lang's much-anticipated and very expensive movie premiered grandly in Berlin in January 1927. With an eye toward foreign markets, Metropolis was supposed to be Germany's answer to Hollywood and Moscow, even as the film spent much of the money MGM had invested in Ufa.66 Metropolis envisions a future dystopia in black and white terms: the wealthy enjoy life high above the sprawling city, while workers toil each day in subterranean cavern-like factories. Ultimately a robot disguised as a demagogue whips the workers into a destructive frenzy, and only human compassion and inter-class understanding prevent disaster. Articles in Göttingen papers show the film to have been a lightning rod for opinions about German cinema. The three reviews of the Berlin premiere in Göttingen papers all agreed on the movie's effect and ability to create another world. Two of them compared it favorably to Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, a film that had recently been well-received in Germany, even grudgingly by right-wing critics who hated its message and origins.67 In the Göttinger Tageblatt Adolph Stein called Metropolis “infinitely more provocative” than Potemkin, although he found Lang's ending kitschy and unrealistic. He

suggested President Hindenburg as an antidote to the selfish capitalism portrayed in the film.68 The Göttinger Zeitung national review went further to connect Ufa's “rehabilitation,” the relationship between German and American films generally, and the great hope placed on Metropolis. The German film industry, the reviewer argued, had not yet come to terms with the pressure of American films on the German market, as evidenced by the fact that a great, powerful film like Metropolis could only be made with financial support from MGM studios. The critic concluded that Metropolis and a handful of other recent German movies (including Varieté and Faust) had the potential to help produce “a pure German film art”—but only if the government supported and protected the industry.69 Page 147 → Metropolis took almost eleven months to arrive in Göttingen, nearly three times as long as it normally took for films to arrive after their Berlin premieres. Even the usual three-to four-month lag time created a two-step ritual of moviegoing in Göttingen. In 1927 newspapers had begun covering the national premieres of bigger movies (usually in Berlin) chiefly by syndicating national reviews. Local reviews then made the anticipation and discussion of a film's arrival in Göttingen a part of their perspective a few months later. In the case of Metropolis, this process created more hype than genuine interest, at least for the cultural critics. By the time Lang's film premiered there, it paled next to the great expectations built up around it. The Tageblatt alone reviewed the Göttingen screening and assigned it to a minor critic. The somewhat incoherent article praised the film's technique, its audacity, and especially its imagination of new technology. But the author denied that it was art and called the film “just a sight, not an experience.”70 Of course neither this reviewer nor any other necessarily spoke for all readers. But the critic's reaction to all the hype and technological dazzle, as well as the others papers’ ignoring the film, showed that some cultural brokers remained skeptical about cinema's potential, even when it aspired to be high art, vaguely instructive, and a marker of German ingenuity. Beyond these big, public expansions in Göttingen cinema, many more local organizations increasingly screened movies. Showing films privately at established theaters or in other own locations added voluntary associations to the list of those working with local officials to expand local cinema. We lack records indicating how many people visited Göttingen's movie theaters or such private screenings. But the number of requests to police by groups of all sorts (political parties, sport clubs, charity groups, educational societies, etc.) to show films steadily increased in the 1920s. Such organizations sometimes played movies for members but often opened screenings to the public as a way to promote their ideas or interests to a larger audience. The police were even stricter with these public showings than with commercial theaters. They scrutinized very closely, for example, the Nazi Party's October 1929 screening of a film about their Party Day that they used in the local campaign that garnered them over half the local vote. The film played in Ernst Heidelberg's (now) two theaters. At the same time Heidelberg gamely advertised in the Volksblatt that these theaters were available, presumably for the SPD-related groups affiliated with that paper, for use daily at lunchtime. In the late 1920s Göttingen's police intensified their checking for fire hazards at all screenings and tightened approval of projectionists. They also turned down more requests for screenings after 11:00 p.m. and on Sunday mornings.71 These points of contact with local police reinforced the need for anyone showing films to build relationships with local authorities. They also reveal the pressure on cinema owners to meet Page 148 → growing demand for movies and the increasing importance cinemas played in town for many purposes, including politics. The grand opening of Heidelberg's Capitol Theater, Göttingen's fifth and largest cinema, in October 1929 made clear the significance of cinema in Göttingen by the end of the decade (figures 7 and 8).72 The Lord Mayor and Senators from the Magistracy were there, as well as representatives from the university, the head of the academic high school (Gymnasium), the regional chief of the national Association of Cinema Owners, Hanover cultural leaders, and the director of Göttingen's City Orchestra, among others, all to congratulate Heidelberg on the opening of his second movie theater in Göttingen. Heidelberg had of course already helped shape cinema's growth during the 1920s through his close contact with the city government and national lobbying groups about entertainment tax rates. With 820 plush seats, two levels, art-deco interior, classical modern exterior, bold pink neon accents, and million-Reichmark price tag, the magnificent Capitol Theater seemed to belie cinema owners’ frequent complaints about financial difficulties. Heidelberg's second cinema, the Capitol was also centrally

located, just one street over from his Eden Theater. In Heidelberg's mind, the movie market was not saturated in this city of 45,000. Certainly film attendance continued to grow, but the three big commercial theaters (Central, Eden, and Capitol) began to squeeze out the Urania and Volkshaus.73 Göttingen now boasted over 2,000 cinema seats—or about one for every twenty-two inhabitants. Besides its large screen, the Capitol also had a substantial stage and orchestra pit that was used for varieté shows, orchestra concerts, dance performances, lectures, and big meetings. Although the theater mostly showed movies, they were frequently opened by dance routines or small concerts. And in this (closing) era of silent films, the Capitol and other cinemas frequently employed small ensembles or orchestras to play film music, instead of the standard pianist. The Capitol's combination of stage and screen highlighted the fluid boundaries between cultural activities, as well as Heidelberg's willingness to try different kinds of performances to attract audiences. We have already seen that Heidelberg's pursuit of his bottom line made his theaters welcome for both the town's left-and right-wing political parties, while still enabling him to navigate police scrutiny of such potentially volatile situations. Heidelberg pushed cultural limits when he showed a movie a few months later about sexual murder (Lustmord) that opened with a local dance pair acting out a modern performance of sexual murder and drug abuse.74 And thereafter he took a chance on hosting a guest troop's performance about the controversial Paragraph 218 in the Penal Code that outlawed abortion.75 Then, when Fritz Hoffmann's Central Theater managed to show sound films before the Capitol, Page 149 → Heidelberg countered that week with a program by the sexy Hungarian dancer Bella Siris. But at the Capitol's opening, talkies were still six months away in Göttingen and were in fact roundly denounced as “an American need for sensation” (Sensationbedürfnis). The focus that October night was on cinema's public image and how much it had changed during the 1920s. Newspaper critics and city leaders had come to realize film's value and important place in cultural life. A Göttinger Tageblatt reporter admired the Capitol's “New Objectivity” interior with its simple and modern, well-lit and acoustically effective stage. The grand opening earned almost a full page in both the Tageblatt and Zeitung. The latter, in particular, stressed the cultural capital that the large movie theater brought to the city, naming it “a thoroughly big-city institution.” He linked the Capitol to the pride many felt for German cinema, as exemplified in the glorious Zeppelin movie that played that night. This modern “big-city movie theater,” he concluded, would take up Göttingen's “great cultural obligation” and fulfill “a cultural mission in our city.” The Director of Hanover's theater was so enthusiastic about the new movie house that he commemorated the event with a poem: Page 150 → Mirror of our turbulent time This new movie house…ornament of our good city! Be young and old after the day's burdens and toil Uplifting and invigorating all at once. O, you new house serve but one great purpose: the welfare of the People And carry in honor the proud name “Capitol”!!!76 The colorful festivities, lofty rhetoric, and exclusive crowd at the Capitol opening also demonstrated cinema's important position in public life that elites and average citizens alike supported. This very public event drew upon strong traditions in Göttingen cultural life and connected cinema to long-standing public activities such as sharpshooting and Händel festivals, concert and theater season premieres, and even political and military parades. These ritualized events provided a public venue for defining the role of cultural activities in Göttingen. Even more

than Händel performances, moviegoing was a form of Page 151 →cultural consumption. The cultural products consumed were all produced outside Göttingen, and millions of viewers around Germany and the world were consuming the same products. And unlike the rules governing sharpshooting and Händel performance, cinema regulations took some shape from national laws. Still, the regulations and personal relationships that interpreted those national laws were unique to Göttingen. Likewise, the rituals of moviegoing—the two-step process by which films were reviewed in local media, the negotiation of police approval, or the contours of major events like this opening—were distinct to Göttingen. Like sharpshooting and the Händel Festival, in other words, cinema gave Göttingers both a product to consume and a vehicle for considering the political implications of their cultural lives. The Capitol's 1929 opening underscored the fact that local institutions, individuals, and ideas shaped the consumption of cinema in Göttingen. Ultimately this great representative of mass culture, big business, and homogenization succeeded when it offered the big world of the movies in this very local setting.

Conclusion: 1929 to 1930 Just over a month after the Capitol's glitzy opening, over half of Göttingen voters selected Nazi or right-wing candidates (from a “super-party list”) to lead local government. Politically this vote marked a dramatic shift in town. This chapter has shown the ways in which economic, political, and cultural interests in Göttingen shaped cinema's development during the 1920s. The direct influence of these changes on voting patterns is hard to discern. Nevertheless, we can identify three important factors that made cinema in Göttingen into a cultural activity that lent support to conservative and, more to the point, right-wing interests. First, early 1920s laws codified a vision of film from the Kaiserreich as entertaining product, not art. The 1920 Motion Picture Law (and subsequent addenda) then gave local officials greater authority through tax policies to treat some films as edifying and others as sources of revenue. These laws, as well as concerns about fire hazards, demanded that cinema owners work closely with the police to run their businesses. Second, the expansion of “educational” film screenings initially at non-profit and then commercial theaters in the mid-1920s reinforced conservative regulations that celebrated established ideas. At the same time, local authorities, cinema owners, and media all realized cinema's potential economic benefit for Göttingen and developed a promotional system that balanced profits against education. This balance generally encouraged all parties involved—with the important exception of writers Page 152 → in the Volksblatt—to favor movies that avoided controversy. Third, newspapers’ interest in cinema, especially starting in 1927, reiterated existing attitudes toward cinema as potentially edifying and economically advantageous. The nationalist tendencies of important local and national writers made concern over the German film industry an important part of discourses about cinema in the late 1920s. This nationalist focus coincided with ongoing debates about the role of American finance and culture in Germany, as well as continued concern about the impact of culture and ideas from the Soviet Union. The cultural and political conservatism exhibited by many important players in Göttingen also informed citizens’ perceptions of cinema. Over the course of the 1920s, cultural purveyors reconciled reactionary fears about mass culture with the belief that it could improve people's lives. This synthesis, above all, helped make cinema into an activity that reinforced right-wing political ideologies. More than just moviegoing, cinema was by the end of the 1920s a complex web of economic interests, regulation, and media discourses. While going to the movies remained an experience of consuming something from outside Göttingen, a number of local ideas, institutions, and individuals shaped Göttingers’ thoughts about film. During this decade cinema became in fact one of the most important links between daily life and national and international ideas. This chapter has shown that every facet of cinema involved a mixture of national (and sometimes international) and local interests. Events in 1930—especially conflicts over films about the Great War and the implications of sound films such as The Blue Angel—made clear that Göttingers’ perception of cinema served as an expression of and inspiration for right-wing political changes. The implications of this development are the subject of the next chapter. The ability to promote cinema as edifying, unifying, “German” culture did more than just allow those on the right to make use of a popular cultural activity to articulate their ideas. The creation in Göttingen of a functioning mechanism driven by established elites, cooperation with the police, and capitalist interests actually modeled how non-democratic governance worked. The fact that this system pushed more conservative visions of society and gave consumers the entertainment they sought helps explain the popularity of the right-wing vision of the future

and why cinema helped make Göttingen into a Nazi town.

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CHAPTER 6 Making Mass Culture Local, 1930–38 Six nights in December 1930 was all it took to make Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front into the most controversial film in Germany between the world wars. After just six nights in Berlin with protests in and out of the theater and across the country, the Appellate Censorship Board reversed the Censorship Board's original approval of the American movie and banned it. For several weeks, conflict about the film grabbed front-page headlines in Göttingen, a singular feat that indicated its significance for national politics. Like other films about the Great War produced in Weimar Germany, Milestone's offered a variety of ways to come to terms with a cataclysmic defeat.1 But since no one in Göttingen actually saw All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930, it served chiefly as a political lightning rod. The Blue Angel, on the other hand, drew large audiences across Germany the same year. Hailed as the first artful sound film, Josef von Sternberg's feature that launched Marlene Dietrich's career engendered discussions in Göttingen about the role of music, movie stars, and “sex appeal” in cinema. The Blue Angel played to sold-out crowds in Göttingen in June 1930. Heinz Koch called it nothing less than “an eternal mirror” on the human condition, one that said, “Ecce homo.”2 The reception of these two movies reveals a great deal about cinema's role in Göttingen around 1930. Coverage of the two flashpoint films helped bolster conservative and right-wing ideas. Misogynist readings of The Blue Angel and the politicized discussion about All Quiet on the Western Front allowed the increasingly powerful supporters of Nazism in Göttingen to articulate their “solutions” to the many problems of the Weimar Republic. In contrast, Göttingen critics across the political spectrum embraced G. W. Pabst's Westfront 1918 that year, indicating that politically neutral treatments of the Great War fared better in this increasingly right-leaning town. Films may not have convinced voters in Göttingen to support Hitler's party. But at the very moment that the NSDAP and the Brüning government were asking Germans to repudiate democracy and trust instead the authority of one man (Hitler, Hindenburg, Page 154 → or Brüning), most Göttingen reviewers were pushing interpretations of these movies that celebrated traditional male control of the public sphere above party politics. These readings dovetailed with Nazi ideas, which had helped the Party assume control of the Town Council in 1929 and garner the largest support of any party from Göttingen voters in the 1930 Reichstag elections. Developments in cinema chronicled in the previous chapter created an environment conducive to conservative interpretations of mass culture. Films and events of 1930 helped reinforce that vision, which in turn strengthened Nazism. In conjunction with other changes, this shift in the most popular mass culture indicated that Göttingen had become a “Nazi town” by 1930. More than other cultural activities, cinema necessitated close cooperation between providers of cultural products, local authorities, and the national film industry. Working closely with the Magistracy especially strengthened Göttingen cinema owners’ support for conservative visions of mass culture's value. A declining economy and tightening regulations intensified this connection in the early 1930s. After 1933 Third Reich leaders in Göttingen and Berlin used existing laws to remold cinema. Göttingen's Magistracy and police continued to do the direct work of supervising cinema. The Third Reich's ability to make cinema a tool of its policies rested squarely on an effective balance of cinema owners’ needs, local regulation, and national aims. The fact that Third Reich laws designed to alter cinema caused limited disruption in Göttingen indicates that those involved in cinema had struck this balance before 1933. Even the regime's increasingly desperate attempts in the late 1930s to rejuvenate the failing film industry did not much alter moviegoing in Göttingen. Only the war's major upheaval signaled a real change in Göttingen cinema life. This chapter traces cinema's development into an important pillar of Nazism in Göttingen. Conflicts surrounding cinema around 1930 made it a medium for Göttingers to envision alternatives to Weimar democracy. New rules, movies, and local discussions about their meaning in the Third Reich then allowed Göttingers to take part in the changes the new regime brought to Germany. Local regulation and critical responses were just as important to these changes as were national products and policies. In short, local efforts shaped even this cultural activity most defined by external forces.

Cinema in a “Nazi Town,” circa 1930 In early 1930 Ernst Heidelberg and Fritz Hoffmann were in a race to debut sound film first in Göttingen. The subject of talkies had dominated local coverage Page 155 → of cinema since the first German “tone film” appeared in September 1928.3 Like some national critics, a few in Göttingen questioned the viability of sound film. Hoffmann won the race to sound in Göttingen. As soon as reviewers experienced sound film on 1 April 1930 at the Central Theater, they forgot any previous doubts. Seasoned Göttinger Zeitung critic Max Maaß immediately proclaimed, “Silent film is dead. Only sound film has a future now.”4 The Central added extra afternoon performances and even took ticket orders over the telephone. All five local publications favorably reviewed the Viennese operetta I Have Always Loved You with the popular singer Maddy Christians and offered details about how the new apparatus worked. Universally they declared sound movies to be a “full success” and the “future” of Göttingen cinema.5 Not to be completely outdone, Heidelberg offered a dance show that week by Bella Siris, “the queen of nude dancing,” complete with suggestive advertisements.6 Shortly after Hoffmann's coup, Heidelberg screened the most important sound film to date and arguably one of the most significant movies of the interwar period, The Blue Angel, starring Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in the role that made her famous.7 The Blue Angel is based on Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat and concerns the unlikely seduction of an academic high school teacher, Professor Immanuel Rath, by a traveling nightclub singer named Rosa Fröhlich or “Lola Lola,” and his eventual destruction. The Austrian-born American Josef von Sternberg directed the Ufa project. Sternberg radically altered Mann's story to create The Blue Angel, refocusing much of the novel's social critique on how Lola's sexual power tragically ruins Rath.8 The Göttingen press celebrated the film's 1 April 1930 Berlin premiere, training Göttingen viewers on certain qualities and turning the characters into immediate icons. Berlin writer Adolph Stein (a.k.a. “Rumpelstilzchen”) praised the film's technological accomplishment in the Göttinger Tageblatt and pointed to Lola's “sex appeal” (a new Englishlanguage import that most reviews used) as nothing more than the catalyst for Rath's “tragic end” and a vehicle for Dietrich's “impressive beauty.” Like other reviewers, he found “Lola-Lulu Pandora” scary yet enticing.9 The most fascinating use of The Blue Angel's national reception in Göttingen newspapers was in the Social Democratic Volksblatt (see figure 9). This paper published no national review of the film but used its visual imagery in a cartoon to comment on national politics in April 1930.10 “The Black-White-Red Angel,” the cartoon mockingly imagined, “a new Ufa sound film with Hugenberg in the Jannings role.” Here Lola's seductive power was likened to that of the authoritarian Brüning government, which President Hindenburg had appointed without elections the month before. By casting Alfred Hugenberg, the right-leaning yet nominally democratic Page 156 → head of the DNVP who ran Ufa, in the tragic role of Rath, the cartoon implied that authoritarianism (symbolized by the reactionary, monarchical colors of black, red, and white) could ruin even conservatives. The caption described “the fall of a solidly middle-class politician, finished by the seductive arts of the coquettish government of Lola Banderola, and movingly playing the parliamentary clown.” This Social Democratic cartoon used the film's iconography to warn against the appeal of authoritarianism at a time when democratic institutions were struggling to solve mounting problems. These national reactions demonstrated The Blue Angel's immediate currency in Göttingen, showing that observers on the left and right agreed that the concept of powerful Page 157 → sexual femininity was a threat itself and acted as a metaphor for social and political trends they deemed dangerous. The Blue Angel opened to a sold-out crowd in Göttingen at the Capitol Theater on 17 June 1930. Extra chairs had to be brought in to accommodate the overflow crowd at the glitzy premiere. Mostly positive local responses echoed national reviews’ focus on sound and technical quality and the sexually charged performances of Jannings and Dietrich. But Göttingen reviewers contextualized these perspectives in two politically relevant ways. Reviewers, first, celebrated the technical quality of The Blue Angel, especially its effective wedding of music and dialogue.11 Above all, the cool, controlling sexuality of Friedrich Holländer's song “Falling in Love Again,” which Lola used to entrap and destroy Rath, defined what many reviewers thought about the film as moral tale.12 This hit song amplified the seductive quality of mass culture and thus underscored the notion that women controlling their own sexuality threatened traditional, male-controlled morality. Second, critics’ responses to the link between sex and power in the film also favored conservative readings. The emphasis in all reviews on Lola /Dietrich's “sex appeal” pointed to the importance of male perspectives in shaping discourses about cinema. In the

Tageblatt Heinz Koch drew universal lessons from his viewing of The Blue Angel, defining “humanity” itself through the male character of Rath and contrasting it with Lola's distinctively feminine “sex appeal.”13 Although Koch relished Dietrich's performance, he found the film to be a “human tragedy” about “a brainless, unconcerned instinctual creature of the dangerous-ingenuous type, whose influence works directly upon intellectual, ivorytowered men like Professor Rath in a vague yet destructive manner.” For Maaß in the Zeitung, too, Rath was a tragic man who made too much of his love for Lola.14 As we have seen in the history of the Händel Festival and especially sharpshooting, conservatives used cultural activities to equate humanity and men, thus pointing to the need for male control of public life. Of this film Koch simply said, “Ecce homo,” not “Ecce humanitas.” Reviewers did use Marlene Dietrich's breakthrough performance to remark on the sexual power of female characters and movie stars.15 In the Zeitung Max Maaß wrote that Dietrich's Lola was “a whore [Dirne], who shows some heart here and there…. One simply cannot be angry with this little creature with such an attractive appearance: that's just how she is.”16 For Heinz Koch, the film's entire effect turned on the fact that Lola's sexual prowess undermined education, sensibility, caution, and emotional distance—in short, bourgeois masculinity. It was the “maddening aura of a little blonde beast's sex appeal that makes the great man into a little man.”17 The Volksblatt review decried Page 158 → Sternberg's emphasis on “sex appeal” when altering Mann's original novel. Whereas the middle-class papers preferred the film version, Social Democrats argued that the movie “weakens the psychological dignity” of the original story and its critique of Germans’ obsession with status.18 Left-wing reception in Göttingen thus blamed “sex appeal” and, in this case, the appeal of mass culture for muting potential social critique in The Blue Angel. The fact that the Volksblatt and Tageblatt could both use this film to make political points (in 1930, no less, when they were otherwise ripping each other apart) indicated the concern many Göttingers felt about men losing control of the public sphere.19 By 1930 local media had developed significant weight in shaping views about mass culture, since all four papers published cinema articles and reviews every day—far more material than about any other cultural activity. Newspapers helped contextualize the political implications of cinema. Reviews in Göttingen offered a compelling image of threats to male authority at a time when conservatives (the Nazi Party and Brüning's national government) employed gendered definitions of mass culture and politics to decry democracy.20 And given Marlene Dietrich's highly publicized defection to Hollywood on the heels of The Blue Angel's success, commentators also worried about losing control of German cinema to the United States—at the very time that debate about the US Young Plan to refinance Germany's war reparations payments was provoking a constitutional crisis that yielded the authoritarian Brüning government. 21 The popularity of The Blue Angel therefore made it an effective vehicle for advocating ideas in 1930 that Nazis were using to attack the Weimar Republic. Even Social Democrats agreed with some points. Taking lessons from cinema reinforced the Right's claim that solutions to current problems lay outside democratic mechanisms. And these interpretations continued to resonate into the Third Reich. Göttingen papers cited Sternberg's film as a benchmark of cinematic appeal as late as 1935.22 In contrast to common responses to Sternberg's picture, reactions in Göttingen to two 1930 films about the Great War, Westfront 1918 and All Quiet on the Western Front, made especially clear the explosive differences of thought on cinema's role in German society.23 Unlike sharpshooting and Händel Festival, which were constructed explicitly as local opportunities to heal and rebuild Germany, the connection between the Great War and cinema was more contentious. World War I had served as midwife to both the Weimar Republic and the contemporary German film industry. The broad impact of films about the Great War conjoined the most painful aspects of Weimar politics with the most popular form of Weimar culture. And filmed versions of war offered potentially Page 159 → greater controversy and commercial windfall than other cultural representations of the conflict.24 G. W. Pabst's Westfront 1918, which debuted in Berlin on 23 May 1930, treated war realistically and advocated rapprochement between France and Germany. Its frankness prompted responses ranging from patriotic enthusiasm to strong anti-war sentiment. Based on Ernst Johannsen's 1929 novel Four from the Infantry, Westfront 1918 was Pabst's first effort with sound and the first German sound film about the war. It portrayed the horrors of trench warfare by following three infantrymen and their lieutenant at the front in France and back home in Germany toward the end of the fighting. The film was one of the ten top grossing films of the season in Germany, so Pabst's

realism might shock but did not necessarily outrage. Westfront's grand opening in Göttingen at the Capitol on 1 July 1930 coincided with several events that underscored the ongoing direct impact of the Great War: public events to celebrate Allied forces’ evacuation of the Rhineland, former POWs marching against unemployment among veterans, and debate about the Young Plan. In each case, right-leaning parties benefited most from these concerns, especially in the volatile political campaign of that summer. Reviewers from the Göttinger Tageblatt, Zeitung, and Volksblatt all enthusiastically endorsed Westfront 1918, though for very different reasons. In the arch-conservative Tageblatt Heinz Koch gravely commended Pabst's realistic depiction of valor and sacrifice, calling it “the cinematic gravestone of the unknown German soldier.”25 The Social Democratic Volksblatt, on the other hand, praised Westfront as an “accusation against the war and National Socialist supporters of war.”26 The liberal Göttinger Zeitung maintained that the film revealed the “countenance of war” and that it condemned the “great senselessness” of 1914 to 1918.27 Westfront's clear statement about the horrors of war was therefore neutral enough to bring together critics from across the political spectrum. As was the case for other cultural activities in Göttingen, though, this film's ability to unite conflicting political opinions bolstered conservatives like Koch who had consistently lamented Weimar's fragmented political scene. Something similar had happened with reviews of The Blue Angel. The common condemnation of the suffering portrayed in Westfront in all three papers lent support to the conservative, nationalist desire to honor fallen soldiers rather than address attendant difficult issues such as the validity of the war, the issue of guilt, and the justice of the ensuing peace. All Quiet on the Western Front, on the other hand, poured gasoline on existing fiery debates.28 Although the publication of Erich Maria Remarque's Page 160 → book in January 1929 had prompted attacks and protests, detractors could not concentrate on a single time and place like a film premiere. Controversy had already helped the novel become the world's best-selling book. After German studios declined to make the film, Universal Studios in Hollywood undertook the project with Lewis Milestone directing. The film (and book) follows a group of idealistic German high school students and their natural leader, Paul Bäumer, during four years of war, portraying their growing up and camaraderie through scenes of battle, celebration, bitter trips back home, and death. Its American release in May 1930 generated both sharp criticism and strong support, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. In Paris, London, and Brussels All Quiet garnered enormous attention and generally good reviews. Anticipating opposition in Germany, Universal made some judicious edits before the German-language dubbed version premiered in Berlin on 4 December 1930.29 The movie arrived to a very different political atmosphere than had The Blue Angel or Westfront 1918. The ruling national coalition fell apart in March 1930. In July President Paul von Hindenburg and Chancellor Heinrich Brüning invoked the Weimar constitution's Article 48 on emergency powers to dissolve the Reichstag and ruled by presidential decree, a precedent Hitler would follow in 1933. In the subsequent September 1930 elections the Nazi Party earned the second-largest majority in parliament, and more voters endorsed the Communists as well. Göttingers’ support for Hitler's party in that election rose to nearly 38 percent. The Nazis also remained the largest group on the Göttingen City Council. Thus, while the agencies governing film policy and policing had not changed between the two releases, the tenor of government had shifted in Berlin and in Göttingen that year. On 5 December 1930, the second night of the premiere, Joseph Goebbels (then NDSAP Propaganda Director and head of the Party in Berlin) and a group of Nazis halted the showing by shouting “Jewish film,” tossing stink bombs, and releasing mice in the aisles. Marches, fights, and mayhem across Berlin followed for the next few days. Together with the raucous protests in Berlin, direct appeals from politicians of Saxony, Brunswick, Thuringia, Württemburg, and Bavaria convinced the Appellate Censorship Board that the film was “anti-German” and dangerous. They banned it on 10 December 1930, as a threat to public order and “German reputation” at home and abroad.30 Göttingen newspapers reported the protests and debates in great detail.31 They used the film's debut and the scandal it caused as vehicles for pushing ideological lines about the war, the uneasy peace, and the Republic that followed. The Tageblatt came out strongly against Milestone's film and celebrated Page 161 → its prohibition as “Goebbels's Victory!” The Volksblatt called the ban a “Suppression of the Truth” and featured a cartoon of Prussian soldiers marching behind a triumphant Wilhelm II, crushing everyone in their way, with the caption

“This is how films must look to tell the truth in Germany.” The Tageblatt also featured a cartoon implying that showing Milestone's film represented Germany's surrender to communism. The Zeitung reported on the debates and maintained that the Nazis poisoned the atmosphere. The controversy dominated the news for days after the ban and dragged on for months.32 The Social Democratic Volksheim finally showed Göttingers a significantly altered version in June 1932.33 Different responses in Göttingen to Westfront and All Quiet highlighted local trends in political behavior and the role that cinema played as a vehicle for connecting political ideology with daily life. Amid rising conflict, conservative support for the banning of All Quiet made sense to many Göttingers. Discussions in newspapers about the film's provocative and divisive nature jibed with the successful right-wing campaign to reject the unstable democratic “system” that those on the right said kept Germany weak and fractured. For very different reasons both Westfront 1918 and All Quiet bolstered conservative claims that only “apolitical,” non-parliamentary solutions could unite Germans. Pabst's film illustrated that “safer” treatments of the war could pass increasingly cautious Censorship Boards, garner a broad audience, and serve as the revenue-generating and edifying form of mass culture that Göttingen authorities preferred.34 Milestone's epic, on the other hand, pointed out the danger of critical filmmaking. Accordingly, filmmakers censored themselves more thereafter.35 Because of the material interests at stake and established conservative views in Göttingen, critical discussions about The Blue Angel, Westfront, and All Quiet helped ensure that conservative films and reactions to them would have the most currency there. This situation in turn helped normalize Hitler's aggressive nationalism in the two years before the National Socialist Party actually gained power in Germany. Even before the brouhaha over All Quiet on the Western Front, police were tightening cinema regulations. Göttingen police had to monitor the growing number of film screenings outside movie houses, especially by voluntary associations. An April 1931 national law mandated that such limited screenings were approved solely for those private audiences. This rule implied that some groups might be using their non-profit status to screen films more broadly, which could make public an otherwise outlawed film or cut into the profits of the film industry.36 In an effort to prevent illegal screenings of all kinds, the Interior Ministry warned local police in late 1930 to watch out for Page 162 → forged certificates of approval for prohibited films.37 Police even debated rules about selling concessions at the movies.38 As well, tension between national regulation and local enforcement, which had shaped cinema regulation since the early 1920s, continued to inform police work. A 1928 Interior Ministry notice to all local police, for instance, said that “local police authorities are fundamentally independent of the Motion Picture Law's right to prohibit films and do not in any way serve as post-censors [Nachzensor].”39 National authorities in 1930 also tried to strengthen the German film industry by constricting foreign films’ access to German markets. All films made outside Germany now had to obtain permission from the Minister of Interior even to be screened before Censorship Boards.40 Tighter regulation and self-censorship in the early 1930s were not merely responses to conflicts about controversial films such as All Quiet. Growing political volatility, economic dislocation, and films about hotbutton topics pushed already conservative regulations further to the right. Police in Göttingen began scrutinizing politically oriented organizations to a greater degree in the late 1920s. And even before the right-wing victory in 1929, the generally conservative tendencies of local officials increased the likelihood that leftist groups would get in trouble.41 These regulations followed the spirit of laws originating in 1920. They tried to make the production, consumption, and discussion of movies into tools for promoting established cultural and economic interests, thus limiting the space for critical movie making and reception. Political shifts around 1930 fortified the conservative tendencies in Göttingen's rules governing cinema, as well as the perspectives of most local authorities and prominent cultural purveyors. The explosion of activity surrounding cinema in 1930, in turn, gave those on the political right greater opportunity to articulate their beliefs through a popular medium. Events of 1930 crystallized these developments, representing a critical, final step toward making Göttingen into a Nazi town.

A New Mandate through an Established Medium, 1931–34

Shifts in cultural space—actual locations of production and consumption, as well as discourses about culture's meaning—helped transform Göttingen into a Nazi town, a place where National Socialist ideas paralleled important facets of citizens’ daily lives. Sharpshooting's changes in the mid- to late 1920s brought more men to an activity that celebrated militarism, anti-democratic governance, and traditional male authority. Alterations in the Händel Festival Page 163 → beginning in the late 1920s validated established “German” music over experimentation. Finally, by 1930 rules and reception in Göttingen were promoting conservative readings of cinema's meaning. As the Nazi Party grew in popularity at this time, developments in all three cultural activities studied here provided Göttingen citizens ways outside the town hall to participate in the changes the Nazis were proposing. For cinema specifically, changes after 1930 began in many ways the process of “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) that the Third Reich would push starting in 1933. That effort, so important for Nazi leaders, proceeded through an established local system of regulation, film screening, consumption, and discussion. Studying this process from the bottom up—instead of from the top down, as most scholars do—explains the role average Germans played in building Nazi policy. And it helps us understand how this Nazi town became integrated into the Third Reich. During a flurry of laws and explanations in the early 1930s, officials increased control over cinema in small yet important ways. In September 1932 the Göttingen Magistracy made small alterations to entertainment tax regulations, reflecting 1929 national laws.42 The head Senator signing the laws and most correspondence about cinema had been doing so for much of the Weimar period and would continue this role after 1933. Police at the regional and local levels redoubled efforts in the early 1930s to keep youth away from films not approved for kids.43 Building upon 1930 regulations for private screenings of feature films, new rules in 1932 and 1933 required local police to monitor strictly the use of eight- and sixteen-millimeter films, the sort that organizations and even individuals might show.44 In each case these regulations amplified or expanded portions of the 1920 Motion Picture Law. Concern about celluloid film's highly flammable nature had motivated police supervision of screenings since the turn of the century, sometimes as much as their interest in films’ content. An October 1931 regional regulation on arrangements inside movie houses intensified police supervision.45 These safety issues brought police even more directly into the activities of movie houses and various local organizations. October 1931 regulations from the Reich President encouraged cultural activities that would both help the economy and reduce political tensions.46 Finally, Göttingen police received notice in November 1932 that national control of cinema had moved from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry for Science, Art and Popular Education. This bureaucratic shift created the broader mechanism for Goebbels's control of cinema as Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, a position he assumed just a few months later. Regulators clearly understood that cinema shaped public perceptions of the world. Page 164 → Both local and national laws during the Weimar Republic had in fact consistently focused on how best to harness this mass culture for the purposes of education, in the broadest sense. As anti-democratic forces grew stronger in 1932, such rules promoted supposedly politically “neutral” ideas like nationalism, cultural conservatism, and traditional male authority. These regulations also created mechanisms by which Third Reich officials would push such notions even more vigorously. Political chaos at the local and national levels failed to solve worsening economic problems. Nazis in Göttingen cleverly created political deadlock by refusing to work with SPD Council members and then blaming partisanship for this stalemate. Their proposed “solution”—to bypass democracy with strong leadership—might have seemed to cinema owners, many local cultural critics, and even some average moviegoers very much like the way cinema had successfully grown in Göttingen. The ramifications in Göttingen of two movies filmed and approved during the Weimar era but screened after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 illustrated connections between Weimar and Nazi cinema and the means by which changes to cinema would proceed in the Third Reich. First, The Chorale of Leuthen was shot in 1932 and passed the Censorship Board on 30 January 1933, the day that Hitler became Chancellor. It premiered a few days later in Stuttgart and then again a month later in Berlin for the entire new cabinet and Hitler himself. The film, which concerns one of Frederick the Great's early victories in the Seven Years’ War, was one of director and producer Carl Froelich's many interwar successes. The many “old Fritz” films of the 1920s and 1930s reflected

changing values attached to this monarch as a symbol of authority, as well as audiences’ twin desires for escapist entertainment and authoritarian solutions to problems of the day.47 The Göttinger Zeitung critic praised Froelich's use of “splendid, colorful pictures, like those we remember from the earlier Fredericus-Films,” as well as the sophisticated film technique.48 Heinz Koch's lengthy review in the Tageblatt detailed the cinematic biography of the ruler and maintained that “the moral effect of these films on the broad masses of movie-goers [has been] unmistakably great and generally good news for national consciousness.” Koch made the by-then-familiar association between Frederick and Hitler, asserting that the “lonesome man on the Prussian throne is today a transfigured idol for the German Volk.” But The Chorale of Leuthen also reminded him that the industry “has begun in recent years to think about its ethical, moral and national obligation.”49 Such heroic films indicated to Koch, in other words, that many people in the film industry had sympathized with Nazi policies before Hitler came to power. Popular with Göttingen audiences and promoted by tax regulations, Page 165 → historical epics like Chorale had long been safe venues for celebrating glorious moments in the “German” past and hinting at ways to recapture that splendor. They formed an important thematic bridge between Weimar and Nazi cinema. Helmut Korte points to late 1931 and early 1932 as the start of a steady growth in the production of filmed nationalist epics such as Yorck, Blush of Dawn, Refugees, and Marshall Forward that promoted ideas compatible with Nazism through an already popular genre.50 Local regulation and criticism made these movies natural vehicles for emphasizing ideas that undergirded Nazism. Second, events triggered by the screening of Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New revealed the importance of established relations between local officials and cinema owners, as well as the new power Hitler's regime gave them. Already on the local police watch list, the Academic Organization of Friends of the New Russia showed Eisenstein's silent film at the struggling Universum Theater, which had taken over the Volkshaus in 1932.51 The only review, a short critique in the Zeitung, clearly wished to step quickly over this anomaly. The critic recognized that a Russian film about collectivization was “naturally fertile soil for Soviet propaganda,” so he remained “quite skeptical.”52 Unfortunately for the Universum and the Friends of the New Russia, their screening could not have come at a worse time. The day after Eisenstein's paean to Soviet collectivization opened in Göttingen, the German Reichstag was burned. Nazis blamed the communists and, with the Center Party's support, voted Hitler emergency dictatorial powers, which he used to suppress oppositional groups, especially those on the left. In this atmosphere personal connections and financial stability mattered as much as political acumen. The Universum's management had none of these things. Under Leimbach's direction, the Volkshaus had been an important part of the Göttingen movie scene, playing the educational and “culturally valuable” films that the Magistracy and critics loved. In the late 1920s the commercial movie houses eclipsed educational theaters. When Leimbach's lease on the Volkshaus expired in December 1931, a businessman from nearby Kassel bought the theater. For a few months it played movies, then varieté. In October 1932 Heinrich Driessen, from Westphalia, took over what had become the Universum movie theater.53 Although Ernst Heidelberg and Fritz Hoffmann controlled the lion's share of Göttingen's market, tax laws encouraged commercial theaters to show “educational” and “culturally valuable” movies. Heidelberg and Hoffmann therefore tried to take over this market, too. In April 1933 they used Third Reich authority to have the Universum closed down. On 4 February Heidelberg and Hoffmann had taken out a joint advertisement in both the Tageblatt Page 166 → and Zeitung decrying the Universum's “lurid advertising,” and they claimed that its showing of the sensational Children Before the Court caused “harm to the reputation of German film.” Despite playing the Eisenstein film shortly thereafter, the cinema continued to show movies sporadically during 1933. On 5 December it reopened with sound facilities and a popular Hans Albers film, The Grabber, about Jack the Ripper. But a week later Heidelberg reported to the Magistracy, with a witness, that Universum had failed to pay ticket taxes collected 6 December. The Magistracy then demanded these and other back taxes (about 250 Marks) from Driessen but had to track him down in Essen, since he had moved without informing the police. For the next sixteen months Göttingen officials tried to recover the money but only managed to collect 50 Marks by taking it out of Driessen's utilities deposit.54 Then they closed the Universum Theater. The Universum's Eisenstein program in February 1933 put it at odds ideologically with the state and most Göttingers.55 The management made a mistake in not paying its taxes. And Heidelberg's jealous pursuit placed

transgressions in front of authorities. Together, these factors endangered the Universum's existence. But equally important, as outsiders, neither the Kassel owner nor the Westphalian manager had much contact with Göttingen government officials in charge of supervising cinema. Heidelberg's relationship with the Magistracy was not always congenial. He, too, was investigated for tax evasion shortly after fingering the Universum.56 But he and Hoffmann always worked closely with the Magistracy and police. When Leimbach ran the Volkshaus, he too had regular contact with city officials, as did those in charge of the Urania. Any one of the Universum's mistakes might have caused problems for the theater, but Driessen failed to mitigate any of them by building a relationship with civic officials. Successful cinemas were well integrated into city structures, and that connection became more important during the Third Reich, especially as growing state involvement starting in 1933 raised the stakes of theater management. Most filmmakers, theater owners, and critics had little trouble adapting to the new regime's rules and expectations about film. But the parameters were more constrained, and the consequences of stepping outside them were greater. Even citizens could make use of stronger state laws in 1933: witness local responses to the 1932 abortion drama First Right of the Child. The film was directed by Fritz Wendhausen and written by NSDAP member Thea von Harbou, both of whom had successful careers in Weimar and Nazi Germany. The subject matter and female doctor's perspective rankled conservatives when it played in March 1933 at the Central Theater in Göttingen. Ironically, one of the Page 167 → few female professors at the university published an attack in the Tageblatt on the “degenerate” and “Marxist trash.”57 The same day police wrote to owner Fritz Hoffmann that, due to “multiple complaints from the public,” the film was banned “for reasons of public safety.” Local police explained to the Film Censorship Board their extraordinary measures, namely, ignoring national control of censorship that had been in place since 1928. They said the film elicited “serious displeasure from the broadest circles of the population.” Police also stressed that the local NSDAP favored banning it.58 In fact the Censorship Board heard much the same from citizens and Party officials across Germany, and they prohibited the movie nationally on 13 May. This move was one of the very few times during the whole interwar period that local police stopped a film approved by the national Censorship Board. Like the Universum's closure, this incident reveals the fact that individuals—at least influential and well-connected ones—could harness new state power, even prompting the central government to take action. Third Reich leaders, especially Joseph Goebbels, strengthened existing measures of organizing, controlling, and financing movies. These moves ultimately had a deep impact on German cinema. In June 1933 the national government renewed protectionist laws passed in 1930 to scrutinize foreign films.59 Then in July new laws created the Reich Film Chamber, two months before the other Chambers (music, visual arts, literature, press, radio) that eventually comprised the Reich Culture Chamber. The Reich Film Chamber affected the lives of virtually every person involved in cinema. Goebbels and his Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda directed this hierarchical professional organization. The Film Chamber worked effectively in part because it simply took over the already powerful, well-organized Association of German Film Industry and the much larger Reich Association of German Cinema Owners.60 Most members of these “coordinated” organizations welcomed National Socialist restructuring.61 The film industry also generally appreciated the Third Reich's greater hand in financing (and thus shaping) films, especially the creation of the centralized Reich Film Bank in June 1933 to centralize funding for film projects. It gave the government greater direct or indirect control of much of the German film industry. By 1935 the Film Bank was financing 70 percent of all German movies.62 The Reich Film Chamber's most far-reaching influence was the exclusion of “undesirable and destructive elements” (leftists, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, foreigners, and especially Jews) from all aspects of the film industry. This profound change met with little resistance. The “Aryan Clause” of 30 June 1933 explicitly forced film companies to ban Jews from all parts of the Page 168 → film industry, slowly expelling about 5,000 people.63 Ufa had already led the way by dismissing its Jewish employees in late March.64 Despite some concern about a drop in quality or backlash against the regime's racist policy in the world film market, the Film Chamber directed a broad campaign to excise any “Jewish influence” and create a purely “German” cinema. But as they did in other cultural activities, Nazi leaders had to settle for excluding Jews, since “Jewish influences” were harder to identify and expunge.

Local cultural regulations passed in 1933 expanded the Göttingen Magistracy's ability to encourage films that could aid this effort. In July 1933 the Magistracy expanded previous tax exemptions to include “culturally or statepolitically valuable” films.65 These policies used regulatory mechanisms originating in the Kaiserreich to promote the National Socialist vision of cinema. In particular, the equation of what was “state-politically valuable” with films that had long been rated “culturally” valuable signaled the Third Reich's desire to anchor its ideas in established cultural practices. Some citizens founded a branch of the German Movie Theater Association (Deutsche Filmbühne) in December 1933 to support these goals.66 Newspapers, which had shaped discourses about cinema since the late 1920s, also advanced a similar view of films. Most reviewers preferred nationalist, literary, and uncritical movies. They also endorsed efforts to strengthen Germany's film industry. The major exception to these trends had always been the Social Democratic Volksblatt. Although this newspaper too valued the German film industry and “elevated” movies, its coverage criticized nationalist films and laws. On 28 February 1933 the new regime used the Enabling Act to close down all left-wing newspapers. The Volksblatt's closure restricted perspectives in town on politics and solidified the dominant conservative, nationalist political leanings of Göttingen. This move impacted cinema, though, less significantly, since the Volksblatt had never covered film as much as the other papers. And the Volksblatt had spent less ink on cinema since 1930, because it was singularly focused on the SPD's struggle against the Nazi Party, a fight they did not wage culturally. At the same time the Göttinger Nachrichten (Göttingen News) moved in October from being a section of a regional newspaper to a daily in Göttingen and the official NSDAP organ. Both the Tageblatt and Nachrichten trumpeted Nazi ideology, while the Zeitung toned down its liberalism and toed the regime's line. (The regional Niedersächsische Morgenpost had folded in 1931.) Overall, these changes in cinema reporting continued the enthusiasm that had always characterized cinema coverage. Göttingen media remained determined to promote local cultural life and economy, and they used new Third Reich regulations to that end. Page 169 → Responses in newspapers to the three big 1933 Nazi propaganda feature films—SA Man Brand, Hitler Youth Quex, and Victory of Faith—illustrated local media's important role in integrating Göttingen into the Third Reich. The familiar ritual of a big national debut followed by a gala local opening anchored Third Reich policies in local experience. First, Franz Seitz's July 1933 SA Man Brand earned the rating “artistically especially valuable” and “valuable for national education” from the Film Censorship Board. Goebbels himself and the Nazi press, though, remained divided about the worth of this first real attempt to create an avowedly National Socialist film.67 The movie portrays Brand's self-sacrificing death at the hands of communists as the means for personal and political National Socialist liberation, casting the SA as Nazism's advance guard. In the Göttinger Tageblatt Adolph Stein (still writing from Berlin as “Rumpelstilzchen”) praised this “chapter of world history” as Fatherlandish, heroic, nationalist, and ultimately German.68 Heinz Koch's less positive local review argued that the film's vague context and montage techniques obscured the motivations of the SA. Still, he called it “an absolutely great success” evoking old battles and imagining a great German future. “‘SA Man Brand’ is the silent hero of our time,” Koch concluded, and the packed house and thunderous applause proved it.69 This mixed review from the city's most prominent cultural critic shaped discourses about new “Nazi cinema” in Göttingen. Koch's informed, cautious optimism encouraged viewers to find value even in a heavy-handed propaganda piece. Second, like Brand, the bigger Ufa production Hitler Youth Quex allegorized the Nazi “movement” through one person's experience. Contact with the Hitler Youth and young Nazi leaders convinces the working-class youth “Quex” that his future lies with the National Socialists rather than his father's sloppy trade unionists or dangerous female communists. Based on a real person, Quex too perishes so that National Socialism may redeem family and nation. The “artistically especially valuable” movie opened in September and reflected the new government's greater confidence after nine months in power. Quex featured many of the techniques that had made Weimar films successful.70 Likewise the Third Reich employed the familiar venue of a gala premiere to connect political leaders (including Hitler, Goebbels, and Hitler Youth Führer Bladur von Schirach) with mass culture. The resplendent debut in Göttingen at the Capitol with flags and marching Hitler Youth replicated the film's symbolism. Unlike SA Man Brand, Hitler Youth Que's local premiere also included civic and Party leaders, as well as representatives

from professional organizations, the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth. The public spectacle drew from previous cinematic events and other public festivals. Heinz Koch situated the film in Page 170 → national and local contexts. He agreed with Goebbels that it “brings the National Socialist world of ideas to the silver screen” and emphasized its effect at the Capitol, when surrounded by “the symbols of the new Reich” and its representatives.71 Although the Zeitung took a slightly cooler approach, the reviewer also described the heightened effect at Capitol and called Quex “a piece of national socialist combat history” with a “packed format” that had a “strong effect.” The review did remark that the film's “fables leave reality behind” and divide the world into black and white “poles.” Still, the final positive verdict celebrated National Socialist salvation.72 Finally, Leni Riefenstahl's Victory of Faith, a huge Ufa documentary of the NSDAP's September 1933 Nuremberg rally, created a fascist aesthetic and evoked a truly mass gaze. It marked a transition in Third Reich cinematic propaganda from fictionalized representations of Nazi ideals to tightly controlled documentary feature films and newsreels.73 The Tageblatt breathlessly described the big premiere in Berlin on 4 December 1933 with Hitler, Goebbels, and a host of other Reich luminaries in attendance. Richard Strauss, Germany's greatest living composer and President of the Reich Music Chamber, directed the orchestral introductory program.74 Expectations for Victory of Faith were especially high after Goebbels had two months earlier publicly halted a bio-picture about Nazi “martyr” Horst Wessel for being too formulaic.75 Riefenstahl's film opened in Göttingen on 16 January 1934 at both the Capitol and Central, the first time any film had ever achieved double billing. Heinz Koch underscored the mass gaze the film offered. He wrote that “Hitler's figure [Gestalt] stands completely and totally alive at the center of the powerful masses.”76 Another review maintained that the film “managed to add a political motive to art and place art at the service of politics.”77 Victory of Faith visualized fascist ideology and aestheticized politics in a unique and compelling way, a feat Riefenstahl perfected a year later with Triumph of the Will.78 As with Hitler Youth Quex, flags, dignitaries, and the festive local premiere incorporated Göttingen viewers into the film's mass perspective. The explicit efforts to coordinate mass cultural and local rituals signaled cinema's intensified public role. Despite the attention paid to these semi-official propaganda pieces, Göttingen moviegoers in 1933 and 1934 chiefly flocked to entertainment like Paprika, A Night in Paradise, The Diamonds of the Tzars, Impossible Love, Master Detective, Baby, Three Blue Boys and One Blonde Girl, and It's About Love. For the most part, reviewers loved them, but they especially praised serious dramas like Anna and Elizabeth or Emil Jannings's The Black Whale, as well as scholarly documentaries like Congorilla. So-called Heimat films fared well, too. After 1933 German studios made fewer political potboilers based on Page 171 → the present or recent past. Old historical dramas like The Rebel (released in 1932 and shown for the third time in Göttingen in 1933) and new ones such as The Judas from Tirol remained critics’ favorites. They reported that audiences liked the patriotic films, too. Adventure and science fiction movies offered local writers a broad field for discussing ideology, ethics, and human relations. In reviews of The Tunnel, for example, Heinz Koch and Max Maaß highlighted the technological marvel and collective struggle to build a tunnel between Europe and America, while the Göttinger Nachrichten’s main film reviewer saw a portrayal of the struggle against Marxism.79 Ultimately movies in the Third Reich offered viewers a blend of ideology, entertainment, control, and even space for resistance.80 While we cannot know the degree to which any film influenced the thoughts of moviegoers, local cultural purveyors clearly shaped perceptions about cinema. By determining which films showed in Göttingen, regulations of course also defined Göttingers’ experiences with cinema. In February 1934 the Third Reich crafted a major vehicle for re-directing cinema by revising the 1920 Motion Picture Law.81 The 1934 law followed the same basic procedures, requiring all domestic and foreign movies for public or private viewing to be approved by the Film Censorship Board (now solely in Berlin). Films could receive special identification “as state-politically valuable, as artistically, as educationally or as culturally valuable” or even “especially valuable.” These labels mirrored those passed in early 1933 and echoed regulations beginning with the 1920 law. The 1934 Motion Picture Law's three major changes from past rules were, first, to require German film scripts to be approved by the new Reich Film Script Director before shooting. This office also advocated for and adjusted scripts, suggesting corrections to banned films and ensuring that movies generally fit with the “spirit of the times.” Second, on the other end of the process, the Reich Minister for Enlightenment

and Propaganda (Goebbels) had the authority to overturn Censorship Board decisions. Third, the new law made movies more beholden to state and ideological interests. Like previous regulations, it prohibited films that offended “religious, moral or artistic sensibilities” or “posed a challenge to security, the interests of the state or Germany's reputation abroad.” But the 1934 law went further to mandate that a movie could be banned if it endangered the “essential interests of the State” or “National Socialist…sensibilities.” These restrictions automatically ruled out films with a left-wing message or those made by Jews. Goebbels did, however, make some exceptions for questionable foreign-made films until 1935 and even allowed a few Jews to continue working in the film industry.82 Penalties remained about the same as under the Weimar Republic: up to a 150 Mark fine and /or up to one Page 172 → year in prison.83 Ultimately the 1934 Motion Picture Law represented a Nazi extension of the 1920 law that made the national government, especially Goebbels, more involved in cinema life. Göttingen's Magistracy had already in July 1933 revised local rules to account for more politically defined tax discounts but otherwise continued their established policies toward cinema. Indeed, the 1934 law maintained two other important features of the 1920 Motion Picture Law: local authorities still had the right to set tax rates, and local police enforced regulations. Subsequent national rules also put Göttingen's Lord Mayor in charge of overseeing local educational film libraries.84 The persistent danger of flammable celluloid kept police involved in film screenings, where they could check content as well as safety. And local police continued to monitor closely all eight- and sixteen-millimeter film screenings, which were often used for educational or private purposes.85 If anything, the 1934 law strengthened the role of local authorities in cinema life. Through national and local regulation, the Third Reich sought to balance ideological and economic desires. Restrictions on who could make movies and some boycotts abroad of Third Reich movies hurt the German film industry, as did the international depression. The number of film production and distribution firms in Germany dropped precipitously from 1932 to 1934. The new Film Credit Bank's close work with government officials kept Hitler's regime intimately involved in the production of motion pictures. For ideological and financial reasons, the three primary national institutions shaping Nazi cinema—the Reich Film Chamber, Goebbels's Ministry, and the Film Credit Bank—all intensified the broad tendency since 1930 toward self-censorship in German moviemaking. Stricter regulations and uncompromising racial policies made this self-censorship still more limiting. Nevertheless, Goebbels's attempt to bolster the film industry yielded mostly light entertaining pieces that could have been made in the Weimar period.86 By 1934 cinema had changed in Göttingen as a result of developments over the previous four years, not merely since the Nazis came to power in 1933. The people and policies that shaped Göttingen cinema life remained centered on business interests, city revenue, and the promotion of elite and nationalist movies. Such had been the aims that supported Nazism starting around 1930. Individual relationships mattered even more, as the stakes for showing movies had gone up. And the media remained instrumental for connecting local and national experience through film. As with sharpshooting and the Händel Festival, we can recognize the deeper roots necessary for the Third Reich to “coordinate” cinema in Göttingen. For Göttingers and Germans generally, Page 173 → cinema during these years became a window onto and vehicle for participating in political change.

The Politics of Entertainment, 1935–38 Regulations and personnel changes that defined cinema in the Third Reich were in place by 1935. But unlike efforts to “coordinate” sharpshooting or the Händel Festival (or sports or most other cultural activities, for that matter), Third Reich officials’ interest in shaping cinema did not abate thereafter. In particular, they sought to use laws passed between 1930 and 1935 to purify, improve, and prop up German cinema, which continued to atrophy compared to other national cinemas, especially that of the United States. Economic motivations in fact drove much of what local and national authorities tried to do, usually bringing them together. Cinema regulations, which grew from long-standing support for Nazi ideas, allowed Göttingers to participate in Third Reich cultural life and politics. Nevertheless, individuals continued to exercise influence on this tight weave of national and local interests, a fact that both the positive and negative experiences of local cinema figures after 1935 made clear. The year 1935 has served as an important turning point in this study of Göttingen's interwar culture, marking the

stabilization of Nazi efforts to “coordinate” cultural activities. Germany's decision to rearm that year redirected some long-held expectations of sharpshooting. And playing a lead part in the 1935 Reich-wide Bach-HändelSchütz Celebration returned the Händel Festival to international prominence by celebrating “German” music. But while Nazi efforts appeared to “solve” tensions in these other two activities to their advantage, Third Reich cultural policies were clearly weakening German cinema by 1935. The number of feature films created in Germany and their ability to secure international distribution continued to fall. And as domestic audiences grew—more than three times as many Germans visited movie houses in 1936 as in 1933—and production coasts climbed, distributors gave foreign (especially Hollywood) films more screen time.87 The Nazi regime responded in part by further consolidating financing in 1936.88 Financial concerns at the heart of regulations since 1920 had aimed to balance ideology with economic windfall. Göttingen authorities and cultural purveyors had wedded these two aims effectively. Third Reich authorities recognized by 1935 the need to continue this synchronicity. Indeed, the Reich Film Chamber notified local authorities in July 1934 that members had obligations to both their local tax bases Page 174 → and to the Chamber.89 But these commitments sometimes clashed, and the tension between local and national aims that we have seen in the previous two case studies became more apparent in Göttingen cinema starting in 1935. The high-profile example of Leni Riefenstahl's April 1935 Triumph of the Will showed one effective way in which the Third Reich wove national-local consumption together to bolster the regime, strengthen the film industry, and promote its ideology abroad.90 After the mixed success of 1933 Nazi feature films, Goebbels pressed the film industry to create more entertaining features and use newsreels for propaganda.91 Triumph of the Will combined the two into a feature-length documentary about the 1934 NSDAP rally in Nuremberg. Riefenstahl visualized the new fascist relationship between leader and citizen and introduced Hitler's regime to the world.92 Responses to the film across Germany illustrated the close connection between government intention, film production, and critical reception. But Triumph succeeded in part because those constituencies had by 1935 worked out a system to reinforce each other. Like other German cities, Göttingen premiered the film with its own display of the symbols and personalities that Riefenstahl captured on film. Both the Tageblatt and Nachrichten featured lengthy preview articles with pictures and detailed reviews after its showing there in May. (The Göttinger Zeitung had closed in April for financial and political reasons.) National reviewers placed Triumph of the Will within a larger political, cinematic, and technological context.93 Heinz Koch in the Tageblatt maintained that the film's festive presentation at the Capitol Theater directly connected Göttingers with Hitler and the nation, that watching Triumph of the Will gave viewers the “real experience of a nation in film.”94 The movie's showing amid a local performance of Nazi rituals and symbols rooted its message in familiar images and compelling activities in Göttingen. In this way Triumph brought together for Göttingers the mass culture and mass politics of the Third Reich by drawing upon ideas that had shaped them since the late 1920s. The ongoing conflict between German and American movies, on the other hand, highlighted the Third Reich's inability to unite local and national efforts to aid the German film industry. Since the Great War, Hollywood had served as model and foil in Germany. Göttingen papers had always reported on Hollywood with a mixture of fascination, fantasy, and resentment. In 1935 Göttingen newspapers chiefly treated the US film industry positively with occasional smug pieces about trouble in Hollywood. The Tageblatt, in particular, continued to report on Hollywood stars and films with the same fervor it had since the late 1920s, while the Nachrichten was more aloof. Cautiously positive responses in both newspapers to Walt Disney cartoons in 1935 betokened a fascination Page 175 → with modernity and love of laughter reminiscent of early Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton films. Reviews of these animated “fables” stressed their universal appeal as well as their reflection of the “burden-free, uncomplicated, almost naive joy” of Americans, in contrast to “the German's…deeper nature.”95 That polarity, too, was as old as film reviewing in Göttingen.96 The actual links between Hollywood and German cinema ran deeper, though, often in ways that fueled German resentment. The German film industry's previous reliance upon US money had reminded some observers of the Dawes and Young Plans by US banks to help Germany pay its war reparations. This imbalance partly spurred the creation of the German Film Credit Bank in 1933.97 Until 1933 personnel had moved freely between the two nations, though more often Germans went to Hollywood for greater exposure. Emil Jannings even held the distinction of being the first winner of the Oscar for Best Actor in 1928. Nazi persecution of leftists and especially Jews had pushed even more German talent to Hollywood after 1933.98

The Göttinger Nachrichten especially had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. It ran articles that acknowledged the American dominance of the world movie market and fawned over its platinum-blonde stars, even while highlighting Hollywood's superficiality as a reflection of the United States. For example, a 1936 fullpage pictorial on “the way you live in Hollywood” showed starlets, all dressed alike, sitting under hair dryers, thumbing through fashion magazines with the caption “Even on break the stars can't let their movie faces fall.” The spread showed a huge “screaming” highway billboard, proclaiming that in Hollywood, “Advertising is Trump!”99 Hollywood had been portrayed as big, beautiful, and superficial since the early 1920s, but nationalism and the declining German film industry intensified these perspectives. Even though Göttingen papers continued to ferret out “Jewish” influence in German film, they rarely used antisemitism to attack Hollywood before World War II.100 In fact, just as Third Reich racial policies sent more talent to the United States, Nazi antisemitism also strengthened Hollywood's still powerful position in Germany. When a June 1935 law banned all German films with Jewish actors, the resulting shortage of movies, especially for reruns, increased the demand for plentiful Hollywood products.101 And the expanding number of opportunities for films to obtain tax discounts on political grounds seemed to bifurcate further “valuable” German movies versus revenue-generating (Hollywood or Hollywood-like) entertainment.102 In October 1935 promoter Oskar Behringer from nearby Münden tried to bridge this gap in Göttingen between edifying and entertaining films. He sought permission from police to show Island of Demons, a documentary about Page 176 → Bali. Behringer wrote that the Reich Film Chamber had deemed this “cultural film…artistically valuable, and [it] has been an unprecedented success in a number of cities across the Reich.” Behringer included advertisements in his request, which showed scantily clad Balinese women. The movie promised to reveal “love and life on Bali, a paradise of beauty” filled with “beautiful and natural people,” and offered “exotic” and “magical” pictures worthy of A Thousand and One Nights. Behringer wished to show this “German film” after 11:00 p.m., which would help keep children out of the theater. The appeal here was reminiscent of the often racy “enlightenment” films of the Silent Era. Behringer played up his credentials and those of the film, seeking to demonstrate that even slightly risqué entertainment could also be Goebbels-approved. Unfortunately for him (and perhaps for Göttingen moviegoers), Behringer ran into Göttingen police rules that prohibited film screenings starting after 11:00 p.m.103 Local regulation usually united local interests and National Socialist ideology. In Behringer's case, however, Göttingen officials used their authority to promote older, conservative ideas about cinema, even in the face of Third Reich decisions about “artistically valuable” movies. Local officials in fact served as important arbiters between economic and ideological interests in cinema. In particular, Police Chief Albert Gnade (figure 10) ruled on all local requests for permits and tax discounts. Sometimes existing rules—even new ones passed by the Third Reich—contradicted each other. For example, Gnade clashed with his superiors in 1935 about rules regarding dancing and tax discounts for military-supported events. Previous rules had always deemed that an event with dancing was purely entertainment, that is, not “artistic,” “broadly educational,” or “culturally or state-politically valuable.” Local military officials asked Gnade in late 1935 to discount a ball they hosted. Gnade believed that, like all other activities (including official Party functions), military festivities with dancing could not be discounted under any legal statute. He cited several existing regulations in his decision not to exempt the event from mandated taxes. In a curt reply, Reich officials told him in no uncertain terms that, regardless of any regulations, military officials made such decisions, not local governments. It was “understood,” the letter to Gnade said, that if a military official—and only a military official—decided that an event, with or without dancing, supported the armed forces, then it qualified as a “valuable” activity and was by law free from taxes.104 This episode pointed to the growing authority of the military in a rearming Germany. Their wishes could now trump long-standing rules, even ones designed to garner tax revenues. More generally it underscored Gnade's somewhat old-fashioned attachment to rules, presuming entertainment to be diversion Page 177 → rather than part of an ideological program. Gnade had made clear since 1929 that he supported Nazi ideas and organizations. As Mayor and Police Chief, he had worked more than anyone else to promote certain kinds of cultural activity as “worthwhile,” especially those endorsed by the Nazi state. Yet in an attempt to preserve tax revenue and the sanctity of rules, Gnade still put great faith in regulation. Indeed, a 1934 attack leveled at him by the NSDAP District Leader and substantiated in Party Court (though later overturned) maintained that he “no longer sees

himself as a National Socialist, but more as just a bureaucrat.”105 Gnade had always assumed that these two positions reinforced each other. But as Third Reich officials increased pressure on some cultural activities after 1935 for ideological and financial reasons, local officials like Gnade sometimes found themselves serving competing interests. Page 178 → In late 1936 the Third Reich tried to make the media a more explicit tool for bolstering the sagging film industry. In a 27 November 1936 speech celebrating the third anniversary of the Reich Culture Chamber, Goebbels announced that cultural writers of all kinds could no longer make negative remarks in reviews. He maintained that great critics of past centuries—Kleist, Lessing, Fontane, Freytag—had “served” art rather than criticized it. Cultural writers and critics in the Third Reich should likewise practice “observation” rather than “criticism.”106 Göttingen papers reported these new restrictions on their front pages in great detail for several days, stressing the critic's political role.107 In Göttingen the ban briefly halted all cultural criticism. Within a few days, however, the Nachrichten resumed cultural coverage, next to an article about the National Socialist Culture Association as “Servants of Culture.”108 The Tageblatt waited a few days longer, when Heinz Koch returned with a lengthy review of a new German movie based on Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance.109 The review generally read like most of his cultural criticism since the 1920s. He even mildly criticized the added “happy end” for the film version. Koch continued to write detailed, knowledgeable, even ironic, but almost always overwhelmingly positive reviews. Criticism in the Nachrichten also remained supportive and laudatory, if more politically driven. With the exceptions of some “artistic and state-politically especially valuable” films that occasionally arrived with pre-written reviews, local critics kept writing reviews much as they had before Goebbels's announcement. Goebbels's ban illustrated an important difference between the press in a smaller city like Göttingen and in metropolitan areas, where film criticism was itself an industry and had a tradition of more contentious criticism. In Göttingen Goebbels's insistence that critics “serve” art merely mandated what had mostly been going on for years. Additional laws in 1937 crafted a detailed rating system that channeled the Page 179 → regime's cultural-political aims even more clearly on tax discounts. Like those since the 1920s, these final regulations before the war used tax incentives to make “valuable” films more attractive to theater owners and viewers. They rewarded filmmakers who followed Goebbels's wishes yet resulted in little real taxation change in Göttingen.110 Unfortunately, we do not have figures for the tax revenue Göttingen cinemas brought into civic coffers, but nationally entertainment taxes earned the government more money each year (save a small drop in 1934–35) between 1932 and 1938.111 Heidelberg and Hoffmann could appeal to a powerful Reich apparatus for support but still had to negotiate important parts of their businesses personally through Gnade and the city government. Ernst Heidelberg, in particular, made effective use of this system in the Third Reich, as he had during the Weimar Republic. His experiences reflected both the positive and negative ramifications of personal relations in Nazi cultural life. Personal politics, business interests, and national ideology eventually collided for Heidelberg and gave him as much trouble as success during the Third Reich. In 1935 he renovated, expanded, and modernized his Eden Theater, in order to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of this, Göttingen's first movie theater.112 After opening the sumptuous Capitol in 1929, Heidelberg had became the chief player in Göttingen's cinema constellation and usually took the lead among cinema owners in working with (or against) the local government. He routinely invoked national organizations or laws to challenge the city's taxation policy.113 Heidelberg joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and his membership in the Reich Association of German Cinema Owners made him part of the Reich Film Chamber. It is difficult to determine Heidelberg's political beliefs. He showed some of the Weimar Republic's most controversial films, including several socialist agitation pieces against the Weimar Penal Code's infamous Paragraph 218, which banned abortion.114 On the other hand, Heidelberg's Capitol routinely wrapped itself in the swastika flag and hosted almost all the big Third Reich propaganda films—Hitler Youth Quex, Victory of Faith, Triumph of the Will, and Olympia, as well as nationalist films of the Weimar era like Blush of Dawn and Chorale of Leuthen. During the Weimar period Heidelberg screened Nazi Party films and offered the use of his theaters to Social Democrats.115 Income generally trumped ideology for Heidelberg. His 1947 denazification report

concluded that he joined the party “by reasons of expediency.” Allied officials maintained that he continued his friendship with the “half-Jewish” attorney Barsdorf throughout the Third Reich and “never interrupted these relations…. A courageous action, indeed, that na [sic] active nazi had dared.”116 During both the Weimar and Nazi eras Heidelberg used whatever ideological and institutional Page 180 → means necessary to promote himself and attack his enemies. In the 1920s he provided local details to national lobbying groups to be used against Göttingen's government. And in 1933 he dutifully reported to the same authorities about the Universum Theater's tax evasion. Ultimately, though, his use of personal politics and his own personal problems engineered his slide from successful Third Reich theater magnate to “victim of Nazism.”117 In May 1933 the city investigated Heidelberg for tax evasion around the same time he was denouncing Universum for the same crime. Local officials eventually cleared him of the charges, but this problem did not go away.118 In October 1935 the Reich Film Chamber revoked Heidelberg's membership for not paying his movie leasing company 22,883 Marks between early 1932 and the middle of 1934.119 Immediately Heidelberg Sr. transferred ownership and control of the Eden and Capitol theaters to his son, Ernst Heidelberg Jr., who remained in the Film Chamber and agreed not to have anything to do with the business. Heidelberg Sr. later admitted that his son “liked to travel.” Albert Gnade and others who knew Ernst Jr. called him a “playboy” who was uninterested in business.120 Initially the front of his son's ownership allowed Heidelberg Sr. to continue to run his theaters, though he tried to encourage his son to take a greater interest in the business. The cover was not easy to maintain and further strained relations between father and son. Several times after 1935 Heidelberg petitioned the Association of Theater Owners and the Reich Film Chamber for readmission. He even had Gnade petition the Chamber on his behalf. Gnade obliged as a “good neighbor” but never succeeded in restoring Heidelberg's ability to manage his theaters legally. During the war Gnade pulled strings that released the son from some military duty, so he could run the cinemas (officially, at least) in Göttingen. At one point in 1941, though, Ernst Jr. was stationed briefly in Marburg and began a relationship there with Annemarie Bierendämpfel, the widow of a military doctor. This relationship significantly eroded relations between Heidelberg Jr. and Sr., especially once the couple was engaged and moved back to Göttingen. As a war widow, Bierendämpfel received a nice pension that she would lose if she remarried, so she encouraged Ernst Jr. to obtain full ownership of the cinemas from his father, in order to replace the income she would lose if they married. When Heidelberg Sr. refused to surrender total control (in part because he suspected the motivation), she conspired with her brother (a doctor in Göttingen and member of the Gestapo's Security Service), one of Heidelberg's employees (also in the Security Service), Security Service officer Alfred Schütt, and Heidelberg Jr. to find some reason to arrest Heidelberg Sr. In the meantime, the older cinema magnate was finally allowed to rejoin Page 181 → the Reich Film Chamber after serving for ten months in occupied Poland in 1942, at age sixty. He then returned to Göttingen to manage his still successful theaters. In April 1943, the day before he was going to work out a new partnership with his son, the Gestapo arrested Heidelberg as a “state enemy” for listening to foreign radio programs. Gnade tried to help lighten the sentence, but the conspirators then accused the Lord Mayor of illegally arranging for Heidelberg Jr.'s release from military service and receiving a bribe from Heidelberg Sr. Heidelberg was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and served two more in a concentration camp because of further denunciations in Göttingen during his prison term. He was liberated by British troops in 1945.121 Heidelberg's experiences reveal more than just the ups and downs of cinema in interwar Göttingen. His work demonstrates the implications of cinema's tight weave of local and national interests. Heidelberg succeeded because he used national and local mechanisms for shaping cinema to his own advantage, often playing them off each other. His well-connected, financially driven, “apolitical” management in the late 1920s and early 1930s made Nazi ideas seem like economically sound plans that resonated with many Göttingers’ experiences. His embrace of Third Reich policies and symbols made him wealthy and his movie houses important venues for presenting Nazi ideas, which helped “coordinate” Göttingen cinema in the Third Reich. Heidelberg's downfall during World War II, finally, illustrated that the Nazi regime depended as much on normal social and familial tensions to push its agenda as it did upon mechanisms of control.122

Despite his problems with the Reich Film Chamber, Heidelberg nevertheless continued in the late 1930s to press the limits of rules, usually getting his way by appealing to Nazism's ideological language and his cozy relations with local authorities. For example, in 1937 he was able to screen several films at times not normally allowed—on Sunday morning and late at night. In each case local police—often his friend Gnade—exempted Heidelberg from regulation hours because he argued his case effectively. He did so by promoting state-supported Strength through Joy screenings, evoking the great public demand for additional screenings of “a national political film,” and trumpeting the value of a popular SA/SS movie.123 Even Gnade, who was head of the local SS chapter, cautioned that such films could only be approved “case by case.” But unlike the Universum's owner in 1933 or the promoter of the sexy Balinese film in 1935, Heidelberg could rely on established working relationships with local officials, at least until the war started. As the German film industry continued to decline and draw away from the world, Heidelberg needed to find more ways to fill his theaters with Reich-approved Page 182 → films. By 1937 the German film industry was clearly suffering. Exports were falling. Financial difficulties prompted the regime and industry leaders to consolidate further and made all film companies heavily dependent upon state funding. Laws passed in 1936 and 1937 to end critical reception and wed films’ artistic and ideological “value” made the industry and national media into an echo chamber for Nazi ideas.124 Germany's bellicose diplomacy, racial exclusion, and withdrawal from international film competitions isolated the industry. Growing opposition to Nazi policies particularly hurt exports. The 1938 annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland closed German cinema from the world even more, although these moves added theaters to the Third Reich's control. In such a context, Heidelberg's efforts to secure audiences (and his own profits of course) were rather patriotic. Newspaper reactions in 1938 to four movies illustrated the curious blend at the end of the interwar era of state intervention, audience demand for familiar themes, and cultural purveyors’ boosterism. The exotic Tiger from Eschnapur, first, a remake of a 1920s silent film by established filmmaker Richard Eichberg, showed Göttingers attractive images of strange people and places. The Tageblatt's “German Woman” section featured a revealing picture of the film's star, the exotic, sexy dancer La Jana, in an article about the “Promotion of Honorable Beauty” in association with the League of German Girls.125 The Tageblatt was not alone in holding this rather “un-Aryan” dancer up as role model.126 Of course constructing her as an example of female beauty helped to prevent the kind of danger that “sex appeal” had raised in The Blue Angel eight years before. Likewise, this image engaged women in film consumption in ways that did not threaten larger Third Reich ideas about men's control of the public sphere. Second, the American western Frisco Express (the German title for Paramount's Wells Fargo) showed in April. Heinz Koch rated it as “a top-notch American film.” Both he and the Nachrichten critic found themselves pleasantly surprised that the film offered more than sensationalist “shoot 'em-up” adventure, one that brought to life an important chapter of US history.127 Third, The Stars Shine, by prolific Third Reich director Hans H. Zerlett, took a page from a more recent chapter in American history: glitzy Hollywood musical films. This German revue film, a big hit nationwide, told the idealized and glamorized story of three women who became movie stars. It also featured the dancer La Jana. In Göttingen, Karl Multhopp, local editor of the Nachrichten, called the farcical musical a “culturally valuable film” and reported that it “received very generous applause from the sold-out house” at the Capitol.128 Finally, Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's two-part movie about the 1936 summer Olympic Games in Berlin occasioned the last great public ritual of an official premiere in Göttingen with parades of flags, local dignitaries Page 183 → (Party, army, state, and city officials, including Gnade), and blustery rhetoric. Newspapers had reported on the progress of Riefenstahl's film documentary for two years. The papers covered its premiere before Hitler, Reich luminaries, and international diplomats in Berlin on 20 April 1938 for Hitler's forty-ninth birthday. The movie arrived only one week later in Göttingen. Reviews called it “a peerless German film,” “the best sport film the world has ever seen,” and emphasized its Party support. Coverage in Göttingen praised the film's representation of the “human spirit” and “Olympic spirit.” One critic even admired the footage of Jesse Owens's “fantastically fast” 100-meter race, one of the greatest blows to Hitler's plan to showcase “Aryan” superiority at the Games.129 Olympia, which fared well abroad, was one small bright spot in an otherwise dimming German film industry. Cinema in Göttingen was clearly different in 1938 than in 1930 or even 1933. Of course technology had

developed, but its function in Göttingen changed too. The Nazi state had used existing mechanisms and regulations to become more intimately involved in all aspects of cinema. And they had vigorously removed Jews and unrepentant leftists from all levels of the industry. Still, even into the war, cinema remained a hybrid cultural activity, a compromise that asked viewers to appreciate various and sometimes contradictory messages.130 Heidelberg's efforts in the late 1930s revealed the ways in which theater owners manipulated regulations to sync their business interests with those of the state. Local newspaper critics, who had only become more enthusiastic toward the Third Reich since 1933, still reflected fairly broad tastes in film. Heinz Koch's veteran ability to find something positive in any film he saw aided Goebbels's promotional plans. Some synthesis of ideology and economic aims had always driven Nazi film policies. The failing Third Reich film industry, though, had consistently suffered from the regime's willingness to sacrifice the bottom line for ideology. The sorts of creative promotions we have seen from Heidelberg and others in Göttingen indicated cultural purveyors’ ability to keep balancing ideological and financial interests. After trying to shape movie production and critical interpretation, the Third Reich finally in 1938 sought to mold consumption. Trying to make movie audiences represent the Volksgemeinschaft, the regime forbade Jews from entering cinemas.131 When World War II began in Europe, Goebbels and his ministry used cinema as the government's primary means of disseminating propaganda. Especially between 1939 and 1942, the number of outright propaganda feature films jumped dramatically. During these early war years, German filmmakers produced the most violent antisemitic movies of the entire Third Reich.132 As Germany became more isolated, theaters played fewer foreign films, and Germans’ love of Hollywood films diminished, at least officially. Goebbels encouraged Page 184 → German studios to take up the slack, as American imports dropped or were banned, by making light entertaining movies. When Germans at home began suffering deprivation because of the war in 1943, the Propaganda Minister whipped up film as a distraction and escape. Although this policy revealed the Third Reich's naked use of cinema as an opiate, it nevertheless indicated that the principle of propagandizing through entertainment continued up to the very end. A curious event in Göttingen in 1940 illustrates the fact that, even in wartime, local traditions and perspectives shaped perspective on cinema. In February 1940 police arrested seven university students and fined others for disrupting screenings at the Central Theater of Rosalie, a light 1937 US musical from MGM starring singer Nelson Eddy and dancer Eleanor Powell and featuring music by Cole Porter. The briefly detained protesters explained that they objected to the film's jazzed-up version of an old German student song; a confiscated flyer encouraged students to “blow the whistle on this disgrace!!!”133 Theater owner Fritz Hoffmann had the police explain to his film lender that he could not complete all his planned screenings of the movie. Lord Mayor Gnade sent a report to the regional president in Hildesheim and, following a 1938 law, notified the Reichsführer of the SS and Head of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler. Gnade indicated that other “comrades” (Volksgenossen) in Göttingen also objected to the film, if less audibly, and suggested that national authorities review the film's approval to be shown. The Municipal Police (Schutzpolizei) representative also reported to superiors about the incident. A month later Goebbels himself wrote to the regional president that the lending company had cut the offensive scenes; the president then notified Gnade of the changes.134 The twenty pages in Göttingen police files testify to the significance of this protest. The fact that a national lending company altered an officially approved movie indicated that local perspectives could influence even national cinema. As I have argued throughout this book, the significance of such action lies in the process that it reveals. More than sharpshooting or Händel operas, cinema imported ideas and images into Göttingen and other towns. Yet Germans still consumed and considered cinema based partly on their local experiences. This chapter has demonstrated that it was the wedding of local and national views that made cinema into a medium for turning Göttingen into a Nazi town and then a pillar of support for the Third Reich.

Conclusion: Cinema in Interwar Göttingen In his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer offered what has become one of the best-known interpretations of interwar German cinema, Page 185 → namely, that cinema reflected the problems of the Weimar era, which the Third Reich “solved” in totalitarian fashion. Kracauer's ideas spawned much of the writing since about interwar German cinema and have shaped the way many people think about its social and

psychological implications. A number of scholars have since shown the weakness of his monocausal psychological argument.135 Nevertheless, Kracauer rightly notes that Weimar-era films helped create fictions and myths that presented little resistance to National Socialist cultural policy and in fact helped promote it. He points to the political function of both avant-garde and more pedestrian films. Indeed, we have seen conservative critic Heinz Koch celebrate the cinematic innovation for which the Weimar Republic is rightly known, even as his reviews helped hasten the decline of the liberal, republican system that nurtured such creativity. Most scholarship of interwar German cinema has focused on production and national regulation, subsequently emphasizing the rupture of 1933, when the Third Reich immediately began reshaping national cinema. Sabine Hake argues that “the cinema emerged after 1933 as the most important medium for forging a national community beyond class boundaries and for staging political fantasies beyond the public-private divide.”136 This study has shown that cinema's “coordination” took place over a longer period from around 1930 to 1935 and was possible because of ideas, institutions, and individuals that were in place by the late 1920s. The changes between, say, Heinz Koch's first review of Faust in 1927 and his response to the 1937 Zarah Leander film La Habanera were significant, even if Koch's language remained much the same.137 Movies had changed; the state was more involved in their production; Jews could not participate in any facet of cinema; local media helped shape consumption. This part's close reading of cinema's history in Göttingen has revealed the complex, lengthy process that generated such changes. I would point to three main areas of change to sum up this history. First, the tools of regulating cinema remained remarkably similar from 1920 to 1945. Both national regimes and their attendant laws balanced ideological and economic interests. The authority given to local officials to enforce national rules meant that the Göttingen Magistracy's culturally conservative vision of mass culture shaped local regulation starting in the early 1920s. Their authoritarian, nationalist views of culture connected ideas from the Kaiserreich with those of the Third Reich at the expense of Weimar democracy. Already by 1930, Göttingen officials and cultural purveyors had reshaped cinema in a way that prefigured Third Reich plans. As a result, regulators helped facilitate the gradual yet substantial changes to cinema over the 1930s. Second, local media generally acted as cheerleaders for this process, eventually bending local perceptions of cinema into support for Nazism. Critics’ Page 186 → attention to films starting around 1927 made newspapers into important venues for considering cinema's meaning. Around 1930 conservative critics used commentary more and more to promote their ideologies. The Social Democratic Volksblatt's pulling away from cultural criticism after 1930 and its closure in 1933 silenced a critical perspective on cinema in Göttingen. Nevertheless, local media (even on the left) shared an appreciation for “elevated” films and generally linked local and national economic interests in their work. Throughout the interwar years, newspapers placed national events and products within a local context. By drawing attention to common experiences, these papers encouraged Göttingers to see their connections to national developments not through democratic engagement but through consumption. Such links reinforced the Third Reich's successful aestheticization of politics. Finally, the history of cinema in interwar Göttingen illustrates the importance of individuals. Figures such as Heinz Koch, Ernst Heidelberg, Fritz Hoffmann, Gotthelf Leimbach, and Albert Gnade helped determine the movies shown in Göttingen, their entrance fees, and discussions about their meaning. In each case the importance of these individuals made nationalism and conservatism, as well as nepotism and personal relations, more important than democratic mechanisms. That is why the system of regulating and promoting cinema made the transition in Göttingen so easily from the Weimar to Nazi period. The personal preferences, cultural regulations, and interpersonal relations of these men challenged democratic institutions. Moreover, if we expand our view of cinema to include reception and consumption, we can see in the cases of The First Right of the Child (1933) and Rosalie (1940) that even individual moviegoers could influence policy. One member of the festive crowd at the Capitol's grand opening in 1929 called that theater an “ornament of our good city” that served “the welfare of the people.” The history of cinema in interwar Göttingen demonstrates that not all people derived welfare from cinema, but this cultural activity did touch more people than any other. Movies ultimately connected Göttingers with the world, the nation, and each other, even if some observers used cinema to drive people apart. The ultimate form of consumer culture, cinema was a means for participating in

broad changes during these two decades. For this reason, the poet celebrating the Capitol's opening in 1929 was right to call it a “mirror of our turbulent times.”

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Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of a Nazi Town In October 1946 Rolf Thiele and Hans Abich received a license from the British military government occupying Lower Saxony to create the Film Construction Company (Filmaufbau GmbH) Göttingen. The new film production firm made its home in an abandoned airplane hanger on the outskirts of town. The founders, both just twenty-eight years old, played up their inexperience with cinema, especially with that of the Third Reich, to obtain the considerable financing necessary to build a film studio. Except for a few bombing raids right at the end of the fighting, Göttingen had escaped World War II relatively unscathed and offered a rich cultural and intellectual environment in which to rebuild German cinema. Thiele and Abich declared their plans to craft realistic yet entertaining films that would help re-educate Germans. Between the years 1949 (when the Göttingen firm made its first film) and 1961 (when it closed down for financial reasons), this new venture produced ninety-five motion pictures. Although Film Construction Göttingen never made as many movies as studios in Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg, it did hold a respectable fourth place in total production behind those established locations of German filmmaking. And while Göttingen too produced some of the light entertainment that characterized 1950s West German cinema, most of the films promoted Thiele and Abich's ideas about movies, notions that anticipated some of the qualities of New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s.1 The significance of this film studio in Göttingen reiterates one of this book's main points, namely, that many Germans participated in political changes through cultural activities.2 Film Construction Göttingen also relied upon familiar important figures in town. Both Heidelbergs, for example, helped found and finance the endeavor. Their Capitol Theater became an even more important location in Göttingen's cultural life, hosting what were now national premieres. For Film Construction Göttingen's first debut, the highly acclaimed Page 188 → Love ’47, critics from across Germany joined over 30,000 viewers to see this “rubble film” at the Capitol in March 1949.3 This film company, like previous cultural organizations, built national success partly from established ideas, institutions, and individuals in Göttingen. Likewise, starting in 1948 some of the same leaders of interwar sharpshooting helped build that activity into an even more popular activity for men and women. And the same prime movers from the 1920s and 1930s directed the Händel Festival into the 1950s and beyond. These continuities in all three activities studied here over the 1940s therefore beg the question: When did Göttingen stop being a Nazi town? The short answer is: almost immediately after World War II ended, the pervasive influence of Nazi ideas in Göttingen's daily life ceased. The two world wars have served as catastrophic bookends in this study of Göttingen. In both cases those conflagrations caused major ruptures in Göttingers’ lives. Yet we have seen that important ideas and individuals from the Kaiserreich shaped cultural life in Göttingen well into the 1930s. The November 1918 revolution brought new laws and democracy to Göttingen but did not replace individuals at the peak of political power with people more sympathetic to democratic governance. Indeed, one major explanation for the atmosphere in Göttingen that fostered Nazism's growth was the lack of substantive change in personnel and ideas to match the new Weimar Republic's formation. After World War II Göttingers likewise used the complex process of denazification and British occupation to their advantage. And some of the figures studied here—sharpshooting leader Wilhelm Lange, Händel Festival directors Walter Meyerhoff and Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard, cinema owner Ernst Heidelberg, and cultural critic Heinz Koch—continued successful careers that bridged the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, and Federal Republic of Germany. However, there are marked differences between the aftermaths of the two world wars in Göttingen. Unlike the shift to a republic in 1918, Germans in 1949 tied the creation of the Federal Republic directly to the promotion of democracy at all levels of West German society. The lengthy Allied occupation ensured that the economic, diplomatic, and military weight of the occupational and then Federal Republic governments undergirded real changes in the town hall and cultural life. Women in particular became more involved in all the cultural practices studied here and in public life generally, especially immediately following the war. The thorough if messy process of denazification helped discredit Nazi ideas and minimize their impact after the war, even if opportunism fueled Göttingers’ cooperation as much as idealism did. And although their methods and aims differed greatly, Soviet

and Western Allies alike made Page 189 → denazification an important step toward completing the war effort and creating a new Germany. In contrast, there had been no systematic attempt in Göttingen to remove individuals or ideas loyal to the Kaiserreich after 1918, from above or below. Dislike for the Weimar Republic, in fact, drew together oldfashioned and new radical conservative ideas in the 1920s. Daily cultural activities often served as the vehicles for those links. Perhaps most dramatically, during World War II Göttingers had experienced firsthand the catastrophic failure of the Third Reich's grand promises. Political changes from above after 1945 thus resonated with most Göttingers’ experiences and eventually helped improve their lives, a very different situation than after the Great War. So, only a few important cultural figures bridged the Nazi and West German regimes in Göttingen. There was far less ideological, legal, and institutional continuity than had been the case after 1918. While the process of change after World War II was neither simple nor complete, Göttingen stopped being a Nazi town more definitively and abruptly than it had become one.4 This book has focused on Göttingen's becoming a Nazi town, the complexity of that process, and its implications in the Third Reich. The preceding chapters have illustrated the everyday ways Göttingers built up Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the history of culture in Göttingen also reveals that the Third Reich's “coordination” of free-time activities proceeded haltingly, according to local conditions, and sometimes in contentious ways. Ultimately this book makes two main points. First, the history of culture in interwar Göttingen demonstrates the various ways local ideas, institutions, and individuals shaped German cultural life. For each example studied here cultural leaders contextualized ideas and products originating outside Göttingen. But they also used their influence to add to the broader discussions of culture's meaning in this era. The histories of sharpshooting, the Göttingen Händel Festival, and cinema all reveal the important synthesis of local and national influences in creating German cultural life between the world wars. Second, we can better understand Germans’ experiences of cultural life and its political significance when we map them over the longer period of change from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. Sharpshooting changed significantly between the move to make every man a “shooter” in 1925 and rearmament in 1935; the Händel Festival focused more on celebrating German culture between the difficult years of 1928 and 1935; and cinema in Göttingen promoted ever more conservative ideas from 1930 to 1934. Together these case studies point to developments that bridge the Weimar and Nazi eras. And the Page 190 → intense activity from about 1925 to 1930 that helped make Göttingen a Nazi town then shaped its development in the Third Reich into the late 1930s. This local study naturally analyzes the specifics of cultural life in Göttingen and the process of change unique to that place. And yet Clifford Geertz reminded us some years ago that “the locus of study is not the object of study.” Historians of localities, to paraphrase Geertz further, do not study towns; they study in towns.5 This book's main points therefore encourage us to look at other places in Germany differently. Specifically, my conclusions urge us to pay closer attention to process, to the complex mechanics of change. We have seen here that not all experiences in interwar Germany matched the major political narratives of that time. In particular, the Nazis’ coming to power in January 1933 meant different things for different Germans. Realizing that continuities between the world wars mattered as much as breaks helps us understand Germans’ roles in turning Weimar Germany into the Third Reich. I contend that we learn more about other moments of major political change in modern Germany—1871, 1918, 1945, 1989—by grappling with the messy process of change in people's lives. Local studies do that particularly well. My analysis also makes clear that pat dichotomous definitions of culture—cosmopolitan versus provincial, avant-garde versus philistine, or Weimar versus Nazi—often obscure our understanding of lived experiences. Labels may be useful shorthand, but they work best when integrated into the context of historical change. I have, for example, sought here not to define what a “Nazi town” is but to explain the process by which Göttingen became one. Whether they are aesthetic, political, gendered, or economic, definitions yield the most information about people's lives when they raise rather than answer questions. Even beyond Germany, these points direct us away from historical analysis based solely on big political change.

For one thing, analyzing free-time activities, especially in industrial societies in which consumption and political behavior are connected, can shed light on the ways in which average people participated in larger developments. As well, local studies of process help identify the contours and limits of broad national narratives, particularly those determined by traditional political change. And while local historians may thus appear to be the “splitters” that J. H. Hexter seemed to favor over the “lumpers,” I would argue that such correctives can ultimately help us write more informed national and transnational histories.6 Indeed, in a recent thoughtful piece about master narratives, William Hagen has reminded us that “escape into a safe monographic or microhistorical space is impossible.”7 I have endeavored to raise questions in Göttingen's cultural space about Germany's larger political development in the first half of the twentieth century. Above all, Page 191 → this study reminds us that we may often answer big questions best by giving agency to seemingly little people. My analysis offers answers to two big questions that continue to disturb modern historiography, namely, where did Nazism come from, and why did so many Germans support it? Viewed a certain way, this study's emphasis on connections between the Weimar and Nazi regimes could seem to minimize the brutality of the Third Reich. In fact, my history of interwar Göttingen culture provides a cautionary tale about how even good intentions can lead to cruelty and violence. Ernst Heidelberg, Heinz Koch, Walter Meyerhoff, Albert Gnade, and many others all believed they were promoting “Göttingen's interests.” Sometimes they politicized the implications of their activities; sometimes they tried to create havens from political turmoil. Both of these aims helped Göttingen citizens become a part of Third Reich activities. This study lays bare the insidious, accidental, opportunistic, and even apparently progressive appeal of helping the brutal Nazi regime do its work. The fact that good intentions and promoting cultural life could aid the Third Reich's endeavors is all the more disquieting. Page 192 →

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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Göttinger Tageblatt (hereafter GT) 4 May 1924. 2. GT 4 May and 20 April 1924. 3. GT 6 May 1924. 4. The full name of Hitler's party was the National Socialist German Worker's Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Party) or NSDAP. In 1939 he was honored as an “old fighter” with a street named after him: Stadt Archiv Göttingen (hereafter StadtAGö): Chronik 20 April 1939. 5. Fritz Hasselhorn, “Göttingen 1918/17–1933,” in Göttingen: Geschichte einer Universitätsstadt, Band 3: Von der preußischen Mittelstadt zur südniedersächsichen Großstadt 1866–1989, ed. Rudolf von Thadden and Günter J. Trittel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999), 90. 6. Klaus Nathans has recently argued something similar in “Leisure Clubs and the Decline of the Weimar Republic: A Reassessment,” Journal of Contemporary History 45.1 (2010): 27–50. 7. Helmut Walser Smith notes eloquently that historians' attention to the Holocaust has shifted the major “vanishing point” of German history away from 1933 in The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). My project similarly assumes that we learn more about Germans' development of Nazism by treating 1933 as but one important step in a longer process. More generally Charles Maier raises important questions about historical periodization in “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105.3 (2000): 807–31. 8. Bernett, “Der deutsche Sport im Jahre 1933,” Stadion 7.2 (1981): 225–83; see also Andrew Bergerson, Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004), and especially “Eigensinn, Ethik und die nationalsozialistische Reformatio vitae,” in Sehnsucht nach Nähe: Interpersonale Kommunikation in Deutschland seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Moritz Föllmer (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 127–56. Bernett was speaking of sports specifically, for which the Nazi process of “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) was sometimes particularly dramatic, but the distinction between longer, gradual developments Page 194 → from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s versus concerted “coordination” efforts from 1933 to 1935 is especially helpful. 9. Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Torchbooks, 1968). See also Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971); John Willet, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917–1933 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1978); Thomas Kniesche, ed., Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia: Camden House, 1994). A recent collection edited by John Williams, Weimar Culture Revisited (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), enlarges the study of “Weimar culture” to include more cultural practices, exploring both the progressive potential of these activities and the ways in which they prefigured Nazi cultural notions. 10. Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 11. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966); Taylor and van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Hampshire: Winchester Press, 1990); Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams and Los Angeles County Museum, 1991); Richard A. Etlin, ed., Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); Klaus Backes, Hitler und die bildenden Künste: Kulturverständnis und Kunstpolitik im Dritten Reich (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1988). Other works on cultural regulation paint a more nuanced picture: e.g., Glenn R. Cuomo, ed., National Socialist Cultural Policy

(New York: St. Martin's, 1995); Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 12. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 79. Benjamin Ziemann's recent historiographical essay disagrees: “Weimar Was Weimar: Politics, Culture and the Emplotment of the German Republic,” German History 28.4 (2010): 542–71. 13. The relationship, moreover, between principalities, states, and the capital in the Weimar Republic was itself complicated: John Bingham, Weimar Cities: The Challenge of Urban Modernity in Germany (New York: Routledge, 2008). 14. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Pamela Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), in particular have highlighted the significant differences between parts of the capital. 15. Adelheid von Saldern, ed., Stadt und Moderne: Hannover in der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1989); Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-siècle Hamburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Meike G. Werner, Moderne in der Provinz. Kulturelle Experimente im Fin de Siècle Jena (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003).Page 195 → 16. Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930–35 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), rev. ed. covering 1922 to 1945 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984). See also Herbert Schwatzwälder, Die Machtergreifung der NSDAP in Bremen 1933 (Bremen: Schünemann, 1966); Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, and Falk Weisemann, eds., Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1977–83). 17. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 18. Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Bergerson, Ordinary Germans. Other scholars study religious organizations and ideas to explain political developments in modern Germany: Oded Heilbronner, Catholicism, Political Culture, and the Countryside: A Social History of the Nazi Party in South Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Anthony J. Steinhoff, The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870–1914 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 19. Although specifically focused on the Third Reich, Christoph Schmidt studies similar issues in Nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik im Gau Westfalen-Nord: Regionale Strukturen und lokale Milieus (1933–1945) (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006). 20. Volker Dahm, “Nationale Einheit und partikuläre Vielfalt. Zur Frage der kulturpolitischen Gleichschaltung im Dritten Reich,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 43 (1995): 221–65, has made this claim particularly about local cultures integrating Germans into the Third Reich. 21. William H. Sewell Jr. discusses this relationship in “Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard Berlanstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 15–38. 22. These English renderings fail to convey the term's implications, mostly because Volk can connote “all people,” “the nation,” or a racially defined group. Over the course of the 1920s, conservative commentators increasingly popularized exclusionary visions of the Volk and Volksgemeinschaft. 23. Historians have learned much about interwar Germany by paying attention to various “spaces,” from neighborhoods to regions to the transnational: Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies; Applegate, Nation of Provincials; the 2006 H-German forum: http://www.h-net.org/~german /discuss/Trans/forum_trans_index.htm (accessed 10 August 2011). Anthropologists and geographers have in the last two decades written persuasively about the broad meanings of place and space: James Duncan and David Ley, eds., Place/Culture/Representation (London: Routledge, 1993); Denis Crow, ed., Geography and Identity: Living and Exploring Geopolitics of Identity (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1996);

Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996); Tim Cresswell, Page 196 →Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). For historians' take see the 2010 Roehampton University and German Historical Institute conference on the “spacial turn”: http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/researchcentres/chat/conferences/index.html (accessed 10 August 2011). 24. Stephen Brockmann's Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital (New York: Camden House, 2006) does something similar by studying the link between the real and imaginary Nuremberg. 25. Some basic theoretical starting points are Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–52; John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). 26. Bergerson details well the dynamic of daily life normalizing Third Reich actions in Ordinary Germans. 27. Kohut, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 85–180, especially 152. 28. Göttingen's Hanoverian legacy did not disappear, however. A Guelph political party advocating Hanover's independence continued to win votes in Göttingen as late as 1928. 29. The three-volume history by leading scholars, for example, is simply called Göttingen: History of a University City. 30. Fritz Ringer's classic study still treats this subject most systematically: The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). See also Kenneth Barkin, “Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the Mandarins,” Journal of Modern History 43.2 (1971): 276–86. 31. Barbara Marshall, “The Political Development of German University Towns in the Weimar Republic: Göttingen and Münster, 1918–1933” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1972), 1–6; Detlef Mühlberger, “The Social Basis of the Nazi Party in the University Town of Göttingen, 1922–1945,” in The Nazi Party: The Anatomy of a People's Party, 1919–1933, ed. Paul Madden and Detlef Mühlberger (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 200–203; Adelheid von Saldern, “Göttingen im Kaiserreich,” in Göttingen: Geschichte einer Universitätsstadt, 14–56, and “Zur Entwicklung der Parteien in Göttingen während der Weimarer Republik, ” Göttinger Jahrbuch (1971): 171; Fritz Hasselhorn, Wie wählte Göttingen?: Wahlverhalten und die soziale Basis der Parteien in Göttingen 1924–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1983), 13–19. 32. “Der Bekenntnisstand in Göttingen,” Göttinger Gemeindeblatt 5.17 (May 1930); Mühlberger, “Social Basis,” 197, footnote 2. 33. Martin Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre Göttinger Händel-Festspiele. Zu den Anfängen der Göttinger HändelRenaissance,” Göttinger Händel-Beitrage 4 (1991): 29. 34. Michael Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im Dritten Reich. Etappen der Gleichschaltung traditionaler Vereinskultur am Beispiel des ländlich-katholischen SchützenvereinswesensWestfalens 1933–1939,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 79 (1997): 439–84. More generally see Siegfried Weichlein, Sozialmilieus und politische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik. Lebenswelt, Vereinskultur, Politik in Hessen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996); Frank Bösch, Das konservative Milieu: Vereinskultur und lokale Page 197 → Sammlungspolitik in ost-und west-deutschen Regionen [1900–1960] (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002). 35. In contrast to the otherwise similar town of Münster: Marshall, “Political Development,” ii–iii, 349–55. 36. “Der Bekenntnisstand in Göttingen”; Arend Smid, “Die Juden in Göttingen zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik” (unpublished Hauptseminararbeit, University of Göttingen, 1989 [StadtAGö: E 214]), 3–4, 11–20; Avraham Barkai and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Renewal and Destruction, 1918–1945, vol. 4 of GermanJewish History in Modern Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 32–35. 37. Saldern, “Göttingen im Kaiserreich,” 36. 38. Eckhard Sürig, Göttinger Zeitungen: Ein pressgeschichtlicher und bibliographischer Führer mit Standortnachweis (Göttingen: Stadtarchiv Göttingen, 1985), 17–18, 39–43; Nora Funke, “Der Antisemitismus im Spiegel der Göttinger Presse in den Jahre 1920, 1925, 1930 und 1935” (Unpublished Examination Paper, University of Göttingen, 1962 [StadtAGö: I C 264]); Ulrich Popplow, “Göttingen in der Novemberrevolution 1918/19,” Göttinger Jahrbuch 24 (1976): 227–30. 39. StadtAGö: Göttinger Adressbücher, 1894–1946.

40. James Retallack, Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988). 41. Saldern, “‘Kunst fürs Volk’. Vom Kulturkonservatismus zur nationalsozialistischen Kulturpolitik,” in Das Gedächtnis der Bilder: Ästhetik und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Harald Welzer (Tübingen: edition diskord, 1995), 45–104. 42. StadtAGö: III A 13 (Sammlung der Ortsstatuten): May 1920, November 1921, May 1925, August 1926, September 1932, July 1933, and November 1935. 43. Indeed, throughout the interwar years local and national cultural regulators were constantly in conflict and negotiation, and astute cultural purveyors played both sides against each other: StadtAGö: AHR I B F 22 Nrs. 1, 5, and 8; I A F 22; I B 3 F 11 Nr. 4. 44. Popplow, “Die Machtergreifung in Augenzeugen-Berichten. Göttingen 1932–1935,” Göttinger Jahrbuch 25 (1977): 184; more generally see Konrad Jarausch, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 45. Saldern, “Göttingen im Kaiserreich,” 61. 46. Marina Kresse, “Die Novemberrevolution 1918/19 in Göttingen” (unpublished University of Göttingen Referat, 1979 [StadtAGö: III B 332]), 20; A. J. Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918: A Study of German Socialism in War and Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 47. The Center Party, an ally in many other places, drew few votes and was united with the Guelph Party, whose desire to reinstitute the Hanoverian monarchy had hardly made it a pillar of Weimar republicanism: Heinz-Siegfried Strelow, “Das Zeuntrum und die Deutsch—Hannoveraner im Göttingen der Weimarer Republik” (University of Göttingen, unpublished Hauptseminararbeit, 1989 [StadtAGö: E 213]). 48. Marshall, “Political Development,” 27–43, 346–48; Popplow, “Göttingen in der Novemberrevolution”; Adelheid von Saldern, Auf dem Wege zum Arbeiter-Reformismus: Parteialltag in sozialdemokratischer Provinz Göttingen (1870–1920) (Frankfurt: Materialis, 1984), 209–15. 49. Martina Kresse, “Die Stadt Göttingen im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Page 198 → Republik” (University of Göttingen, Unpublished Lehramt Prufüng, 1980 [StadtAGö: III B 328]). Peter Fritzsche identifies the civic engagement caused by World War I and the Revolution as the principal explanation for the Weimar Republic's demise in Germans into Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 50. Kresse, “Stadt Göttingen,” 79–80; Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1921–1933 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 10–13. 51. Hans Joachim Dahms, “Die Universität Göttingen 1918 bis 1989: Vom ‘Goldenen Zeitler’ der Zwanziger Jahre bis zur ‘Verwaltung des Mangels’ in der Gegenwart,” in Göttingen: Geschichte einer Universitätsstadt, 394–410. 52. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV, F 152, Nr. 9, Ab. G, 1868–1956, 142.2–153.30. 53. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 31–32, 92–94, 108–9; Gerald D. Feldman and Irmgard Steinisch, “Die Weimarer Republik zwischen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsstaat. Die Entscheidung gegen den Achtstundentag,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 18 (1978): 353–439; Adelheid von Saldern and Dietrich Mühlberg, “Kontinuität und Wandel der Arbeiterkultur,” Mitteilungen aus der kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung 30 (March 1992): 230–32, 245–47; Saldern, “Der Wochenend-Mensch,” Mitteilungen aus der kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung 30 (March 1992): 5–33. 54. Paul Lerner, “An All-Consuming History? Recent Works on Consumer Culture in Modern Germany,” Central European History 42 (2009): 509–43. 55. Sabine Hake, The Cinema's Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), stresses the importance of media coverage, for example, in cinema's initial development. 56. Detailed in David Imhoof, “The Game of Political Change: Sports in Göttingen during the Weimar and Nazi Eras,” German History 27 (2009): 374–94. 57. Marshall, “Political Development,” 57, 93–94, 200–201. Peter Fritzsche similarly attributes the growth of right-wing politics to the popular protest and mobilization during this period in Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); see also Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), and Thomas

Childers, The Formation of the Nazi Constituency, 1919–1933 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986). 58. Noakes, Nazi Party, 34–35, 51, 86; Saldern, “Zur Entwicklung,” 180; Marshall, “Political Development, ” 154–75, 266–71. 59. Marshall, “Political Development,” 318–21. The 1929 National Socialist victory in Göttingen also represented the Party's second greatest local success that year in the entire country: Noakes, Nazi Party, 131–32. 60. StadtAGö: Göttinger Adressbücher. 61. Marshall, “Political Development,” 329–36. Rosenhaft's Beating the Fascists discusses these streetfighting years. 62. In her 1972 dissertation, Barbara Marshall revealed in a particularly pregnant footnote the difficulty she had in obtaining archival materials in Göttingen from after 1930. She did not, however, find this 1930 restriction very limiting. Her study of Göttingen's politics in the Weimar Republic could easily conclude in 1930 because the process of Nazification was already well on its way by that point: “Political Development, ” xvi. The fact that Göttingen's head archivist in the late 1960s refused to share materials from after 1930 only underscores this point.Page 199 → 63. Göttinger Zeitung (hereafter GZ) 30 July 1929. 64. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbung Nr. 109, 1930 Festival Program, 7. 65. Imhoof, “The Game.” Studies of worker sports have long highlighted their inclusive, democratic organizations: Heinz Timmermann, Geschichte und Struktur der Arbeitersportbewegung, 1893 bis 1933 (Ahrensburg: Czwalina, 1973); Henning Eichberg, “Alternative Verhaltensnormen im Arbeitersport?” Sportwissenschaft 1 (1975): 69–80; Wolfgang Buss, “Die Entwicklung der südhannoverschen Arbeitersportbewegung in d. Zeit 1920 bis 1928,” in Die Entwicklung der Turn- und Sportvereine, ed. Arnd Krüger (West Berlin: Project Druck und Verlag, 1984), 131–39; Sigrid Block, Frauen und Mädchen in der Arbeitersportbewegung (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 1987); Viola Denecke, Die Arbeitersportgemeinschaft: Eine kulturhistorische Studie über die Braunschweiger Arbeitersportbewegung in den zwanziger Jahren (Duderstadt: Mecke, 1990); Klaus Schönberger, Arbeitersportbewegung in Dorf und Kleinstadt: zur Arbeiterbewegungskultur im Oberamt Marbach 1900–1933 (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 1995); James Riordan, “The Worker Sport Movement,” in The International Politics of Sport in the Twentieth Century, ed. James Riordan and Arnd Kruger (New York: Routledge, 1999), 105–20. 66. Later in the Third Reich, as we will see, even some of the supposedly “apolitical” backers of Nazi ideas would come to miss democratic self-rule. 67. Hitler garnered 40.7 percent of the city's vote, and Hindenburg received 41.8 percent, compared to 30.1 percent and 49.5 percent nationally: Hasselhorn, “Göttingen 1917/18–1933,” 119. 68. GT 2 August 1932. 69. GT 11 May 1933; Albrecht Schöne, Göttinger Bücherverbrennung 1933: Rede am 10. Mai 1983 zur Erinnerung an die “Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1983). 70. In fact it took several steps from 1935 to 1940 for Goebbels, as the head of the Reich Chamber of Literature, to control censorship in Germany and craft such a list. 71. Leonidas E. Hill, “Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature,” in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, ed. Jonathan Rose (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 9–46. 72. Stephan Füssel, “‘Wider den undeutschen Geist’: Bücherverbrennungen und Bibliothekslenkung im Nationalsozialismus,” in Göttingen unterm Hakenkreutz: nationalsozialistischer Alltag in einer deutschen Stadt, ed. Jens-Uwe Brinkmann and Hans-Georg Schmeling (Göttingen: Stadt Museum, 1983), 95–104. 73. Dahm, “Nationale Einheit.” 74. For more details, see Imhoof, “The Game,” 383–89. 75. E.g., the Worker Cycling and Riding Association (StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbung Nr. 205 Radfahrverein “Central” Elliehausen, Protocol Books, 50–130) and Sport Club Weende 1913 (Göttinger Volksblatt [hereafter VB] 17 February 1931 and Sport Club Weende, “70 Jahre SC Weende 1917–1983” [Göttingen 1983], 23). 76. As was the case with the Göttingen Sport Club 1905: GT, 1/2 and 17 July and 25 December 1933; and 7 /8 and 29 April, 1 June, 2 August, 24 and 26 October 1934; Göttinger Nachrichten (hereafter GN) 14 November 1934.

77. David Imhoof, “Sharpshooting in Göttingen: A Case Study of Cultural Integration in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” German History 23.4 (2005): 481–83.Page 200 → 78. E.g., the sharpshooting club Scharnhorst: C. Kellerman, W. Leßner, W. Schulze, “Vereinsgeschichte 1823–1988,” Schützenverein Scharnhorst e.V. von 1923 (1988, copy in author's collection), 15. 79. StadtAGö: Sammlung der Ortsstatuten III A 13, 29 September 1932, §2.8; 7 July 1933 §2.a.7 and b.9. 80. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics. 81. Cordula Tollmien, “Nationalsozialismus in Göttingen (1933–1945)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Göttingen, 1999), 223–26. 82. The Mayor usually exercised more direct authority in Göttingen, while the Lord Mayor was a more symbolic position. However, Gnade was a stunningly effective micro-manager and workaholic. He maximized his power as Mayor from 1933 to 1938 and then, from 1938 to 1945, made the Lord Mayor spot into the real locus of power. 83. Tollmien, “Nationalsozialismus,” 78–80, 138, 223–29. 84. In contrast, Hermann Beck, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933; The Machtergreifung in a New Light (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), details Nazi attacks on conservative allies after 1933. 85. Michael Geyer, “The Nazi State Reconsidered,” in Life in the Third Reich, ed. Richard Bessel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 57–68; Jane Caplan, Government Without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 86. StadtAGö: Dep. 77 II Nr. 19, 1 Albert Gnade; quote from letter 2 January 1935, 113. 87. StadtAGö: AHR I B 3 F 22 Nr. 5 Bd. 2. 88. StadtAGö: AHR I B 3 F 22 Nr. 5 Bd. 2, 12 December 1933–12 July 1934; Pol-Dir. VII E F 55 Nr. 16a, 23 October 1935. 89. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwebung Nr. 160 ad Lage 5; Dep. 77 Nr. 19,4 Albert Gnade: Damköhler und Heidelberg Affäre. 90. Indeed, Marlene Dietrich is the only female figure mentioned much in what follows, and commentators in Göttingen constructed her explicitly as an object. As was the case elsewhere, women's organizations in Göttingen did exert some influence on public life, especially in the realm of family and welfare policies: Traudel Weber-Reich, “Um die Lage der hiesigen nothleidenden Classe zu verbessern”: der Frauenverein zu Göttingen von 1840 bis 1956 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993); Nancy Reagin, A German Women's Movement: Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Male control of the activities studied here illustrates the ways that conservatives channeled exploding participation and consumption to reinforce their basic ideas. 91. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 92. StadtAGö: III A 13, 16 November 1935 statutes. 93. The powerful Reich Music Chamber Führer Peter Raabe directed a concert as part of the Händel Festival-cum-celebration. University officials also used the opportunity to dismiss prominent university sports leader Bernhard Zimmermann because of his Jewish wife, despite the fact that he had up to that point worked well with Nazi officials: Imhoof, “The Game,” 389–90.Page 201 → 94. Schmidt's Nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik also points to 1937 as an important turning point in Third Reich cultural history, including the way that regional and local cultural leaders came to terms with national developments. 95. Indeed, National Socialism's ability to resolve apparent contradictions in interwar Germany remained one of its greatest attractions: Peukert, Weimar Republic and Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Peter Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996): 1–22.

CHAPTER 1

1. GT 19 July 1921. This article was only one of two times in the entire interwar period that Koch commented on sharpshooting. His enthusiasm even bubbled over into poetry here, as he penned sappy lines about the Festival's appeal. His exuberance did, however, warp his math: Göttingen's last Sharpshooting Festival had been in 1914, only seven—not eight—years before. 2. Although he mentioned the modern amenities, Koch used the older Low German (Plattdeutsch) term Schüttenhoff to describe the festival grounds, a linguistic trick that emphasized sharpshooting's long roots in the area and the special feelings Göttingers, some of whom still spoke Low German, had for it. 3. Norbert Kirchner, Westfälisches Schützenwesen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Wandel und gegenwärtige Stellung (Münster: Waxman, 1992); Barbara Stambolis, “Schützenvereine in der Gesellschaft des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsmöglichkeiten am Beispiel historischer Vereinsforschung,” Rheinisch-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 44 (1999): 171–213, and “Nation und Konfession im Spannungsfeld: Aspekte historischer Vereinsforschung am Beispiel Schützenwesens,” Historisches Jahrbuch 120 (2000): 199–226; Dietmar Klenke, “Zwischen nationalkriegerischem Gemeinschaftsideal und bürgerlich-zivil Modernität: Zum Vereinsnationalismus der Sänger, Schützen und Turner im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 45 (1994): 207–23; Dietmar Sauermann, “Studien zum Schützenwesen in den Kreisen Minden-Lübbecke und Herford,” in An Weser und Wiehen: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Kultur einer Landschaft. Festschrift für Wilhelm Brepohl (Minden: Geschichtsverein, 1983), 309–22; Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 439–84. More generally on associational life, see Horst Kanitz, “Sozialgeschichtliche Entwicklungslinein des Vereinswesens,” in Lokale Freizeitvereine: Entwicklung, Aufgaben, Tendenzen, ed. Walter Bühler et al. (St. Augustin: Institut für Kommunalwissenschaft, 1978), 72–113; Heinz Schmitt, Das Vereinsleben der Stadt Weinheim an der Bergstraße: volkskundliche Untersuchung zum kulturellen Leben einer Mittelstadt (Weinheim: Gebrüder Diesbach, 1963); Konrad Dussel and Matthias Frese, “Von traditionaler Vereinskultur zu moderner Massenkultur? Vereins- und Freizeitangebote in einer südwestdeutschen Kleinstadt 1920–1960,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 331 (1995): 72–84; Weichlein, Sozialmilieus und politische Kultur. 4. Hence my focus on sharpshooting generally (Schützenwesen), not just clubs (Schützenvereine).Page 202 → 5. Sharpshooters and supporters have long used the false etymological connection between the noun Schütze (a sharpshooter) and the verb schützen (to protect) to evoke sharpshooting's “ancient” roots as local militias and police forces and their symbolic role as protectors of town traditions: Kirchner, Westfälisches Schützenwesen, 3–4. 6. Taking cues from anthropological notions of liminality, this study pays particular attention to the rhetoric around and about sharpshooting festivals. Here “liminal” implies a space created by public rituals in which social norms are both questioned and reaffirmed: Turner, The Ritual Process; Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992); “Comments and Conclusions” in The Reversible World, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). Roger Abrhams and Richard Bauman maintain specifically that festivals seem “to draw together opposing elements in the…societies in which they occur, and to draw them together more closely and harmoniously than at any other time in the year”: “Ranges of Festival Behavior,” in Reversible World, 206. See also Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 7. Dieter Düding, ed., Öffentliche Festkultur: politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (Reinbeck: Rowholt, 1988); Manfred Hettling and Paul Nolte, eds., Bürgerliche Feste: symbolische Formen politische Handelns im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993); Manuela Achilles, “‘Blutdurst’ und ‘Symbolhunger’: Zur Semantik von Blut und Erde,” in Spielräume des einzelnen: Deutsche Literatur in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich, ed. Walter Delabar, et al. (Berlin: Weidler, 1999), 185–216. 8. Following Clifford Geertz's Weberian definition of culture, I view sharpshooting as a cultural activity, something to which participants ascribed their own meaning and which in turn shaped their worldview: “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–32. 9. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 10. Karin Gehrmann, “Das Schützensilber der Stadt Ahrweiler aus den Jahren 1653 bis 1986” (Ph.D. diss.,

University of Cologne, 1988), 48–55, 22–24. 11. Sharpshooting remained most widely spread in northern and western Germany into the twentieth century: Heinrich Harmjanz and Eric Roehr, eds., Atlas der deutsche Volkskunde (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1937), charts 10 and 11. 12. Günther Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft 1392–1992 (Gudensberg-Gleichen: Wartberg Verlag, 1992), 75–80; Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Göttinger Schützen: Vom Bürgeraufgebot zum Schiess-Sport (Göttingen: Verlag Göttinger Tageblatt, 1975), 33–34. In 1712 new governing rules in Göttingen stipulated that members must be of noble birth or practice an “honorable” profession: no millers, shepherds, hangmen (!), non-guild craftsman, or hand workers (ibid., 39). 13. Thomas Nipperdey, “Verein als soziales Struktur in Deutschland im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Geschichtswissenschaft und Vereinswesen im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1972), 3–44. 14. Otto Dann, “Vereinsbildung in Deutschland in historischer Perspektive,” in Vereine in Deutschland: Vom Geheimbund zur freien gesellschaftlichen Organisation, 121–22; Nipperdey, “Verein als soziales Struktur,” 31–33; David Blackbourn and Geoff Page 203 → Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 196–97; Hans-Thorald Michaelis, Schützengilden: Ursprung—Tradition—Entwicklung (Munich: Keyser, 1985), 80–82; Sauermann, “Studien,” 310. 15. Kanitz, “Sozialgeschichtliche,” 78–80. Indeed Donna Harsch maintains that by the 1920s the mix of sociability and equality in working-class associations defined Social Democracy and was the primary reason that the SPD stood on the verge of becoming a truly popular party: German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 16. Like the 1863 Club, the Veterans group boasted a solidly middle-class membership: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 146, Nr. 12, Ab. A, 1–2. 17. On the subject of democracy and mass politics as “feminine,” see Eve Rosenhaft, “Women, Gender and the Limits of Political History in the Age of ‘Mass Politics,’” in Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany. New Perspectives, ed. James Retallack and Larry Eugene Jones (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 149–73. 18. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV, F. 147, Nr. 8: Schützenverein Göttingen (Bürger-Schützengesellschaft) Spec. 1862–1934, 89–90. 19. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Göttinger Schützen, 97ff. 20. Kirchner, Westfälisches Schützenwesen, charts on 31 and 84. 21. Alfred Kirchhoff, 500 Jahre Celler Schützenwesen: Ein Stück Heimatgeschichte aus der alten Herzogstadt Celle (Celle: Phol, 1928), 145; Kirchner, Westfälisches Schützenwesen, 8. 22. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Göttinger Schützen, 97–101. 23. Versailles Peace Treaty §§ 177 and 178, as well as § 1 of the Demilitarization Law (printed in GZ and GT 7 July 1921); Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 198; Stambolis, “Nation,” 204. 24. Christiane Eisenberg, “The Middle Class and Competition: Some Considerations of the Beginnings of Modern Sport in England and Germany,” International Journal of the History of Sport 7.2 (1990): 265; Hermann Bach, “Volks- und Wehrsport in der Weimarer Republik,” Sportwissenschaft 11 (1981): 273–94; Michael Barrett, “Soldiers, Sportsmen, and Politicians: Military Sports in Germany, 1924–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1977). The English translation of Volkssport as “people's sport” fails to capture the many implications in the term Volk, which could be used democratically to imply all people or racially to mean a group of people related by blood. 25. In Göttingen the illiberal, nationalist (though eventually anti-Nazi) Young German Order provided the seeds for the Scharnhorst Sharpshooting Club in 1923: Kellerman, “Vereinsgeschichte.” Especially after 1933 the SA became a popular means for competing at the Sharpshooting Festival. 26. Bach, “Wehrsport,” 278–88; Barrett, “Soldiers,” 67–70. 27. For a more detailed analysis of sports in interwar Göttingen, see Imhoof, “The Game.” 28. Calling these organizations “gymnastics clubs” omits all the broader notions of calisthenics, group exercise, public presentation, and general physical fitness that the German term Turner carries.Page 204 → 29. Eisenberg, “The Middle Class and Competition,” 265–82, and “English Sports” und deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800–1939 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999).

30. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 152 Nr. 9 Ab. G, 1868–1956, 146.2–153.30; AHR I B 3 Fach 22 Nr. 8 Bd. 2, “Erlaß einer Ordnung über die Erhebung einer Kartensteuer und einer Lustbarkeitssteuer 1924–32”; “Versammlung der Vorstände der Göttinger Verbände und Vereine am Mittwoch, den 30. September 1931.” 31. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147 Nr. 9 Ab. B, 18 and Nr. 17, 6–7; Hardy Grüne, Zwischen Hochburg und Provinz: 100 Jahre Fußball in Göttingen (Göttingen: Verlag der Werkstatt, 1998), 27–29, 48. 32. The largest three were the German Turner Association (founded 1868), the German Soccer Association (founded 1900), both mostly middle class and solidly nationalist conservative, and the Worker Turner and Sport Association (founded 1893), which worked closely with the SPD. 33. Jörg Pieper, “Die Zerschlagung der demokratischen Sportbewegung durch die nationalsozialistischen Machthaber ab 1933—eine Fallstudie zu den Vorgängen in der Region Göttingen” (Unpublished Seminar Paper, University of Göttingen, 1997), 90; Timmermann, Geschichte und Struktur der Arbeitersportbewegung. 34. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147 Nr. 30; Buss, “Die Entwicklung.” 35. The Göttinger Tageblatt railed against “France's Outrageous Lies” on 19 July 1921. Even the normally cool, liberal Göttinger Zeitung decried “France's Chauvinism” and demanded that Göttingers “wake up” (13 and 15 July 1921). As it frequently did throughout the interwar era, the Tageblatt also printed antisemitic articles on “the terrible Results of Jewish Rule” in the Soviet Union (16 July 1921). 36. For these events and those described below, see GZ and GT 19 July 1921; GT 21 and 26 July 1921. 37. GZ 10 July 1921 and GT 12 July 1921. Volksfest translates more or less into “People's Festival,” though the English again fails to render all the implications of the German term. 38. GZ 19 July 1921 and GT 22 July 1921. 39. GT 22 July 1921. 40. GZ 20 and 22 July 1921 and GT 20 July 1921. 41. GZ 14, 15, 19, 28 July 1921; GT 14, 15, 22, 29 July 1921. 42. GT 21 July 1921. 43. Jeffrey Herf argues that a conservative desire for “reconciliation between antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism and…modern technology” shaped many facets of interwar German culture, in Reactionary Modernism, 1. 44. Peter Fritzsche describes this synthesis of public action and anti-politicism as a form of populism in Rehearsals for Fascism and Germans into Nazis. 45. Additionally, sharpshooting Vereine from the nearby large villages of Weende, Geismar, and Grone took part in Göttingen's sharpshooting festivals, as did shooting divisions of hunting clubs and veterans organizations. The actual number of sharpshooting organizations was therefore probably closer to twenty by 1930. 46. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 8: Schützenverein Göttingen (Bürger-Schützengesellschaft) Spec.1862–1934, 89–90; Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, Page 205 → 198–99, and 600 Jahre Göttinger Schützen, 104; Kellerman, “Vereinsgeschichte,” 15. 47. Not only did they come from similar social groups; they actually competed for members: Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 198. 48. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 198 and 600 Jahre Göttinger Schützen, 104. 49. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 198–99. 50. Club “Scharnhorst” spelled out its founding ideals in the original statutes and membership requirements: Kellerman, “Vereinsgeschichte.” 51. See Introduction, note 53. 52. Dann, “Vereinsbildung,” 119–42; Kanitz, “Sozialgeschichtliche,” especially 82–113; Friedhelm Kröll et al. Vereine: Geschichte—Politik—Kultur (Frankfurt: Institut für Marxistische Studien und Forschung, 1982); Schmitt, Vereinsleben der Stadt Weinheim. 53. Herf, Reactionary Modernism; Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches. Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1991); Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern.” 54. GT 7 and 16 July 1922. 55. GZ 18 July 1922. 56. GT 18 July 1922. 57. GT 22 July 1922.

58. GT 21 July 1922. 59. GT 18 July 1922; GZ 25 July 1922. 60. GZ 16 and 17 January 1923, VB 13 January 1923. 61. Holger Biermann, “1923 in Göttingen: Auswirkungen von Ruhrkrise und Inflation” (unpublished seminar paper, University of Göttingen, 1989 [StadtAGö: E 215]), 15–17; more generally see Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 62. GT 7 July 1923. And its value continued to go down every day thereafter. 63. GZ 4 July 1923; GT 3 July 1923. 64. Kellerman, “Vereinsgeschichte,” 15. 65. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147 Nr. 20 Ab. B. 66. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 146 Nr. 12 Ab. A. 67. GZ 24 July 1924. 68. Harmjanz and Roehr, eds., Atlas, charts 10 and 11. 69. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 152 Nr. 9 Ab. G, 1868–1956, 146.2–153.30; StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 2, Erlaß einer Ordnung über die Erhebung einer Kartensteuer und einer Lustbarkeitssteuer 1924–32, Versammlung der Vorstände der Göttinger Verbände und Vereine am Mittwoch, den 30. September 1931. 70. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine,” 448. 71. During the mid-1920s, for example, three clubs listed eighteen members: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 20, Ab. B, 7; Nr. 24, Ab. B, 3; and Nr. 22, Ab. B, 2. 72. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147 Nr. 8, 89; Kellermann, “Vereinsgeschichte,” 94; StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147 Nr. 19 Ab. B, 4. 73. One local branch of a larger organization from Braunschweig had fifty regular Page 206 → members and twenty-one “corporate” members from the student fraternities: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV F. 147, Nr. 29, Ab. B, 1. The Göttingen branch of the Hanover-based Small-Bore Sharpshooting Club Republic had fiftyfive members in 1929: Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover (hereafter Nds.HStA. Hannover) Hann. 310 II A Nr. 2 II, 40. 74. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 4, 16 February 1923. 75. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 21, Ab. B and StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV: Vereinpolizei Ab. B, Fach 147, Nr. 22. The latter was short-lived and left little archival evidence, but the Workers Sharpshooting Club continued until 1935. 76. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger Schutzen Gesellschaft, 199–200, 308. One of the founding members and leaders of the working club, Fritz Wittorf, had been a leader of the SPD and its gymnastics club since 1914; he served as SPD representative to the Magistracy from 1922 to 1924 and again from 1929 to 1933: Saldern, Arbeiter Reformismus, 300; Göttinger Adressbücher (StadtAGö: Z 53). 77. GZ 24 June 1924. A number of conservative paramilitary organizations, including the Stahlhelm, also participated in sharpshooting festivals. 78. And their yearly dues were about half of those middle-class club members paid. 79. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 22, Ab. B, 2. Kahn had been head of the local SPD branch in 1909, until he clashed with party leadership; during World War I he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD): Saldern, Arbeiter-Reformismus, 294. 80. Arend Smid, “Die Juden in Göttingen,” 3–4, 11–20. 81. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Ab. B F. 147, Nr. 21, 2. 82. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Ab. B F. 147 Nr. 22, 1. 83. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Göttingen Schützen, 86. 84. GZ 5 June 1905, cited in Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger Schützen Gesellschaft, 188. 85. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine,” 448–50; Stambolis, “Nation,” 214–19. 86. Nds.HStA. Hannover Hann. 310 II A Nr. 2 II , 60. 87. Julius Stumpf, “Die Entwicklung des ‘Deutschen Schützenverbandes e.V. im DRL.’ sein Aufbau und seine Ziele,” in Wir Schützen, ed. Wilhelm Ewald (Duisburg: Rheinische Nationaldruckerei und Verlag, 1938), 380. 88. The Small-Bore Sport Club, 1923 (StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 20, Ab. B); the Association

of Small-Bore Sharpshooting, 1924 (StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 26, Ab. B); the Indoor Sharpshooting Club, 1924 (StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 24, Ab. B); a local branch of the SmallBore Sport Club of Brunswick and Southern Hanover, 1927 (StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 29, Ab. B); Göttingen's division of Club Republic, 1929 (Nds.HStA. Hannover Hann. 310 II A Nr. 2 II); the Small-Bore Sharpshooting Club “Hurrah [Horrido],” 1929 (StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. Fach 32 Nr. 18); and the Sportshooting Society of a local insurance company, founded in 1932. 89. Niedersächsische Morgenpost (hereafter NM) 17 July 1925. 90. GZ 22 July 1924. 91. Quote in GZ 24 June 1924; see also GZ 22 June 1924 and 2 July 1924. 92. GZ 24 June 1924. 93. GZ 2 July 1924.Page 207 → 94. GZ 29 June 1924. 95. GZ 22 July 1921, GT 4 August 1932 and 24 July 1934. 96. GT 4 August 1925. 97. NM 2 August 1925. 98. Adelheid von Saldern describes the widespread obsession with new technology and its potentially völkisch function in “Cultural Conflicts, Popular Mass Culture, and the Question of Nazi Success: The Eilenriede Motorcycle Races, 1924–39,” German Studies Review 15 (May 1992): 317–38. 99. NM 17 July 1925.

CHAPTER 2 1. GT 31 July 1927. Koch's rare commentary on sharpshooting underscored the aesthetic and social significance of the new Hall. He was in fact the only local writer to remark on its Bauhaus style and to reference the current aesthetic of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). One of the Göttinger Zeitung's cultural critics, who also did not normally report on sharpshooting, likewise lauded the modern Hall in a full-page article: GZ 31 July 1927. 2. GT 6 August 1925. 3. Alf Lüdtke discusses the success of Nazi symbolic overtures to workers in “The ‘Honor of Labor’: Industrial Workers and the Power of Symbols under National Socialism,” in Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945, ed. David F. Crew (London: Routledge, 1994), 67–109. 4. Sharpshooters elsewhere crafted similar changes: Kirchner, Schützenwesen, 7–8; Kirchhoff, 500 Jahre Celler Schützenwesen, 145. 5. GT 28 June and 1, 2, 4, 8, and 18 August 1925; GZ 2 and 8 August 1925. 6. GT 28 June 1925. 7. These shooters still had to pay 30–60 Pfennigs for practice targets and up to 3 Marks for those used in festival competitions: StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 4, “1927 Schiesordnung der Bürger-SchützenGesellschaft Göttignen e.V.” §10 and 13–16. But one newspaper report indicated that the Society would also pay for uniforms and other expenses: GT 18 August 1925. The Association of Proletarian Sharpshooters, probably the cheapest club in town, collected 2.40 Marks each year from members around this time: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV: Vereinpolizei Ab. B, Fach 147, Nr. 22. Yearly dues for one of the small-bore clubs were 12 Marks, plus 1.5 Pfennigs per bullet when practicing: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XVV: Vereinspolizei Fach 147, Nr. 24, 2. 8. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 4, “1927 Schiesordnung der Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft Göttingen e.V.” §10 and 13. 9. GT 28 June 1925. 10. GT 3 July 1926. 11. GZ 2 August 1925. 12. GT 4 August 1925. 13. VB 2 August 1925, GZ 11 August 1925. 14. GZ 11 August 1925. 15. GZ 2 August 1925.Page 208 →

16. GT 6 August 1925. 17. GT 28 June 1925. 18. Eve Rosenhaft makes this point more generally in “Women, Gender.” 19. Karen Hagemann argues that this situation was all too common in the Social Democratic Party and affiliated groups, in “‘Equal but Not the Same’: The Social Democratic Women's Movement in the Weimar Republic,” in Bernstein to Brandt: A Short History of German Social Democracy, ed. Roger Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), 133–43. 20. VB 4 and 8 August 1925, quote from VB 3 August 1927. 21. VB 8 August 1925. 22. GT 28 June 1925; see also GT 1 August 1925, GT 3 July 1926, and GZ 2 August 1927. 23. GT 28 June 1925; GZ and NM 17 July 1925; GT 1 and 18 August 1925. 24. GZ 2 August 1925. 25. GT 1 August and 28 June 1925. 26. VB 4 August 1925. 27. GT 8 April 1926. 28. Margaret Stieg, “The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy,” Central European History 32.1 (1990): 22–56; Klaus Petersen, “The Harmful Publications (Young Persons) Act of 1926: Literary Censorship and the Politics of Morality in the Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 15 (1992): 505–23. 29. K. Jans, “Shießsport und Presse,” Schützenzeitung für Niedersachsen 45 (April 1928). Other articles in this paper expound upon the value and promotion of sport-shooting; e.g., “Inwiefern das Kleinkaliberschießen charakterbildend?” 80 (January 1931). 30. GT 23 January 1926. 31. Respectively, 84,633 and 159,804 Marks: Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 203–4. 32. Imhoof, “The Game,” 380–83. 33. GT 31 July 1927. 34. GZ 30 July 1929. 35. GZ 3 August 1929. 36. VB 1 August 1929. 37. GZ 4 August 1929. 38. See especially Stambolis, “Schützenvereine” and “Nation,” as well as Kirchner, Westfälisches Schützenwesen; Schwartz, “Schützenvereine”; Gehrmann, “Schützensilber”; Weichlein, Sozialmilieus, chapter 3; and Bösch, Milieu. Religious overtones were also absent at sharpshooting festivals in the similarly homogeneous city of Hanover: Andreas Krasset, “Zwischen Kirmes und Korn. Das hannoverische Schützenfest in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Feste und Feiern in Hannover, ed. Hans-Dieter Schmidt (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1995), 231–43. 39. Others have made this argument more generally about this era: Herf, Reactionary Modernism; Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern”; Reichel, Der schöne Schein. 40. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine,” 448–65. In 1931 one of Göttingen's veterans associations did break off relations with the Burgher Sharpshooting Society to protest (in Page 209 → vain) the growth of small-bore sport shooting. One historian of sharpshooting calls this division evidence of the “great harm” that sport shooting brought to Göttingen: Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 214. But the breadth of support for sport shooting and its legacy to the present day belies this analysis. 41. See especially GT 29 July–2 August 1932; GZ 1 and 2 August 1932. 42. GT 4 July 1932 and VB 1 August 1932. 43. GZ 1 August 1932. 44. GT 2 August 1932. 45. GT 1 August 1932. 46. Barrett, “Soldiers,” 1–76, 319–21. 47. Allen describes the impact of personalities and local networks on the “coordination” of associations in nearby Northeim in Nazi Seizure, rev. ed., 284–87. 48. Imhoof, “The Game,” 383–89. 49. StadtAGö: AHR II A 13 Nr. 124, Bd. 3, Verschiedene Vereinssachen, 1933–1952.

50. Sauermann, “Studien,” 312. 51. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. I, 12 February 1934. 52. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. I, Normal-Satzung des Deutschen Schießsportverband, from Beilage der Deutschen Schützenzeitung 49 (8 December 1933). 53. Reichsgesetzblatt 1928, 143–47; 1931, 77; 1931, 742–45; 1932, 253; 1938, 265–29, 1573. 54. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 80 IV, 1, Gnade's 1934 Report to Reichssportkommissar, 5–6, and Gnade's 1934 Festival Speech, 11. 55. Heinrich Best, ed., Vereine in Deutschland: Vom Geheimbund zur freien gesellschaftlichen Organisation (Bonn: Informationszentrum Sozialwissenschaft, 1993); Walter Bühler, Hortst Kanitz, and Hans-Jörg Siewert, eds., Lokale Freizeitvereine: Entwicklung, Aufgaben, Tendenzen (St. Augustin: Institution für Kommunalwissenschaft, 1978); Friedhelm Kröll, Stephan Barjes, and Rudi Wiengarn, Vereine: Geschichte—Politik—Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Institute für Marxistische Studien und Forschungen, 1982). 56. Gehrmann, “Schützensilber,” 35–37. 57. The history of sharpshooting in Göttingen thus corroborates the conclusions of other scholars that voluntary associations were adaptable and important to the growth of Nazism in Germany: Koshar, Social Life, 245–71; Allen, Nazi Seizure, 214, 222–32; Gehrmann, “Schützensilber,” 34–37, 84–87; especially Schwartz, “Schützenvereine,” 439–84. 58. Sauermann, “Studien,” 313. 59. Michael Schwartz divides the process into an initial stage of formal Gleichschaltung in 1933 and 1934, followed by an institutional one from 1934 to 1938. He argues that the process never really ended and remained incomplete when World War II began: “Schützenvereine,” especially 454–55, 479–83. 60. Allen maintains that sharpshooting societies in Northeim, for instance, merely “redecorated” themselves after 1933 and that the transfer of power and subsequent Gleichschaltung there was not a great shock, “though their character was also altered” by greater emphasis on military and sport shooting: Nazi Seizure, 228. 61. GZ 15 March 1933. Most reporting on sharpshooting—sport or otherwise—continued Page 210 → to fall under the local heading, but this separation underscored that some advocates recognized sportsharpshooting's different objectives. 62. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 80, 1, Gnade 1934 Speech, 19. 63. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. I, Normal-Satzung des Deutschen Schießsportverband (1933). 64. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. I, 8 December 1933 and StadtAGö: AHR I B 5, 6 Nr. 16 Bd. II, 22 December 1933 report. And Lord Mayor Bruno Jung remained honorary head of the Society. 65. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. I, Normal-Satzung des Deutschen Schießsportverband (1933). 66. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 215–16, and 600 Jahre Göttinger Schützen, 122–23; Hans Damrau and Heiner Schröder, 125 Jahre Schützenverein von 1863 e.V. Göttingen (Göttingen: Schützenverein 1863, 1988), 93–97. 67. Records from the Scharnhorst club, for instance, reveal no conflict or change in the club's regular activities as a result of this policy: Protokolbuch, Schützenverein Scharnhorst e.V. Göttingen 1925–1957 (private collection, in author's possession). 68. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 80 IV, 1, Gnade's 1934 Report to Reichssportkommissar, 2–13. 69. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 216–17. 70. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. Fach 147, Nr. 8, 93–94. 71. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16, Bd. I BSG 1890–1935, 13 February 1934 report from Führer of the Burgher Sharpshooting Society (signed A. Gnade). 72. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 80 IV, 1, Gnade's 1934 Report to Reichssportkommissar, 6–11. 73. StadtAGö: Kl. Erberbungen 80 VI, 1, 9–10. 74. See especially coverage before and at the start of the Festival: GZ, GT, and Göttinger Nachrichten (hereafter GN) 7–16 July 1934. 75. GN 16 July 1934. 76. GT 19 July 1934. Given the challenge Nazi musicologists faced in defining “German music,” this claim was clearly an attack on the jazz music occasionally played at Festival dances in the 1920s. 77. GZ 21 July 1934.

78. Published in GZ and GN 14 July 1934 and GT 14/15 July 1934. 79. GN 9 July 1934. 80. GT 11 July 1934; GN, GZ, and GT 16 July 1934. 81. GZ 16 July 1934; GZ and GN 14 July 1934, GT 14/15 July 1934; StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. Fach 147, Nr. 8, 93; StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. I, article by District Sport Director Schünemann in Schützen-Zeitung für Niedersachsen from April 1934, 9–10. A March 1934 letter from Gnade to Hans Hertwig claims that the Society had gained 200 new members and stood at 2,000 strong: StadtAGö: AHR I B 5, 6 Nr. 16 Bd. II, 9 March 1934. A May 1936 letter from Gnade to Muhs in Hildesheim reiterates this number from 1934: StadtAGö: AHR I B 5, 6 Nr. 16 Bd. II, 30 May 1936. Such head counts do not appear in Weimar-era reports on Sharpshooting Festivals. However, even the most generous extrapolation from available statistics would reveal that no more than half of this number took part during the 1920s. Probably at most twenty-five clubs that Page 211 → were organized for shooting (in Göttingen, from surrounding areas, and as divisions of athletic clubs, hunting groups, and veterans associations) ever participated in a Weimar-era Festival. If these groups averaged twenty-five members, then perhaps 625 men shot as part of a Verein. The regular and public invitations to non-club shooters that began in 1925 might have yielded another 500 or 600. 82. The Göttinger Zeitung emphasized on 23 July 1934 that “he belonged to the youngest, recently joined sharpshooting brothers.” 83. Bernett, “Der deutsche Sport,” 252. 84. The following story comes from Pol-Dir. XXV: Vereinspolizei F. 147, Nr. 21, Ab. B. 85. Wassersportvereinigung Göttingen 1908 e.V. “75 Jahre Wassersportvereinigung Göttingen 1908 e.V.: 1908–1983” (Göttingen, 1983), 19–32 and StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 30, 15; StadtAGö: PolDir. XXV Fach 153, Nr. 21, 5–21 and Fach 155, Nr. 11, 1–4. Police records do not record the closing, for instance, of the Worker Bicycle Club “Star” or Göttingen's Independent Gymnastics Club, but those clubs too were outlawed by the February 1933 laws. After being pressured by police and right-wing groups for some time, other leftist organizations in Göttingen likewise closed (or were closed) by the summer of 1933: see Joachim Bons, Viola Denecke, and Kornelia Duwe, “Im ‘Volksheim’ war immer was los!” in Göttingen ohne Gänseliesel: Texte und Bilder zur Stadtgeschichte, ed. Kornelia Duwe, Carola Gottschalk, and Marianne Koerner, 2nd ed. (Gudesberg-Gleichen: Wartberg Verlag, 1989), 68–71. More generally see Tollmien, “Nationalsozialismus,” 65–71, 99–105. 86. The only Jewish member, one-time left-wing activist Karl Kahn, left Göttingen around this time, after SA members vandalized his shop, so the police could not use his membership as an excuse to invoke the February 1933 laws; he died at the age of sixty-one during a visit in February 1934: Uta Schäfer-Riechter and Jörg Klein, Die jüdischen Bürger im Kreis Göttingen 1933–1945: Göttingen, Hann. Münden, Duderstadt; ein Gedenkbuch (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992), 114. 87. Deutsche Schützenzeitung 10 November 1933. 88. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 80, 1 (Gnade Rede und Bericht), Gnade speech at 1934 Schützenfest, 12. 89. In keeping with the Third Reich's plans to promote individual shooting over clubs, a number of the confiscated goods went to the Burgher Sharpshooting Society: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 147, Nr. 21, Ab. B, 11–34. In contrast, other suppressed left-wing groups, such as the Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold, were not compensated for their losses: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 153, Nr. 21, 10–23. 90. Nds.HStA. Hannover: Hann.172 Göttingen Acc.17/62, Nr. 23 and Nr. 29. 91. Beck, Fateful Alliance. 92. Meinhardt, 600 Jahre Bürger-Schützen-Gesellschaft, 220. On the Nazification of students, see Geoffrey Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 93. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine,” 448–50. Barrett even goes so far as to call the Third Reich's substantial SA paramilitary plan “the National Socialist continuation of the youth training policy of the Weimar Republic and the Army, albeit with Nazi modification and amplification”: “Soldiers,” 329.Page 212 → 94. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine”; Sauermann, “Studien,” 313; Gehrmann, “Schützensilber,” 31–42; Stambolis, “Schützenvereine” and “Nation”; Dietmar Klenke, “Überlebenstechniken des Eichsfelder Katholizismus unter den deutschen Diktaturen: Identitätssicherung oder Selbstaufgabe?” in Solidargemeinschaft und fragmentierte Gesellschaft: Parteien, Milieus und Verbände im Vergleich. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Peter Lösche, ed. Tobias Dür and Franz Walter (Opladen: Leske +

Budrich, 1999), 94–96. 95. Andreas Krasselt finds the same phenomenon in Hanover: “Kirmes und Korn.” Sharpshooting groups in nearby Northeim did, though, alter their “character” to fit with the new emphasis on military and sport shooting: Allen, Seizure, 228. 96. GN 15 July 1935. 97. GN 20 July 1936. The article's enthusiasm reflected both the reaction of sharpshooting leaders and the continued role of local papers in constructing sharpshooting's image. 98. GN 15–18 July 1935. 99. GN 9 July 1935. 100. See Henning Eichberg et al., Massenspiele, NS-Thingspiel, Arbeiterweihspiel und olympisches Zeremoniell, problemata 58 (Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog, 1977); Michael Werner, “‘Das Fest unserer Zeit’: Händel-Inszenierungen in den 1920er Jahren und ihre Implikationen für das nationalsozialistische Thingspiel,” in P. Csobádi et al., eds., “Und Jedermann erwartet sich ein Fest.” Fest, Theater, Festspiele. Gesammelte Vorträge des Salzburger Symposiums 1995 (Anif/Salzburg: Müller-Speiser, 1996), 675–87. 101. During one speech, a professor and sharpshooting leader maintained that Göttingen's sharpshooting history stretched back to glories of thousands of years ago: GN 15 July 1935. 102. Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism. 103. Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 192; GT 14 and 15 July 1936. 104. GT 14 July 1936. 105. GT 15 July 1936. 106. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5, 6 Nr. 16 Bd. II, Niederschrift from 30 December 1935 meeting of Führerrates und Gläubigerausschusses der BSG. 107. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. II, 10 May 1936 letter from Gnade to Muhs, 1–7. 108. Damrau and Schröder, Schützenverein, 97. 109. StadtAGö: AHR I B 5,6 Nr. 16 Bd. II, 10 May 1936 letter from Gnade to Muhs, 8–12. On this trend elsewhere, see Schwartz, “Schützenvereine.” 110. A January 1936 report listed 895 Society members: StadtAGö: AHR I B 5, 6 Nr. 16 Bd. II, 1 January 1936 report of Burgher Sharpshooting Society. And while that number probably grew around the festival, it was certainly lower than the figures reported in 1934. 111. GT 14 July 1936. 112. GT 23 July 1936. 113. Schützenverein Scharnhorst's protocol book, for instance, even notes a meeting of fifteen members (out of thirty-one active) on 15 May 1944.Page 213 →

CHAPTER 3 1. This basic story comes from Willi Rehkopf, “Oskar Hagen: Begründer der Göttinger Händelfestspiele, Rede anläßlich der Enthüllung einer Gedenktafel am 29. Juni 1981, Goldgraben 20,” Göttinger Jahrbuch 30 (1982): 201–3; Willi and Minnie Rehkopf, “Die Akademische Orchestervereinigung Göttingen,” in 75 Jahre Akademische Orchestervereinigung Göttingen, 1906–1981 (Göttingen: A. Wittchen, 1981), 19–35; Holger Hagen, “Erinnerung: Göttingen—Händel—AOV,” in 75 Jahre Akademische Orchestervereinigung Göttingen, 39–51. 2. Werktreue or “historical accuracy” or “authentic performance” attempts to render both the text and production style of the composer's time as completely as possible in musical performance, often using period instruments or copies, scholarly editions of the original scores, and studied reproductions of costumes, sets, gestures, and movement. Arnold Dolmetsch first called such aesthetics “authenticity” in the early twentieth century: Harry Haskell, “Early music,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/46003 (accessed 14 July 2012). It remains the dominant dogma in early music performance even today. See Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988); Joseph Kermann, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 182–217; Richard Taruskin, “On Letting the Music Speak for Itself,” Journal of Musicology 1 (1982): 338–49; and Nicholaus Kenyen, ed.,

Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), especially Kenyen's introduction and Howard Mayer Brown, “Pedantry of Liberation? A Sketch of the Historical Performance Movement.” 3. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1930, Karl Brandi, “Die große Pause,” 27–29. 4. Gay, Weimar Culture, xiii. Other scholars also challenge Gay's basic argument: Reichel, Der schöne Schein; von Saldern, Stadt und Moderne; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Werner, Moderne in der Provinz; David J. Buch and Hana Worthen, “Ideology in Movement and a Movement in Ideology: The Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 (9–16 December, Berlin),” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 215–39. 5. Wolfgang Boetticher, “Die frühe Göttinger Händelrenaissance. Versuch einer Würdigung,” Göttinger Händel Beiträge 2 (1986): 207–20; Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre”; Michael Schäfer, “70 Jahre HändelFestspiele,” Göttinger Jahresblätter 13 (1990): 134–38; Konrad Ameln, “Dreissig Jahre Göttinger HändelGesellschaft,” Händel-Jahrbuch 9 (1963): 49–65; Walter Meyerhoff, 50 Jahre Göttinger Händel-Festspiele Festschrift (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1970). 6. Michael Walter, Hitler in der Oper: deutsches Musikleben 1919–1945 (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1995); Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Reitmüller, eds., Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2003); Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing Page 214 → German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007); Joy Haslam Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 7. Currid, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 13. 8. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, viii–ix, 71; Burkhard Egdorf, Von der Stadtmusik im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gründung des Göttinger Symphonie-Orchesters: Ein Beitrag zur kommunalen Musikgeschichte Göttingens (Göttingen: Göttinger Symphonie-Orchester, 1989), 148–49. 9. Egdorf, Stadtmusik, 148–49; Leo Hiemer, “Zur Kultur der Weimarer Republik: Das Stadttheater zu Göttingen” (unpublished seminar paper, University of Göttingen, 1979 [StadtAGö: III B 334]); L. Körner, “Festansprache des Präsidenten der Reichstheaterkammer Reichs-Kultursenator L. Körner anlässlich des 50-jährigen Bestehens des Stadttheaters Göttingen” (unpublished pamphlet, Göttingen, 1940 [StadtAGö: III J 4]). Michael Walter finds such conservative decisions common in this era: Hitler in der Oper, viii–ix, 71. 10. After 1929, however, the worsening economy and conservatives' attacks on modernism limited aid to avant-garde artists: Michael Kater, “The Revenge of the Fathers: The Demise of Modern Music at the End of the Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 15 (1992): 295–315. 11. Ulrike Gruner, Musikleben in der Provinz 1933–45. Beispiel: Marburg. Eine Studie anhand der Musikberichterstattung in der Lokalpresse (Marburg: Stadt Marburg, 1990), 25–33. 12. Hiemer, “Stadttheater,” 15–22. 13. Potter, “German Musicology and Early Music Performance, 1918–1933,” in Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94–97. 14. Applegate, “What Is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation,” German Studies Review (Winter 1992): 30. More generally, see Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German Identity. 15. Potter, Most German. 16. Potter, “German Musicology,” 94–97. 17. Potter, Most German, 5–6, and “German Musicology,” 94. 18. Potter, “German Musicology,” 102. 19. Gruner, Musikleben, 26–33; Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 42–70. 20. Christopher Hailey, “Rethinking Sound: Music and Radio in Weimar Germany,” in Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, 24–34. 21. Katja Schneider, Paul Thiersch und die Bühnen: Szenische Visionen eines Architekten (Halle: Staatliche

Galerie Moritzburg, 1995), 18. 22. Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre,” 29–30. Pamela Potter cites Moser as a leading example of nationalist musicologists prescribing German music to heal wounds from World War I and the Revolution: Potter, Most German, 2–4, 40, 200–228. Similarly, David Dennis follows the wide variety of political uses of Beethoven's music and biography in Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Eckhard John argues in fact that the entire interwar period was characterized by Page 215 → the politicization of music: Musik-Bolschewismus: Die Politisierung der Musik in Deutschland 1918–1938 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 58. 23. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 65–70. 24. Hagen, Art Epochs and Their Leaders: A Survey of the Genesis of Modern Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927); Patterns and Principles of Spanish Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1936); The Birth of the American Tradition in Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940). His Deutsches Sehen: Gestaltungsfragen der deutschen Kunst, originally published in 1919, was reissued with a new foreword in 1933 that claimed that Hitler's new regime would finally realize the grand vision of German art and criticism (3rd ed., Munich: R. Piper, 1933). 25. Hagen, “Die deutsche Uraufführung von G. Fr. Händels Musikdrama Rodelinde im Göttinger Stadttheater am 26. Juni 1920, veranstaltet vom Universitätsbund,” Mitteilungen des Universitätsbundes Göttingen 2.1 (1920): 32–33; StadtAGö: Deposit Nr. 109, 1921, Festival Program, “Das Recht der HändelOper,” 7; 1923, Festival Program, 10. 26. Rehkopf, “Oskar Hagen,” 201–3, and Rehkopf, “Die Akademische Orchestervereinigung Göttingen,” 27–30; Hagen, “Erinnerung,” 44–51; Schneider, Thiersch, 18. 27. Hagen, “Uraufführung,” 32. 28. Hermann Abert, “Händel als Dramatiker: Vortrag gehalten in der Aula der Göttinger Universität am 4. Juli 1921, zur Einführung in die Händelschen Opern Ottone und Rodelinde,” Mitteilungen des Universitätsbundes Göttingen 3.1 (1921): 17–31; Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre,” 33–34. 29. Hagen, “Die Bearbeitung der Händelschen Rodelinde und ihre Uraufführung am 26. Juni 1920 in Göttingen,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2 (1920): 726–28, and “Uraufführung,” 30–31. 30. Stephen Hinton, “Lehrstück: An Aesthetics of Performance,” in Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, 65. 31. Hagen, “Uraufführung,” 26–27; Gunther Zahn, “Der Theaterspielplan Göttingens in den 20er und 30er Jahren, besonders dargestellt an der Klassikerrezeption” (unpublished seminar paper, University of Göttingen, 1985 [StadtAGö: E 126]). 32. Hagen, “Bearbeitung,” 727–28. 33. James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 34. Hagen, “Bearbeitung,” 726. 35. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1923, Festival Program, Hagen, “Handel und wir,” 10. 36. Abert, “Händel als Dramatiker,” 21. 37. Hagen, “Bearbeitung,” 732. 38. Abert, “Händel als Dramatiker,” 17–31, especially 20–22. 39. Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5. 40. Boetticher, “Göttinger Händelrenaissance,” 216. 41. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1921, Festival Program, 7–8. 42. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1923, Festival Program, Hagen, “Händel und wir,” 10. 43. Hagen, “Uraufführung,” 31–33; GZ and GT 29 June 1920; Heinz Koch in GT 7 July 1921.Page 216 → 44. Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre,” 27–28; Boetticher, “Göttinger Händelrenaissance,” 209; Kater, “Revenge of the Fathers,” 302. 45. Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre,” 35–36. 46. E.g., GZ 12 June 1927. 47. Mitteilungen des Universitätsbundes Göttingen 2.1 (1920): 16–17 and StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1927 and 1928, Festival Programs. 48. GZ 29 June 1920. Of course Hagen was Stechow's boss, so he might have had some ulterior motive for such adoration. 49. GZ 1 July 1920.

50. GT 29 June 1920. 51. GT 3–4 July 1920. 52. Voßische Zeitung 4 July 1920. 53. Allgemeine deutsche Musikzeitung 23 July 1920. 54. Hagen, “Uraufführung,” 33. 55. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1921, Festival Program, Hagen, “Das Recht der Händel-Oper,” 5–10. 56. Johannes Kobelt, Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung und Anzeiger 15 and 18 June 1921. 57. Hannoverscher Kurier 10 June 1921. 58. GT 7 July 1921. Koch's opinion mattered. He reviewed the vast majority of local theater and music performances and art exhibits, as well as the occasional Sharpshooting Festival. Koch always wanted to act himself, but his meager build, squeaky voice, and bad teeth prevented him from doing so. He wrote plays, as well as poetry, but primarily lived out his aspirations to the stage by befriending local and visiting actors and musicians and writing an incredible number of reviews: author's interview of Ilse-Maria Lever, granddaughter of the Tageblatt's founder, niece of the owner between the wars, and friend of Koch's; Göttingen, 23 June 1999. 59. GZ 6 and 8 July 1921. 60. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1921, Festival Program, Hagen, “Das Recht der Händel-Oper,” 7–9. 61. Abert, “Händel als Dramatiker,” 18. 62. GZ 29 June 1920. 63. First mentioned locally in GZ 30 June 1922 as common international name; further discussion in GZ 5 July 1923. 64. Anthony Hicks, “Handel, George Frideric,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40060pg23 (accessed 14 July 2012). 65. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 64–70. 66. J. A. Rice, “An Early Handel Revival in Florence,” Early Music 18.1 (1990): 63–71. 67. Thomas S. Grey, “Wagner's Meistersinger as National Opera (1868–1945),” in Music and German National Identity, 78–104. 68. GT 29 June 1920. 69. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1923, Festival Program, Hagen, “Händel und wir,” 10. 70. Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 234–60, especially 245–47.Page 217 → 71. Helmich, Händel-Fest und “Spiel der 10.000”: Der Regissduer Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989), 16–17. 72. Michael P. Steinberg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), x, 21–38, 224. 73. Abert, “Händel als Dramatiker,” 30–31. 74. Robert Hill, “‘Overcoming Romanticism’: On the Modernization of Twentieth-century Performance Practice,” in Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, 37. 75. Kater, “Revenge of the Fathers,” 302. 76. The faded reputation of the nineteenth-century composer Giacomo Meyerbeer during the Weimar Republic highlights this tendency: Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 131–74. 77. Jacques Handschin, “Die alte Musik als Gegenwartsproblem,” in Gedenkschrift Jacques Handschin: Aufsätze und Bibliographie, ed. Hans Oesch (Bern: Haupt, 1957), 338–41; Hill, “Overcoming Romanticism, ” 37–38; Gilliam, Preface to Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, xi; and J. Bradford Robinson, “Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: In Search of a Shimmy Figure,” in Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, 108–9, 114–15; Kater, “Revenge of the Fathers,” 295–315. 78. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 2, footnote 6. 79. StadtAGö: Dep. 109, 1921, Festival Program, Hagen, “Otto and Theophano,” Programheft for 1921 Festival, 14. 80. Peter Morris-Keite, Alexa Larson-Thorisch, and Audrius Dundzila argue that Wagner challenged certain bourgeois ideas about marriage yet reinforced strict nineteenth-century definitions of gender by “subtly psychologizing well-known figures from Germany mythology”: “Transgression and Affirmation: Gender Roles, Moral Codes, and Utopian Vision in Richard Wagner's Operas,” in Re-Reading Wagner, ed.

Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 63; see also Slavoj Zizek, “‘There Is No Sexual Relationship’: Wagner as a Lacanian,” New German Critique 69 (Fall 1996): 9–10. 81. Hagen, “Bearbeitung,” 730. Castrati had disappeared for the most part by the turn of the nineteenth century, and the art of singing countertenor only revived after World War II. 82. Hagen, “Uraufführung,” 29. As was customary in the eighteenth century, Händel rewrote a few parts for tenors, but really only toward the end of that century did composers write heroic roles for tenors: David Fallows et al., “Tenor,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com /subscriber/article/grove/music/27667 (accessed 14 July 2012). 83. The Göttinger Zeitung's cultural critic Max Carstenn especially emphasized gender roles: e.g., 6 and 7 July 1922, 6 and 8 July 1923, 8 July 1924, and 3 July 1926; see also GT 8 July 1923, GT 6 July 1924, and GZ 24 June 1927. 84. Niedecken-Gebhard, “Die Bedeutung des Tanzes für das Kulturtheater,” Zeitung des Bühnenvolksbundes (manuscript at Theater Museum Cologne), no date, cited in Helmich, Händel-Fest, 70. 85. Max Carstenn in GZ 11 July 1922. 86. GZ 11 July 1922. 87. GT 8 July 1922.Page 218 → 88. GZ 7 July 1923. 89. GT 11 July 1923. 90. GZ 8 July 1923 91. GT 8 July 1923. 92. GT 6 July 1923. 93. Lange in GZ 6 July 1923. 94. Voßische Zeitung 13 July 1922. 95. Cited in StadtAGö Dep. Nr. 109 as Basler Zeitung 14 July 1922 (but may have been Basler Nachrichten). 96. GT 7 July 1922. A Tageblatt review of 8 July 1924 likewise describes all levels of society at one performance. 97. Steglich, “Die neue Händel-Opern-Bewegung,” Händel-Jahrbuch 1 (1928): 88. 98. Steglich's appendix “Übersicht über die szenischen Händel-Aufführungen vom Sommer 1920 bis Sommer 1927,” in “Die neue Händel-Bewegung,” following158. 99. Werner, “Das Fest unserer Zeit,” 675–87; Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 132, footnote 4. Universities and amateur musicians in Britain also experimented with lesser-known works by Händel. Musicologists and directors Edward Dent and Cyril Rootham in particular led student performances of Händel oratorios as part of their experimental work on Shakespeare in the 1920s: Percy M. Young, “The Dramatic Element Introduced into Handel Performances at Cambridge in the Early Twentieth Century,” Händel-Jahrbuch 37 (1991): 173–75. 100. Helmich, Händel-Fest, 71. 101. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1924, Festival Program, 7, 5. 102. Steglich, “Die neue Händel-Opern-Bewegung,” appendix. 103. Wilhelm Weismann, “Vom Leipziger Arbeiter-Händelfest,” Zeitschrift für Musik 93 (1926): 417–18. 104. John, Musikbolschewismus. 105. Saldern, “Der Wochenend-Mensch,” 9–12; Jeremy Tambling, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7; Christopher Hailey, “Rethinking Sound.” 106. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 64–70. 107. Michael Werner identifies these qualities as characteristic of the “Händel Movement” in “Das Fest unser Zeit.” Thiersch's work especially reflected this aesthetic: Schneider, Thiersch, 12. 108. GT 8 July 1924. 109. GZ 6 July 1923. 110. Though the city had to press Festival organizers for several months to collect: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 5, Bd. 2, letters between Magistrat and Festival leaders of 12 September and 11 October 1924 and 21 February 1925. 111. GT 8 July 1922.

112. GT 7 July 1922. 113. Koch's own writing had caused authorities to shut down the Tageblatt at this very time, when an article of his appeared to fan the flames of nationalism that erupted in the wake of right-wing terrorists' murder of German Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau: GT 7 and 16 July 1922.Page 219 → 114. Theodor Wilhelm Werner, “Göttingen: Händel-Festspiele,” Die Musik 16.12 (September 1924): 924–25. 115. Steglich, “Händels ‘Xerxes’ und die Göttinger Händel-Opern Festspiele 1924,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 7 (1924): 21, 32–33. 116. Private Collection of Brunni Lübel-Hagen, 18 January 1925 letter to Hagen from university curator; UAG (Phil.Fak.), PA Oskar Hagen (1917–1925), 6 March 1924 letter from Preussische Minister für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung. 117. Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre,” 27–28. 118. Boetticher, “Göttinger Händelrenaissance,” 209. 119. Private Collection of Brunni Lübel-Hagen, 21 January 1924 letter to Hagen from E. A. Bridge, President of the University of Wisconsin. 120. Universitätsarchiv Göttingen (Phil.Fak.), PA Oskar Hagen (1917–1925), 8 May 1925 letter from Hagen to head of philosophical faculty and 18 January 1925 letter to Hagen from university curator; Staehelin, “Siebzig Jahre,” 29. 121. Schneider, Paul Thiersch, 20–21. 122. Stechow directed from 1924 to 1927 and again from 1928 to 1933. 123. Haskell, “Early Music.” 124. Johannes Kobelt review in Allgemeine deutsche Musikzeitung 23 July 1920; Rudolf Steglich, “Händels Oper Rodelinde und ihre neue Göttinger Bühnenfassung,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 3 (1921): 518–34, and “Die Händel-Opern-Festspiele in Göttingen,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 3 (1921): 615–20. 125. See, for instance, a 1924 exchange between director Hermann Roth and musicologist Hugo Leichtentritt in Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 6 (1924): 638–40, in which Leichtentritt challenged Roth's “modern” production of Händel in Karlsruhe. Steglich especially led the charge against Hagen's edits in his 1924 piece “Händels ‘Xerxes.’” 126. Frisch, German Modernism, 138–83; Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 64–70. 127. GT 7 July 1921. 128. Frisch, German Modernism, 138–39. 129. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1926, Festival Program, Franz Notholt, “Händels Oper Ezio,” 11–14. 130. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1926, Festival Program, Alfred Bertholet, “Die Händelopern-Festspiele in Göttingen,” 7–10. 131. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1927, Festival Program, Josef Wenz, 9–16, quote on 16. 132. Schneider points out that Hagen's relationship with “his Festival” became increasingly difficult after he left: Thiersch, 21. 133. Georg A. Walter, “Händel-Erlebnis eines Sängers,” Händel-Jahrbuch 1 (1928): 159–66. 134. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 132, footnote 4; Steglich's appendix in “Die neue Händel-Bewegung.” 135. Opera in particular benefited from new technology and consumption. Recordings by the great Italian tenor Caruso, for instance, helped popularize the phonograph at the turn of the century, and those albums in turn boosted interest in opera: Tambling, Opera and the Culture of Fascism, 7. In the 1920s, recordings, radio, and film Page 220 → introduced opera music to an even wider audience and increasingly became a part of daily life. Recording techniques during that time favored the smaller ensembles used in Göttingen and elsewhere to perform Händel: Hailey, “Rethinking Sound.” Hagen used screenplays as foils against which he defined the organization of Händel's librettos: StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1923, Festival Program, Hagen, “Händel und wir,” 10. Paul Schlessinger likewise claimed that film lacked Händel's depth of meaning and emotion: StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1924, Festival Program, “Händel Renaissance,” 8. 136. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1921, Festival Program, Hagen, “Das Recht der Händel-Oper,” 10. 137. Dennis, Beethoven, especially 86–141. 138. And indeed 1920s composers like Paul Hindemith and Carl Orff did take cues from Baroque composition: Giselher Schubert, “Hindemith, Paul” and Alberto Fassone “Orff, Carl,” in Grove Music

Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/13053 and http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/42969 (accessed 14 July 2012). 139. See especially Benjamin's “The Work of Art” and related works collected in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Peukert makes this point in The Weimar Republic.

CHAPTER 4 1. GZ 17 April 1930. 2. GT 25 and 19 June 1927; GT 8 July 1928. 3. Max Carstenn, GZ 7 and 8 July 1928; see also Koch's generally positive review in GT 8 July 1928, as well as those in the VB (7, 10, 11 July 1928) and the NM (8 July 1928). 4. The Hannoverscher Kurier covered the Festival extensively, with full pages and photos: 7 and 13 July 1928; see also Hamburger Nachrichten 10 July 1928 and Rheinland-Westfälische Zeitung 7 July 1928. 5. Walter, Hitler in der Oper; Kater, Twisted Muse; Potter, Most German; Hanns-Werner Heister, ed., “Entartete Music” 1938—Weimar und die Ambivalenz, vol. 2 (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2001); Applegate and Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity, especially chapters by Thomas Grey, Michael Kater, and Doris Bergen; Kater and Reitmüller, eds., Music and Nazism. 6. Potter, “Dismantling a Dystopia: On the Historiography of Music in the Third Reich,” Central European History 40.4 (2007): 623–51. 7. Steglich, “Die Händel-Opern-Festspiele in Göttingen”; “Händels Oper Rodelinde,” 519–32, quote from 532; “Über die gegenwärtige Krise der Händelpflege,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 10 (1928): 632–36; and “Die neue Händel-Opern-Bewegung,” 71–185. 8. Steglich, “Händels ‘Xerxes’ und die Göttinger Händel-Opern-Festspiele 1924,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 7 (1924): 21–24.Page 221 → 9. See the detailed appendix in Steglich, “Die neue Händel-Bewegung.” 10. Steglich, “Krise der Händelpflege,” 633. 11. GT 24 June 1927; Koch's extensive reviewing and reporting in interwar Göttingen lent greater weight to this perspective. More generally see Robinson, “Jazz Reception,” 107–34. 12. GT 9 July 1921. 13. Potter, Most German, 2–4, 206–7. 14. Hiemer, “Stadttheater zu Göttingen,” 11–12. 15. Steglich, “Krise der Händelpflege,” 635. 16. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 Ia, 28. In fact, the Festival would carry this debt into World War II: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 80, 3, Lord Mayor Gnade's June 1939 report on the Händel Society and 1939 Festival, 3. 17. On the other hand, a similar left-liberal organization, the People's Stage (Volksbühne), declined in Göttingen during the 1920s: Hiemer, “Stadttheater,” 19–20. 18. John, Musik-Bolschewismus, and Dennis, Beethoven, 86–141. 19. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 Id, November 1929 call to members of the Händel Society. 20. Potter, Most German, 6. 21. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 152 Nr. 9 Ab. G, 1868–1956, 146.2–153.30; StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 2, Erlaß einer Ordnung über die Erhebung einer Kartensteuer und einer Lustbarkeitssteuer 1924–32, Versammlung der Vorstände der Göttinger Verbände und Vereine am Mittwoch, den 30. September 1931 22. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 109, 1930 Festival Program 7 and 22. 23. 1930 Program, 10–12. 24. This phrase is how Leo Hiemer describes the aims of Hans Hecht, a professor of English literature, founder of an amateur performance troupe, and contributor to the 1930 Festival Program in “Stadttheater,” 18. More generally see George Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), 113–14; William John Wilson, “Festivals and the Third Reich” (Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, 1994).

25. Benjamin Feline discusses a similar gendering phenomenon in the American context of the same time period in Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 19. 26. Helmich, Händel-Fest, 141–44. 27. Quote from Hannoverscher Kurier 11 July 1930; see also Berliner Lokal Anzeiger 17 July 1930; Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Berlin 16 July 1930; Neues Wiener Tageblatt 28 July 1930; Hamburger Nachrichten 13 July 1930; and Magdeburger Tageszeitung 16 July 1930. 28. Magdeburger Tageszeitung and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Berlin) 16 July 1930. 29. GZ 10 July 1930. 30. GT 10 July 1930. 31. GZ, GT, and NM 12 July 1930 and VB 15 July 1930. 32. Hiemer, “Stadttheater,” 18. 33. 1930 Program, 27–29. 34. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1930.Page 222 → 35. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 Ie, 16a–17: Satzungen der Göttinger Händelgesellschaft e.V. (Göttingen: Ernst Grosse, 1931); StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1931, Finanz-Übersicht for Regierungsdirektor i.R.Rath, 10 January 1931. 36. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 Ib, 28–50. 37. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 109, 1931, Etatsentwurf für Festspiele 1931. 38. Boetticher, “Göttingen Händelrenaissance,” 216. 39. StadtAGö: Dep.77 I Nr. 59: Walter Meyerhoff interview 12 March 1976 by Ulrich Popplow, 2. 40. See letters exchanged from April and July 1933 between Meyerhoff and Regional President Hermann Muhs, Inge Herting of Hanover, Göttingen politician Uhlendorf, Niedecken-Gebhardt, Stechow, and his Nazi replacement Hekeshoven: StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 II, 126–218. 41. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 II, 218–218a. 42. This personal use of ideology and connection to Third Reich organization characterized cultural politics during this era, especially about music: Nina Okrassa, Peter Raabe: Dirigent, Musikschriftsteller und Präsident der Reichsmusikkammer (1872–1945) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 406; Gruner, Musikleben in der Provinz, 78; Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany; Kater, Twisted Muse; Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 56–57, 214–17. 43. Brauneck, Theater im 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Reinbeck, 1982), 64. 44. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 II, 13 July 1933 letter, 137–38. 45. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 II, 13 July 1933 letter, 136. 46. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 II, 8 May 1933 letters to Muhs and Inge Herting, 218–220a. 47. He taught at Madison until 1940 and then for twenty-three years at Oberlin College; he died in 1974: Uta Schäfer-Richterand Jörg Klein, Die jüdischen Bürger im Kreis Göttingen 1933–1945: Ein Gedenkbuch (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992), 253–54. 48. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 Ib, 29–50; Schäfer-Richter and Klein, Die jüdischen Bürger, 44–46, 68–69, 76–69, 85, 102, 121, 128, 135–36, 182–85. 49. Karin Busemann, “Nonkonformismus versus Gleichschaltung. Beispiele aus dem Musikleben,” in Kulturaustreibung: die Einflußnahme des Nationalsozialismus auf Kunst und Kultur in Niedersachsen. eine Dokumentation zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung, ed. Hinrich Bergmeier (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1993), 121. 50. Okrassa, Raabe. Important figures in German music such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Toscanini also hindered the “Aryanization”: Kater, Twisted Muse, 16–20, 79–85. Personal conflicts sharply defined much of the Third Reich's work; see especially Caplan, Government Without Administration, and Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 2nd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1989); The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). 51. Kater, Twisted Muse, 75–82; Konrad Dussel, Ein neues, ein heroisches Theater? Nationalsozialistische Theaterpolitik und ihre Auswirkung in der Provinz (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), 339; Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 57–71, 214–15.

52. Pamela Potter describes the substantial and unique contributions musicology offered to the Third Reich in Most German.Page 223 → 53. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 214–15. By 1938 working musicians began to see some financial benefit from the Third Reich's organization of musicians into the Reich Music Chamber. This corporatist notion had, though, been around since before the Great War and marked an important continuity between the Weimar and Nazi eras: Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 118, and Okrassa, Raabe, 406; Gruner, Musikleben, 78; Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany. 54. A Reich Music Chamber circular reminded Festival leaders of this in mid-1934: StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 IV, 187–87a. 55. Programming and personnel continuities between the Weimar and Nazi regimes in other cultural venues, such as the City Theater, helped him. The director, the mayor, and the steering committee ran the Theater in the Third Reich much as they had during the Weimar Republic—and during the Kaiserreich, for that matter. The “national renewal” that the Nazis promised had already taken place in Göttingen's theater at least a decade earlier: Hiemer, “Stadttheater,” 14–15. 56. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 II, 137–38. 57. Monumentality usually describes architecture or civic planning and characterized many building projects in Europe at this time: Franco Borsi, The Monumental Era: European Architecture and Design, 1929–1939 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1987). On the broader implications of Wagner and monumentalism, see Andreas Huyssen, “Monumental Seduction,” New German Critique 69 (1996): 181–200; Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007). 58. Johannes Kobert, Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung und Anzeiger 15 June 1921; GZ 11 and 14 July 1922, GT 8 July 1923, VB 8 July 1925, and GT 25 June 1927. 59. Herf, Reactionary Modernism; Reichel, Der schöne Schein; Norbert Frei, “Wie modern war der Nationalsozialismus?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19.3 (1993): 367–87; Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern”; Paul Betts, “The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism,” Journal of Contemporary History 37.4 (2002): 541–58; Hans Dieter Schäfer, Moderne im Dritten Reich: Kultur der Intimität bei Oskar Loerke, Friedo Lampe und Helmut Käutner (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003); Baranowski, Strength through Joy; Wolfgang König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft: “Volksprodukte” im Dritten Reich: Vom Scheitern einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2004). 60. GT 30 June/1 July 1934. 61. Pamela M. Potter, “The Politicization of Handel and His Oratorios in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Early Years of the German Democratic Republic,” Musical Quarterly 85.2 (2001): 317–25. 62. Even once in power, Nazi officials found it much easier to point to rather than explicitly define “German music”: Potter, Most German, 200–234. 63. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 IVa, 102. 64. Smaller gifts (up to 200 RM) from Göttingen businesses and individuals comprised another 725 RM: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 IVa, 102–2a. 65. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 III, 13 June 1934 letter, 53–54. 66. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 IV, 187–88.Page 224 → 67. GN 9 July 1934. 68. Karl Brandi, GT 30 June/1 July 1934. 69. GZ 3 July 1934. Although Maaß wrote for a liberal newspaper that folded in 1935, Gnade wrote him a favorable recommendation for a subsequent job: StadtAGö: Dep. 77 II Nor. 19,4 51–52. 70. Also called a “masque” or “serenata,” this piece was published and performed in many different forms during Händel's life: Stanley Sadie, “Acis and Galatea,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O005248 (accessed 14 July 2012). The fact that Acis and Galatea, like an eighteenth-century Lehrstück, was modified to fit specific performance needs connected (intentionally or not) this 1934 performance with Hagen's edited productions in the 1920s. 71. Potter, “Politicization of Handel,” 317–25. 72. StadtAGö: Dep. Nr. 99, 1934, Festival Program, Fritz Lehmann, “Zur szenischen Aufführung von ‘Acis

and Galatea.’” 73. Local reviewers especially underscored this connection, much as they had in the 1920s: GN 3 July 1934; Trumpff, GT 30 June/1 July 1934; GT 5 July 1934; GZ 5 July 1934, as well as Music Director Fritz Lehmann's own description in GT 4 July 1934. 74. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 175–212; Kater, Twisted Muse, especially 179–80 and 191–96 and, more generally, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 75. The case of atonal composers Arnold Schönberg versus his pupil Anton Webern is instructive. National Socialists singled out Schönberg as an enemy of “German” music because of his “chaotic” twelve-tone scale and his Jewishness. For the Nazis the two were synonymous. However, Webern, with no other ethnic or political strikes against him, managed to survive in the Third Reich, despite being explicitly labeled a twelve-toner in the Reich-wide exhibition of “degenerate music” in 1938: Kater, Twisted Muse, 72–74, 78. 76. Michael Meyer, “A Musical Façade for the Third Reich,” in Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art,” 171–84; Albrecht Dumling, “The Target of Racial Purity: The ‘Degenerate Music’ Exhibition in Dusseldorf, 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, 43–72; Kater, Twisted Muse, 78–79. 77. Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (New York: Berghahn, 2003). 78. Helmich, Händel-Fest, 88, 261–88. 79. Susan A. Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 80. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1980), 116–80. 81. Koch, GT 5 July 1934 and GT 16 July 1934. 82. Koch, GT 8 July 1922. 83. GT 19, 24, and 25 June 1927 and 8 July 1928. 84. GT 16 July 1934. 85. See also Gustav Adolf Trumpff, GT 30 June/1 July 1934; GN 3 and 5 July 1934. 86. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 II, 13 July 1933 letter from Meyerhoff to Niedecken-Gebhardt, 138 and Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 IV, 27 December 1934 letter from Meyerhoff to Prof. G. A. Walter, 4a.Page 225 → 87. See, among others, Münchner Neueste Nachrichten 15 February 1935; Der Angriff 20 February 1935; Frankfurter Zeitung 7 May 1935; Völkischer Beobachter 26 June 1935; Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 28 June 1935; Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten 29 June 1935; Schlesische Tageszeitung, Breslau 30 June 1935; Hessischer Kurier Kassel 29 June 1935; Hannoverscher Kurier 21, 25, 26, and 27 June 1935; Dresdner Anzeiger 29 June 1935; Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten 29 June 1935; and even London's Daily Telegraph 2 March 1935. 88. Koch, GT 20 June 1935; R. Buchwald, GN 20 June 1935. 89. Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten 29 June 1935. 90. Hessischer Kurier 29 June 1935. 91. Potter details musicologists' and Nazi officials' attempts to claim or “Germanize” Händel in Most German, 222–28. One newspaper article about the Bach-Händel-Schütz Celebration, for instance, insisted that Händel “became a Londoner but remained a German”: Volksparole Düsseldorf 26 February 1935. 92. Dennis, Beethoven. 93. Kater, The Twisted Muse, 34–39. 94. Hitler's attention to Bayreuth may have actually gave Heinz Tietjen and Emil Preetorius more freedom to experiment there during the 1930s: Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 175–207, 234–60, 270–81; Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 168–69. 95. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 233; for Göttingen specifically, see Zahn, “Theaterspielplan,” especially Appendix II. 96. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 V, 5 March 1935 letter from Steglich to Göttingen musicologist Hermann Zenck, 28 97. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 V, 64–75. 98. The city and Reich Music Chamber each gave 1,500, Muhs and Rust each gave 1,000, and the University League covered the rest of the costs with a 1,326 donation: StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47

VII, 101. 99. StadtAGö: Kl. Erweburngen Nr. 47 V, 38. 100. StadtAGö: Kl. Erweburngen Nr. 47 V, 161 and VI, 70. 101. (Frankfurt an der) Oder-Zeitung 28 June 1935. 102. Hannoverscher Kurier 21 June 1935. 103. Dresdner Anzeige 29 June 1935. 104. Hannoverscher Kurier 25 June 1935. 105. Hannoverscher Kurier 27 June 1935. 106. Not until the 1950s would countertenors or, in some cases, women begin to sing the soprano and alto leads Händel had written for castrati. 107. StadtAGö: Dep.77 I Nr. 59, Popplow interview with Meyerhoff 12 March 1976, 2–3. 108. StadtAGö: Dep.77 I Nr. 59, 1, 2, 5. A prominent Göttingen businessman also interviewed in the 1970s called Meyerhoff “150% Catholic” and maintained that his grandmother was Jewish, two details that would make his casual comfort with the Third Reich all the more astounding: StadtAGö: Dep. 77 I Nr. 46, Popplow interview with Ernst Kelterborn, 6. Recent scholarship on the Third Reich's criminal courts argues that jurists' purported distance from “politics” actually helped facilitate some of the regime's Page 226 → worst policies: Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 109. StadtAGö: Dep. 77 I Nr. 71, Popplow interview with Rehkopf 29 July 1976, 10. Rehkopf maintained, as well, that his work with the Party and the Hitler Youth gave him a measure of freedom in the Third Reich (19). 110. They also exemplify the complexity of the history of memory, but that is another story. 111. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 Ib, 8 March 1935, 132: letter from Wilhelm Lange, editor of the liberal center Göttinger Zeitung (which the Göttinger Tageblatt purchased and closed down in 1935), to the Händel Society. Lange explains that he left the Society in 1933 because of its closeness to the Nazi regime. 112. University Rector Hans Drexler recalled that he had to outmaneuver district Party Leader Thomas Gengler who had the “idiotic idea to occupy the Händel Society” and that Meyerhoff simply failed to see that Gengler “was not presentable”: StadtAGö: Dep.77 I Nr. 7, Popplow interview of Drexler, 3. 113. Helmich, Händel-Fest, 182; GZ 29 June 1920, GZ 7 and 8 July 1921, GZ 6 and 7 July 1922, GT 7 July 1922, GT 6 July 1923, GZ 8 July 1923, GZ 8 July 1924, GZ 12 June 1927, GT 19 and 24 June 1927. 114. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 80 VII,3, “Bericht über den Stand der Göttinger Händel-Gesellschaft nach dem Händelfest 1939.” 115. StadtAGö: Kl. Erwebungen Nr. 47 VII, 101; XIb, 23; XIVb, 132; AHR I E 2,6 Nr. 29, 67; and Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 XVIIIb, 2. 116. Unlike other musical events in Germany, however, the Party organization Strength through Joy's discounted tickets did not amount to many seats for Festival performances. Members could purchase tickets for as little as one-third of the original price, but a 1937 report, for example, reveals only 5 to 17 tickets sold for any given performance that year: StadtAGö: Kl. Erwerbungen Nr. 47 XIIIb, 36. 117. Erwin Ratzke, “Hakenkreuz und Talar: Das 200jährige Jubiläum der Georg-August-Universität im Jahre 1937,” Göttinger Jahrbuch 36 (1988): 231–48. 118. University of Göttingen Archive, UniJub 1937, K. III; Sitzungsprotokoll 22 December 1936, cited in Claudia Engmann and Bernd Wichert, “Erbe und Auftrag—Die Musik bei der Zweihundertjahrefeier der Göttinger Universität im Jahre 1937,” Göttinger Jahrbuch 40 (1992): 266. 119. Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 9 July 1937. 120. GN 21 June 1937. 121. Westfälische Landeszeitung 23 June 1937. Based in Hanover, Meseke wrote a total of seventeen articles on the 1937 Festival for various newspapers, including the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung and several for the Völkische Beobachter, as well as regional papers. 122. Meseke in Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 9 July 1937, Völkischer Beobachter 19 March 1937, and National-Zeitung (Essen) 23 June 1937. For other reviews see Die Musikwoche 17 July 1937, Der Mittag (Düsseldorf) 23 June 1937, Anhalter Anzeiger (Dessau) 22 June 1937, Dortmunder Zeitung 23 June 1937, and Kassler Neueste Nachrichten 22 June 1937. 123. Hans Georg Bonte in Die Musikwoche 17 July 1937.

124. Gerhard Stavenhagen in the Niedersächsische Tageszeitung (Hanover) 22 June Page 227 → 1937; Grete Kohler in the Kassler Neueste Nachtrichten 22 June 1937. For some contrast, see Bonte in Die Musikwoche and Hermann Zeltner in the Fränkischer Kurier 4 July 1937. Meseke stressed this teleological narrative in many of his reviews—e.g., Rheinische Landeszeitung 26 June 1937. 125. Roderich Schmidt, ed., Ludwig Doormann—Ein Leben für die Kirchenmusik—Erinnerungen, Gespräche, Briefe, Berichte (Göttingen: Deuerlichsche, 1988), 28–29. 126. GT 6 July 1923. 127. Heinrich Becker, ed., Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, 2nd ed. (Munich: Sauer, 1998); Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 128. Dussel, Nationalsozialistische Theaterpolitik, 340–41. 129. Kater, Twisted Muse, 6. 130. Kater, Twisted Muse, 130–33; Potter, Most German, 23, 42–44; Marshall, “Political Development,” 106–33, 224–33, 282–303, 352; Noakes, Nazi Party, 20–23, 190–99. In a series of interviews by Ulrich Popplow in the 1970s, Göttingers from all political backgrounds likewise pointed to student activity as a major reason for the city's early support of Hitler's party: StadtAGö: Depositum Nr. 77 I.

CHAPTER 5 1. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII E Fach 55, Nr. 13, 133–33a. 2. Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs, 11 August 1919, § I18. 3. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII E Fach 55, Nr. 13, letter of 22 November 1919, 140. 4. Reichs-Gesetzblatt 1920, 953–58, especially §§ 4, 5, and 6; addenda to the May law in Reichs-Gesetzblatt 1920, 1213–17, especially § A.2. 5. Hake, Cinema's Third Machine. 6. Modris Eksteins, “War, Memory, and Politics: The Fate of the Film All Quiet on the Western Front,” Central European History 12 (1980): 60–82; Jerold Simmons, “Film and International Politics: The Banning of All Quiet on the Western Front in Germany and Austria, 1930–1931,” Historian 22 (1989): 40–60; Helmut Korte, Der Spielfilm und das Ende der Weimarer Republik. Ein rezeptionshistorischer Versuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998); Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 7. Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties (New York: Elsevier, 1976), 20. 8. David Steward Hull, Film in the Third Reich: Art and Propaganda in Nazi Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); K. Wetzel and P. A. Hagemann, Zensur—verbotene deutsche Film 1933–1945 (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1982); David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Monaco, Cinema and Society; Bruce Murray, Film and The German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Thomas Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933–1945, trans. John A. Broadwin and V. R. Berghahn (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996); Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: Page 228 → A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Gerhard Stahr, Volksgemeinschaft vor der Leinwand? Der nationalsozialistische Film und sein Publikum (Berlin: Verlag Hans Thiessen, 2001); Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, eds., Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 9. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Willet, Art and Politics; Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000); Robert Reimer, ed., Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich (Rochester: Camden House, 2000); Jo Fox, Filming Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2000);

Sabine Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester: Camden House, 2004); Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Some scholars have focused on years that overlap both regimes as a way to understand better what was unique and common to each period: e.g., Korte, Spielfilm. 10. Other local histories of cinema have touched on these issues: Bernd Kleinhans, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Kino. Lichtspiel in der braunen Provinz (Cologne: PapyRossa, 2003); Judith Protze, Oldenburger Lichtspiele: Film- und Kinogeschichte(n) der Stadt Oldenburg (Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg, 2004). 11. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 20ff; Hake, Cinema's Third Machine, 5. Before the Eden and Central were built, movies regularly played at the Göttingen Sharpshooting Festival, as one of the many novelties and attractions at the Festival grounds: e.g., GZ 17 June 1901 and GZ 19 July 1902. 12. Jürgen Kinter, “‘Durch Nacht zum Licht’—Vom Guckkasten zum Filmpalast. Die Anfänge des Kinos und das Verhältnis der Arbeiterbewegung zum Film,” in Kirmes—Kneipe—Kino: Arbeiterkultur im Ruhrgebiet zwischen Kommerz und Kontrolle (1850–1914), ed. Dagmar Kift (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992), 119–46; Kaspar Maase, “Kinder als Fremde—Kinder als Feinde: Halbwüchsige, Massenkultur und Erwachsene im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich,” Historische Anthropologie 4 (1996): 93–126. 13. Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany. Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 14–22. 14. Dieter Helmuth Warstat, Frühes Kino der Kleinstadt (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1982), 181. 15. Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 22–26. 16. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 23–24; Klaus Petersen, Zensur in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1995), 51. 17. Kracauer, Caligari to Hitler, 44–45, and Murray, Film and The German Left, 27; list from Fehrenbach, Cinema and Democratizing Germany, 30.Page 229 → 18. Petersen, Zensur, 50–51. 19. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir Göttingen VIII E Fach 55, Nr. 13, letter of 22 November 1919. 20. Gary Stark, “Cinema, Society and the State: Policing the Film Industry in Imperial Germany,” in Essays on Culture and Society in Modern Germany, ed. Gary Stark and B. K. Lackner (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1982), 135–41. 21. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 26–28; Eva Sturm, “Von der Zensurfreiheit zum Zensurgesetz: Das erste deutsche Lichtspielgesetz (1920),” in Geschlecht in Fesseln: Sexualität zwischen Aufklärung und Ausbeutung im Weimarer Kino 1918–1933, ed. Malte Hagener (Munich: text + critic, 2000), 63–79. 22. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 32–33. 23. Lichtspielgesetz of 12 May 1920 in Reichs-Gesetzblatt, 1920, 953–58. A month later the government added various addenda, mostly about procedure, in Reichs-Gesetzblatt 1920, 1213–17. 24. France also banned more German movies than the Germans banned French: Monaco, Cinema and Society, 51–59. 25. The May 1920 cinema law singled out movies “of scholarly or cultural significance.” Related regulations on entertainment taxes the following year allowed some “culturally distinguished events” to receive tax discounts: 9 June 1921 in Reichs-Gesetzblatt, 1921, 862. 26. Approximately 25 to 30 percent of all movies approved by the Censor received the adult rating: Monaco, Cinema and Society, 55. 27. They had to pay 40 percent of the ticket price (individual, package, or season tickets) to the city for all shows. And when they offered entry without individual tickets (e.g., for a club or other special showing), the owner paid thirty-five Marks per fifty seats; an amendment ten months later raised these prices to 50 percent on each ticket sold and forty-five Marks per fifty seats: StadtAGö: Sammlung der Ortsstatuten III A 13, Ordnung für die Besteuerung von Eintrittskarten und Lustbarkeiten in Göttingen, 11 May 1920; StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. I, 15 March 1921. 28. Reich-Gesetzblatt 1921, 856–64. A letter from the Interior Minister to officials in Hildesheim and Hanover reiterated that these basic policies were not completely binding and that localities retained authority over entertainment taxes, especially by using “indirect taxes”: StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8,

Bd. I, letter of 31 July 1921. The Göttinger Zeitung reported the episode on 10 August 1921 and argued that forcing localities to enact vaguely defined “indirect taxes” offered too much room for less scrupulous “dangerous” means of controlling entertainment to raise revenue. 29. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 1, 13 May through 31 July 1921. 30. StadtAGö: Sammlung der Ortsstatuten III A 13, Ordnung über die Vergnügungssteuer, 10 November 1921. 31. Since cinemas in Göttingen contained four different seating areas and thus four different ticket prices, this rule meant that the owners had to pay at four different tax rates on each performance. Ticket prices were taxed on a graduated scale from 20 to 50 percent in Göttingen; the Reich law suggested 10 to 25 percent. Despite this difference, Göttingen's rules generally paralleled Reich guidelines and were approved. 32. Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); P. Baxter, “On the Naked Thighs of Miss Dietrich,” Wide Angle 2.2 (1978): 18–25; Judith Mayne, “Marlene Page 230 → Dietrich, The Blue Angel, and Female Performance,” in Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric, ed. Dianne Hunter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 28–46. Observers at the time also began to see cinema's multivalent meanings; most notably see Siegfried Kracauer, Frankfurter Turmhäuser: ausgewählte Feuilletons 1906–30, ed. Andreas Volk (Zurich: Edition Epoca, 1997) and Kleine Schriften zum Film, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach with Mirjam Wenzel and Sabine Biebl (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004); Rudolf Arnheim, Film, trans. L. M. Sieveking and Ian F. D. Morrow (London: Faber and Faber, 1933) and Stimme von der Galerie, 25 kleine Aufsätze zur Kultur der zeit (Berlin-Schlachtensee: Dr. W. Benary, 1928); Benjamin, “Work of Art.” 33. We have already seen the variety of implications in the term Volk. Here the concept pointed toward a broader, egalitarian concept of all people. But Göttingen's politics and this group's elitism ensured that some observers would recognize the racialized, exclusive implications of “Volkshaus.” 34. Fehrenbach, Cinema and Democratizing Germany, 17–20; Hake, Cinema's Third Machine, 27–40. 35. Before the war, Göttingen's Volkshochschule had offered such vocational and continuing education classes, but it was virtually broke after the war. Leimbach also wanted to use instructional movies to a much greater degree. 36. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 9, brochure February 1922; Rolfdieter Kaufmann, “‘100 Jahre Wiesenstrasse’ (und mehr): Eine Dokumentation zur Geschichte eines Göttinger Wohnviertels und Stadtteils” (private publication, Göttingen, 1998, [StadtAGö: B482]), 39. 37. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 5, Bd. 2, letters from 4 February 1926 and 15 April 1926. 38. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 5, Bd. 2, 5 September 1928. 39. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 9, letters from spring 1922 and 19 May 1924; notice from June 1924. 40. Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 152–53; Murray, Film and the German Left, 66–70. 41. Sabine Guckel, “‘Von Kinderseelen und ungebildeten Volksmassen’. Filmreform und Lehrfilmkino in Hannover zwischen 1912 und 1925,” in Stadt und Moderne, 299–304. 42. GZ 4 June 1924. 43. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 1–18, 54, 241–50. More generally see Ian Jarvie, Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Eric Rentschler, “How American Is It?: The U.S. as Image and Imaginary in German Film,” German Quarterly 54 (1984): 603–20. 44. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 2, letter 7 March 1925; Reichgesetzblatt 1921, 862 and 1926, 263; AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. I, letters 17 February 1923 and 22 June 1923. The 1925 regulations also reveal the effects of the runaway inflation of 1922 and 1923 by basing tax levels on different price categories, rather than specific prices. 45. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. I, letter 30 June 1923. Heidelberg referred here to other cities' tax rates, indicating that he probably received information from Page 231 → national lobbying groups about tax issues elsewhere. In 1927 and 1928, for example, he participated in an enormous campaign led by the Association of the German Film Industry to convince lawmakers to lower taxes on movies: StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 2, material from 28 September 1927 to 24 February 1928. 46. Sara Hall concludes that this influence actually helped Weimar police craft law and order: “Moving Images and the Policing of Public Space in Berlin Around 1920,” German Studies Review 21.2 (2008):

285–302, and “Open Your Eyes! Public Ordering and the Policing Gaze,” Modernism/Modernity 15.2 (2008): 277–96. 47. StadtAGö: Sammlung der Ortsstatuten III A 13: 15 May 1925 and 20 August 1926. 48. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 2, letter from city council to Magistracy, 5 May 1928. 49. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII E Fach 55 Nr. 14, 205. 50. During the 1920s intellectuals of the left and right had in fact realized that cinema could further their ideas, though conservatives had greater means to do so: Saldern, “Kunst für's Volk”; Murray, Film and the German Left; Theodore Rippey, “Kuhle Wampe and the Problem of Corporal Culture,” Cinema Journal (2007): 3–25; Willet, Art and Politics, 145–49, 206–8. 51. Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 27. 52. Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), 23–33, 49. 53. Hake, Cinema's Third Machine, xi; also see Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 38–45. 54. Monaco, Cinema and Society, 78–79. 55. Heinz Koch, GT 10 February 1927. It is worth noting that this review appeared serendipitously on the same day as another reviewer's coverage of the Emmy Leisner concert the night before. Normally Koch would have reviewed this famous Berlin soprano's concert, as he had done previously, especially since Leisner was the sister-in-law of Händel Festival founder Oskar Hagen. 56. GZ 8 and 9 February 1927. Maaß too had local cultural bona fides, due to his regular reviewing of high culture, including the Händel Festival. 57. VB 10 February 1927. 58. The Urania also played with the fine line drawn between education and sensation. In March, for example, they played the pseudo-scientific False Modesty, a documentary about real people's sexual problems. On 3 March 1927 the Tageblatt and Volksblatt praised the film's attempt to curtail sexual license and protect families, while the Zeitung wryly noted that the movie's appeal was more than scientific. On this subject more generally, see Ulf Schmidt, “‘Der Blick auf den Körper’: Sozialhygienische Filme, Sexualaufklärung und Propaganda in der Weimarer Republik,” in Geschlecht in Fesseln: Sexualität zwischen Aufklärung und Ausbeutung im Weimarer Kino 1918–1933, ed. Malte Hagener (Munich: text + critic, 2000), 23–46. The film coincided with a heated debate in the press about a mixed-sex public swimming pool in Göttingen, as well as on what swimmers should wear: Imhoof, “Reflecting Pool: Sports, Politics, Hygiene, and the Construction of Göttingen's First Swimming Pool in 1927,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of the European Committee for Sport History (Vienna: University of Vienna, 2007), 540–48.Page 232 → 59. The regional business-oriented Niedersächsische Morgenpost did not cover Faust. It did expand film coverage, though, in the late 1920s but never paid as much attention to cultural activities generally as the three Göttingen newspapers did. 60. Göttinger Leben 15 February 1927, GT 18–20 and 24 February 1927, GZ 20 February 1927. 61. GT 24 February 1927. 62. GZ 20 February 1927. 63. On Stein's work generally, see Niels H. M. Albrecht, “Die Macht einer Verleumdungskampagne: antidemokratische Agitationen der Presse und Justiz gegen die Weimarer Republik und ihren ersten Reichspräsidenten Friedrich Ebert vom ‘Badebild’ bis zum Magdeburger Prozeß” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Bremen, 2002), 38, 102, 175–84, 330–37. 64. GT 6 April 1927. 65. VB 3 April 1927. 66. Thomas Saunders, “History in the Making: Weimar Cinema and National Identity,” in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, ed. Bruce A. Murray and Christopher J. Wickham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 59; Thomas Elsaesser, Metropolis (London: BFI, 2000), 12–14. 67. After an initial ban, the Soviet film was approved even for children: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir VIII E Fach 55 Nr. 14 119. 68. GT 16 January 1927. 69. GZ 21 January 1927. 70. GT 10 November 1927.

71. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII E Fach 55 Nr. 14. 241–45, 123–278a. 72. Actually, Capitol was the sixth movie house to open in Göttingen and the seventh place to show films regularly. Besides the Eden (1910), Central (1910), Volkshaus (1922), and Urania (1925), the Thalia Theater showed movies for about six months in 1924. Located on the outskirts of Göttingen in a former pub, Thalia opened in January 1924 with much fanfare about its stage and screen, live music and cinema: GT, GZ, and VB 18 and 20 January 1924. The event was one of the largest in local cinema life up to that point. But within a couple of months, the flashiness, the multi-media programs, and the City Theater singers were gone. And by the middle of the year, the Thalia itself was gone, one of only two times in the first sixty-five years of Göttingen cinema that the city had too many movie houses. The SPD meeting house and entertainment center, the Volksheim, also showed movies regularly. 73. Unfortunately, there are no numbers to demonstrate precise attendance, but the Urania and Volkshaus appeared less and less in newspaper reviews and advertisements, while the commercial theaters offered more shows, including the educational films that had originally helped the Volkshaus and Urania thrive, and advertised with greater fanfare 74. The reviewers were taken aback but appreciated the powerful introduction to the movie. One stressed that although the provocative dance might have been “too much for Göttingen nerves” on a Monday night, the performance made him realize that many moviegoers get tired of the usual “foolish, grotesque” introductory shorts and that “Mr. Heidelberg goes to great lengths to offer his audience something special”: GT 4 March 1930.Page 233 → 75. Frauen in Not (§218) (Women in Peril). The middle-class papers did not even touch this film, but the Volksblatt advertised for several days beforehand and praised this “experience” that confirmed their social and hygienic opposition to the law: VB 31 May and 3 June 1930. 76. GT 3 October 1929.

CHAPTER 6 1. Bernadette Kester, Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films on the Weimar Period(1919–33), trans. Hans Veenkamp (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 291–301. 2. GT 18 June 1930. 3. GT 18 April 1929, 28 July 1929, 8 January 1930. 4. GZ 1 April 1930. Maaß and other journalists attended a preview the night before. He had previously reported that Göttingen was the “first city of our size in the Hanover province to have a sound theater.” 5. Quote from NM 5 April 1930; see also GT 1 and 4 April 1930, GZ 1 and 5 April 1930, Göttinger Leben 1 April 1930, and VB 5 April 1930. 6. Göttinger Leben 1 April 1930 and GZ 3 April 1930. 7. For a more extensive analysis of what follows, see Imhoof, “Blue Angel, Brown Culture: The Politics of Film Reception in Göttingen,” in Weimar Culture Revisited, ed. John A. Williams (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2011), 49–72. 8. After seeing the film, Heinrich Mann fully approved the “free adaptation” of his novel, despite the variances: Heinrich Mann, “Der Blaue Engel wird mir vorgeführt,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 30 March 1930. 9. GT 5 April 1930. Other reviews (GT 7 April 1930 and GZ 14 April 1930) similarly emphasized the technical accomplishment and the tragic destruction of Rath. 10. VB 9 April 1930. 11. GZ 18 June 1930. The Niedersächsische Morgenpost reviewer (19 June 1930) made similar claims. 12. The original German, “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt” or “from head to toe, I'm geared for love” makes the point even more clearly. The English version became a jazz standard and was Dietrich's signature song for decades. 13. GT 18 June 1930. The Morgenpost review agreed (19 June 1930). 14. GZ 18 June 1930. Koch and Maaß had some months earlier similarly commended G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, based on Frank Wedekind's 1895 play of the same name: GT and GZ 17 October 1929.

15. VB and NM 19 June 1930. 16. GZ 18 June 1930. 17. GT 18 June 1930. 18. VB 19 June 1930. Siegfried Kracauer's Berlin review raised similar concerns: Die Neue Rundschau (June 1930): 861–63. 19. Of course misogynist readings did not prevent viewers from interpreting films differently. In Joyless Streets Patrice Pedro argues well that female (and male) viewers may have read such films differently than male reviewers did.Page 234 → 20. Rosenhaft, “Women, Gender.” 21. Koch mentioned Dietrich's departure in his review, echoing concerns discussed a few months earlier about Garbo's defection and her mesmerizing beauty in the hands of Hollywood producers: GT 18 January 1930. 22. GT 11–12 and 17 October 1930; GZ 21 July 1932; GT 17 January 1935. 23. For a more details on what follows, see Imhoof, “Culture Wars and the Local Screen: The Meaning of World War I Films in One German City around 1930,” in Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 175–95. 24. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 29–31. 25. GT 2 July 1930. 26. VB 2 July 1930. 27. GZ 3 July 1930. 28. For substantive treatment of the film in Germany and beyond, see Simmons, “Film and International Politics.” 29. Eksteins, “War, Memory, and Politics,” 60–62. 30. Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 157–77. 31. GT, VB, and GZ 12 December 1930. 32. GT 13/14 December 1930; VB 15 and 19 December 1930 and 3 March 1931; GZ 19 December 1930. 33. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. FAch 55, Nr. 14, 301–6. 34. Korte, Spielfilm, 250; Murray, Film and the German Left. 35. Willett, Art and Politics, 207–8. 36. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII Fach 55 Nr. 13, 183–85, 194; Reichsgesetzblatt 8 April 1931, 127. 37. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII F. 55 Nr. 13, 191. 38. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII F. 55 Nr. 13, 186–88a. 39. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII Fach 55 Nr. 13, 180. 40. Reichgesetzblatt 5 July 1930, 193. 41. The police took greater notice of several avowedly socialist sport and shooting clubs, for example, around this time: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. XXVII Fach 155, Nr. 9 and 11; Pol-Dir. XXV Fach 153 Nr. 21 and Nr. 25; NStA. Hannover Hann 310 II A Nr. 2 II. 42. StadtAGö: Sammlung der Ortsstatuten III A 13, Vergnügungssteuerordnung für die Stadt Göttingen, 29 September 1932; Reichgesetzblatt July 1929, 134ff. 43. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII E F. 55 Nr. 13, 196–99b, 204–4a. 44. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 13, 202–15, 217–18. 45. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 13, 198–98k. 46. Reichsgesetzblatt 7 October 1931, 566–76. 47. Korte, Der Spielfilm, 392–93, 453–54, 414–21; Katherine Roper, “Fridericus Films in Weimar Society: Potsdamismus in a Democracy,” German Studies Review 26.3 (2003): 493–514. 48. GZ 18 March 1933 and 8 February 1933. 49. GT 18/19 March 1933. 50. Kore, Spielfilm, 122–26. 51. The Volkshaus had shown Eisenstein's 1927 celebration of the Bolshevik revolution,Page 235 → October: Ten Days that Shook the World, in November 1930: StadtAGö: Pol-Dir F. 55 Nr. 14, 275. 52. GZ 27 February 1933. 53. Kaufmann, “100 Jahre Wiesenstrasse,” 39–40; GT and GN 6 December 1933. Special thanks to

Rolfdieter Kaufmann for additional unpublished research (in the author's collection). 54. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 5, Bd. 2, 12 December 1933–12 July 1934. 55. Of course the Universum played more than Eisenstein and thus cannot be labeled overly leftist, but those in charge must have known how the new regime would react to the Soviet film. 56. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 5, Bd. 2, 8 May 1933. 57. GT 23 March 1933. 58. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. Nr. 55 F. 14, 333–35. 59. Reichgesetzblatt 27 June 1933, reported in StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 13, 216. 60. Reichsgesetzblatt 22 July 1933, 531. 61. Hake, Cinema's Third Machine, 111. 62. Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 13–14; Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 43; Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus, “The German Film Credit Bank, Inc. Film Financing during the First Years of National-Socialist Rule in Germany,” Film History 3.4 (1989): 317–32. 63. Hake, German National Cinema, 61–62. 64. Kreimeier, Ufa Story, 209–14. 65. StadtAGö: Sammlung der Ortsstatuten: Nachtrag zu der Vergnügungssteuerordnung für die Stadt Göttingen, 7 July 1933. 66. GN 1 December 1933; GT and GZ 9/10 December 1933. 67. Heidi Faletti, “Reflections of Weimar Cinema in the Nazi Propaganda Films SA-Mann Brand, Hitlerjunge Quex, and Hans Westmar,” in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens, 13–14. 68. GT 17/18 June 1933. 69. GT 14 July 1933. The Zeitung did not review the film, so Koch's critique remains the only local perspective we have. 70. Faletti, “Reflections,” 17–27. 71. GT 23/24 September 1933. 72. GZ 23 September 1933. 73. Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda; Hull, Film in the Third Reich. 74. GT 5 December 1933. 75. Göttingen papers published the Propaganda Minister's reasons for rejecting Franz Wenzler's Hans Westmar: GT, GZ, and GN 11 October 1933. 76. GT 17 January 1934. 77. GT 5 December 1934. 78. While he mentioned neither film, they surely shaped (and certainly reflect) Walter Benjamin's ideas in “The Work of Art.” Susan Sontag likewise describes the visual appeal of fascist politics in “Fascinating Fascism,” in The Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 305–25. 79. GZ and GN 25 November 1933; Page 236 →GT 25/26 November 1933. 80. Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich; Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion; New German Critique 74 (Spring–Summer 1998), special edition devoted to Nazi cinema, especially Patrice Petro, “Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular,” 41–55; Reimer, ed., Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens; Hake, Popular Cinema. 81. Lichtspielgesetz of 16 February 1934, Reichsgesetzblatt 1934, 95–99. 82. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 48, 77; Hake, German National Cinema, 63. 83. However, the increased emphasis on cinema's political function meant that ideological infractions, an increasingly broad category, might also attract the interest of the Gestapo. 84. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 13, 222–25m. 85. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 13, 221, 223, 234–34a, 238–39. 86. Welch, Propaganda, 36–43. 87. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 92, 107–8; Hake, German National Cinema, 64–65. 88. Welch, Propaganda, 15. 89. StadtAGö: AHR I B 3 F. 22 Nr. 5 Bd. 2, “895. Auskunftserteilung der Gemeinden an die Reichsfilmkammer” from 1 July 1934. 90. One of the most interesting figures of the Third Reich, Riefenstahl's very challenge to traditional male authority as an important filmmaker ironically helped to reinforce the authority of Hitler and other male

Nazi leaders. The literature on Riefenstahl is justifiably vast; most recently see Niel Christian Pages, Mary Rheil, and Ingeborg Major-O'Sickey, eds., Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism (New York: Continuum, 2008). 91. Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda; Hake, German National Cinema, 61–85; Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 35–41, 59–61. 92. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 75–76. 93. GN 29 April 1935 and GT 30 April 1935. 94. GT 2 May 1935. 95. Quote from GN 24 July 1935; GN 22 July and GT July 1935. 96. Heinz Koch's very first reviews in 1927 had contrasted the psychological depth of the German Faust (GT 10 February 1927) with the tremendous spectacle in the US production of Ben Hur (GT 24 February 1927). 97. Mühl-Benninghaus, “German Film Credit Bank.” 98. Austrian-Polish filmmaker Otto Preminger chided fellow émigrés in the 1930s for speaking Hungarian (Magyar): “Don't you people know you're in Hollywood? Speak German.” Cited in Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 298. 99. GN 9 July 1936. 100. GN and GT 21 August 1935 and GN 27 November 1936. 101. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 77–78. 102. For example, a December 1935 law made any event supporting the broad Winter Help Drive potentially discountable: StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 2, 3 December 1935.Page 237 → 103. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. VIII E Fach 55, Nr. 14, 395–98. 104. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 5, Bd. 2. 105. StadtAGö: Dep. 77 II Nr. 19, 1 Albert Gnade. 106. GT 28/29 November 1936. The Göttinger Nachrichten went further with the headline “Art Appreciation instead of Criticism,” 29 November 1936. 107. GT and GN 30 November 1936. 108. GN 4 December 1936. 109. GT 9 December 1936. 110. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 111. 111. For 1932/33 the national total was 18.5 million RM; for 1935/36, 21.1 million; and for 1937/38, 23.5 million: Welch, Propaganda, 31. 112. GT 15 August 1935. 113. E.g., he used the Association of German Film Industry and the Reich Association of German Cinema Owners in 1926 and 1929: StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 8, Bd. 2. 114. The Cross Women Must Bear (VB 21 April 1927) and the even more radical Soviet production on the same topic, The Case of Sonja Petrova (GT and GZ 17 October 1929). The Tageblatt lamented Heidelberg's “notorious” commitment to Russian culture when he brought in a Soviet cabaret and choir: GT 14 November 1929. The Volksblatt, on the other hand, praised his theater for staging a guest production of the play Women in Peril (§218) by the Worker Educational Committee from Berlin: VB 3 June 1930. 115. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 14, 241–45. 116. StadtAGö: Kleine Erwerbung Nr. 160 ad Lage 5, Kreis German Denazification Panel (KP), Opinion Sheet, Case Nr. GS/K/427, 22 January 1947. 117. As denazification officials called him: ibid. 118. StadtAGö: AHR I B3 F. 22, Nr. 5, Bd. 2, May–July 1933. 119. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. Göttingen VIII E Fach 55, Nr. 16a, letter dated 23 October 1935; the letter also went to local police. Heidelberg's son implied after the war, however, that a number of people in Göttingen envied his father's success and sought any means to deprive the cinema owner of what he had built from the ground up: Ernst Heidelberg Jr.'s testimony in Heidelberg Sr.'s denazification process, in StadtAGö: Kleine Erwerbung Nr. 160 ad Lage 5. 120. StadtAGö: Kleine Erwerbung Nr. 160 ad Lage 5, Heidelberg's account of his actions during the Third Reich for his denazification process, undated but probably written before late June 1947. Gnade describes

Heidelberg Jr. in the same process and in his collected papers from 9 March 1944: StadtAGö: Dep.77 Nr. 19,4 Albert Gnade: Damköhler und Heidelberg-Affäre. Ilse Leaver maintains that the young Heidelberg flitted all around Europe, always stayed in the best hotels, and was a “playboy”: 23 June 1999 interview. The rest of the story that follows comes from the denazification process and Gnade's collected papers. 121. After the war the father and son made up and ran Eden and Capitol together. Heidelberg Jr. also helped found a film production company (discussed in the Conclusion) that made Göttingen one of West Germany's most important movie-making cities until about 1962. Heidelberg Sr. died successful and well respected in 1954. Heidelberg Page 238 → Jr. was never the dedicated or crafty businessman that his father was. When cinema changed in the 1960s, his theaters fared poorly. He lost money, tried to sell them unsuccessfully, and committed suicide in the early 1970s. 122. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, “Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent? Gestapo, Society, and Resistance,” in Nazism and German Society, 166–96; Gellately, Backing Hitler. 123. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 14, 409–17a. 124. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 94–125; Hake, German National Cinema, 64–66; Hake, Popular Cinema, 146–47. 125. GT 9 February 1938. 126. Brian Currid agues that “Gypsy music” likewise helped moviegoers define and escape from “German” culture: National Acoustics, 171–215. 127. GT and GN 14 April 1938. 128. GT 19 April 1938. 129. GT 21, 25, 27 April 1938; GN 21 April 1938; remark about Owens by Max Welke in GT 27 April 1938. 130. Hake, German National Cinema, 85. 131. Hake, German National Cinema, 65. 132. The average percentage of propagandistic films produced per year from 1933 to 1938 was 12.52 percent; from 1939 to 1942 it was 22.22 percent; after 1942 it fell to just 10.43 percent: Korte, Der Spielfilm, 126. 133. The song, “Gaudeamos igitur” or “Let's Rejoice While We're Young,” actually makes some sense in a movie that takes place at West Point and concerns a princess from an unnamed central European country. 134. StadtAGö: Pol-Dir. F. 55 Nr. 14, 453–68. 135. See especially the New German Critique issue devoted to Kracauer, volume 54 (1991); as well as Mike Budd, ed., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Texts, Contexts, Histories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Petro, Joyless Streets. 136. Hake, German National Cinema, 64. 137. GT 10 February 1927 and 3 January 1938.

CONCLUSION 1. Gustav Meier, Filmstadt Göttingen: Bilder für eine neue Welt? 2nd ed. (Northeim: LVS-Verlag, 1998); Jens U. Sobotka, “Die Filmwunderkinder: Hans Abich und die Filmaufbau GmbH Göttingen” (Ph.D. diss., Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität-Münster, 1997); Hake, German National Cinema, 87–99, 104–14; Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany; Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 2. In Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008) Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot offer a few examples of the myriad ways Germans used culture to consider publicly the Third Reich's legacy. 3. Meier, Filmstadt, 52–67; Hester Baer, “Gendered Visions of the German Past: Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Liebe ’47 (1949) as Woman's Film,” in Dismantling the Dream Page 239 → Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 73–100. 4. Scholars have explained in great detail the stilted, sometimes dubious process of denazifying Göttingen's university: Robert P. Ericksen, “The Göttingen University Theological Faculty: A Test Case in Gleichschaltung and Denazification,” Central European History 17.4 (1984): 355–83; Gerhard Rammer,

“Die Nazifizierung und Entnazifizierung der Physik an der Universität Göttingen” (Ph.D. diss., University of Göttingen, 2004); Einar Brynjólfsson, “Die Entnazifizierung der Universität Göttingen am Beispiel der Philosophischen Fakultät” (Master's thesis, University of Göttingen, 1996); Hans Joachim Dahms, “Die Universität Göttingen 1918 bis 1989,” in Göttingen: Geschichte einer Universitätsstadt, 424–43. On the larger issue of the two world wars' role in shaping German history, see Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian, eds., Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past; Smith, Continuities of German History. 5. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 22. 6. Hexter famously divided historians thusly in “The Burden of Proof,” Times Literary Supplement 24 October 1975. 7. William H. Hagen, “Master Narratives beyond Postmodernity: Germany's ‘Separate Path’ in Historiographical-Philosophical Light,” German Studies Review 30.1 (2007): 2.Page 240 →

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Index 1863 Club “1863ers,” 35, 38, 46, 58, 66 1918: November Revolution, 10, 127, 188 1919–25: sharpshooting during, 23–42 1920–28: Händel Opera Festival during, 73–99 1920–29: cinema development during, 127–52 1925–38: sharpshooting during, 43–70 1928–38: Händel Opera Festival during, 100–123 1930–38: cinema development during, 153–86 Abert, Hermann, 78, 79, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89 Abich, Hans, 187 Academic Organization of Friends of the New Russia, 165 Academy Award, 160, 175 Acis and Galatea (Händel), 112, 113, 119, 224n70 Albers, Hans, 166 Alcina (Handel), 102 Allen, William Sheridan, 4, 209n60 Allgemeine deutsche Musikzeitung (newspaper), 83 Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung (newspaper), 226n121 All Quiet on the Western Front (film), 13, 128, 153, 158, 159–61, 162 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 160 American films in Göttingen, 130, 138–39, 145, 146, 152, 182 See also Hollywood Anna and Elizabeth (film), 170 anti-democratic forces and ideas, 13, 162, 164 anti-politics in Göttingen, 1–2, 23–24, 51, 204n44 antisemitism, 8–9, 10, 17, 114, 145, 175, 200n93 in the cinema, 167–68, 175, 183, 185

Göttinger Tageblatt articles on, 204n35 and Händel Opera Festival, 108–9, 117, 118 in sharpshooting activities, 56, 57–58 See also Jewish population apolitical cultural activities and organizations, 14–15, 36, 39, 44, 45, 48–49, 52, 161, 181, 199n66 Apolitical List, 1, 2, 12, 23, 29 Appellate Censorship Board, 153, 160 Applegate, Celia, 4, 76 Aryans “Aryan Clause” of 3 June 1933, 167–68 Aryanization of music, 222n50 Olympic Games (1936) meant to showcase, 183 Third Reich forcing associations to have only Aryan members, 17, 57–58 Asphalt (film), 141 Association of Cinema Owners, 148 Association of Former Corps Students, 63 Association of Front Soldiers, 1 Association of Marksmen and Sharpshooters, 26 Association of Proletarian Sharpshooters, 38, 39, 207n7 Page 260 → atonal scale, 224n75 Austria, 1938 annexation of, 182 “authentic performance.” See historical accuracy in staging Händel's operas avant-garde arts and ideas, 3, 75–76, 80–81, 112, 185, 190, 214n10 Baby (film), 170 Bach, C. P. E., 105 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 74, 77, 94, 100, 102, 105, 121 Bach-Händel-Schütz Celebration in 1935, 113, 115, 116, 173 Bali, documentary about, 175–76, 181

banned books list, 16, 199n70 Baroque music, 73–74, 75, 82, 83, 92, 94–95, 97, 114, 117 and Expressionism, 73, 79, 84, 85, 86, 88, 102, 112 impact on 1920s composers, 99, 220n138 See also Händel Opera Festival Barrett, Michael, 211n93 Barrons, Stephanie, 3 Barsdorf (attorney), 179 Battleship Potemkin (film), 146, 232n67 Bauhaus-style, 43, 49, 80, 88, 207n1 Baum, Vicki, 91 Bauman, Richard, 202n6 Bäumer, Paul, 160 Bayreuth Festival, 84, 114, 225n94 Beethoven Ludwig van, 86, 114 Behringer, Oskar, 175–76 Ben Hur (film), 145, 236n96 Benjamin, Walter, 99, 235n78 Bergerson, Andrew, 5 Berlin, importance of in the Weimar Republic, 4 Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (film), 141 Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Jelavich), 3 Berlin Kroll Opera, 85 “Berlin Pot-Pourri” (column by Stein), 145 Bernett, Hajo, 3 Bierendämpfel, Annemarie, 180 “The Big Break” (Brandi), 106 The Black Whale (film), 170 The Blue Angel (film), 13, 128, 152, 153, 155–58, 159, 160, 161, 182, 233nn8, 9, 12

Blush of Dawn (film), 165, 179 Bode, Heinrich, 34 book burning in Göttingen on 10 May 1933, 15–16 Brahms, Johannes, 86, 114 Brandi, Karl, 106 Brauneck, Manfred, 107–8 Braunschweig (shooting club), 205n73 Brecht, Berthold, 16 Brüning, Heinrich, 154, 158, 160 Burgher Sharpshooting Society, 26–27, 31, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 62, 65 as an apolitical association, 48–49 denounced as monarchical, 47 efforts to expand, 59, 61, 65 growth of, 210n81, 212n110 offering subsidized memberships, 45–46, 50, 207n7 reinventing self in the 1920s, 69 forced to name Mayor Gnade as “Führer,” 58, 59, 67 government encouraging membership in, 55–56 requiring all men to become members in 1934, 59 new target-shooting range. See Sharpshooting Hall receiving confiscated goods, 211n89 and sport shooting, 52, 208n39 Buseman, Karin, 108 Calsow, Georg, 27, 34 Capitol Theater, 157, 159, 169–70, 174, 179, 180, 187–88, 232n72, 237n121 grand opening in 1929, 148–50, 151, 186 Carnegy, Patrick, 85 Carstenn, Max, 84, 89, 90, 217n83 Caruso, Enrico, 219n135

The Case of Sonja Petrova (film), 237n114 castrati performing as singers, 87, 217n81, 225n106 Catholic Center Party, 8 Catholics Catholic regions and sharpshooting, 52, 57, 64 Page 261 → Meyerfhoff as “150% Catholic,” 225n108 censorship of books, 16, 199n70 book burning in Göttingen on 10 May 1933, 15–16 of cinema assigning adult ratings to movies, 132, 229n26 banning of All Quiet on the Western Front, 153, 160 of Battleship Potemkin, 232n67 France banning German movies, 229n24 law in 1935 banning all German films with Jewish actors, 175 limiting foreign films’ access to German markets, 162 no negative remarks in newspaper reviews, 178 police monitoring cinema and theaters, 139, 230n46 self-censoring by filmmakers, 161, 162 Weimar Republic curtailing cinema in Constitution, 127 debate about mixed sex public swimming pool, 231n58 post-revolution lack of, 131 Censorship Boards (Prüfstellen), 131–32, 153, 160, 161, 162, 164, 167, 169, 171 Center Party, 34, 131, 165, 197n47 Central Institute for Education and Training, 136 Central Theater, 136, 137, 148–49, 155, 166–67, 170, 184, 228n11, 232n72 Chaplin, Charlie, 175 Children Before the Court (film), 166

The Chorale of Leuthen (film), 164–65, 179 Christians, Maddy, 155 cinema houses in Göttingen. See movie theaters in Göttingen cinema in Göttingen, 127–52, 153–86 absence of female actors, 19 change in perceptions about in Göttingen, 128 codifying of cinema in Germany, 1919–21, 129–35 distinguishing between film and cinema, 142 documentary films, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139, 170, 174, 175–76, 183, 231n58 as educational entertainment or “culturally valuable,” 130, 134–40, 144, 151, 164, 165, 171, 172, 229n25, 232n73 thin line between education and sensationalism, 231n58 “enlightenment films,” 131, 176 first sound (talkie) film in Göttingen, 154–55 “flashpoint films.” See All Quiet on the Western Front (film); The Blue Angel (film); Westfront 1918 (film) France banning German movies, 229n24 German laws regulating, 185 continuing efforts to purify and improve, 173 financial concerns, 173–74 Motion Picture Law of 1934, 132, 171–72 Motion Picture Law of May 1920, 127, 129, 131–32, 151, 163, 229n25 rating system in 1937, 178–79 trying to make films be echo chamber for Nazi ideas, 182 and Gleichschaltung, 163 impact on opera, 98, 219n135 as mass culture, 6, 140–51 political function of, 141, 171, 187–88, 231n50, 236n83 lending support to Nazism, 2–3, 165 movies devoid of ideology, 14 statistics on movie theaters and attendance, 130

synthesis of local and national influences on, 189 and taxes on cinema, 132–33, 137, 138–39, 163, 229nn25, 27, 28, 31, 230n45, 236n102 offering tax discounts for Nazi films and events, 20, 164 unifying “German” culture, 152 City Building Director of Göttingen, 9 Page 262 → City Sharpshooting King, 27 City Theater, 73, 75, 83, 103, 133, 223n55, 232n72 Club Lower Saxony, 33, 35, 38, 48 Club Republic, 39 communism and the Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), 13, 51, 62, 107, 160, 165 suppression of, 15, 16 Confino, Alon, 4 Congorilla (film), 170 conservative views, 32, 33, 51, 141, 189, 204n43 on 1932 election, 53 about “unity,” 52 cinema promoting, 128, 134, 136, 140, 141, 144, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 161, 162–63, 176, 189, 200n90, 231n50 bolstering of by “flashpoint films,” 153 facilitating Nazi ideology, 18–19, 24, 33, 39, 54, 122 festivals serving conservative ideology, 107–8 on gender definitions of mass culture, 158 impact of Volksblatt's closing, 168 leadership/elite, 8–9, 10, 18, 36, 37, 42, 52, 134, 136 modernism promoting, 93 on music Händel Opera Festival reinforcing conservatism, 74, 75, 81, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92–93, 95, 98–99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 115, 122 importance of German music to, 74, 101–2, 119, 214n10 and need for male control of public life, 157

of newspapers and reporters in Göttingen, 12, 34, 43, 75, 103, 140, 141, 143, 144, 159, 185, 186 only “apolitical” solutions would unite Germans, 161 shaping interwar German culture, 32, 204n43 use of economic troubles to gain support, 103–4 use of sharpshooting, 24, 27, 28, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 37–39, 42, 44–48, 49, 50, 53, 54 conservative paramilitary shooters, 69, 206n77 “coordination.” See Gleichschaltung (“coordination”) countertenors, 217n106, 225n106 Crafts School, 88 The Cross Women Must Bear (film), 237n114 cultural activities cinema unifying “German” culture, 152. See also cinema in Göttingen “coordination” (Gleichschaltung), 3, 9, 16–17, 19, 55, 58, 163, 193n8, 197n43, 209nn59–60 definition, 4, 190 defining self through, 5 in Göttingen through 1920s, 7–9, 13, 14–15 growth of associations in 1920s, 37 and Nazism, 107, 215n24, 222n47 book burning in Göttingen on 10 May 1933, 15–16 and modernist dance, 112, 113 “Nazi culture,” 3–4, 20, 101 Nazi-era Händel Opera Festivals, 110–21 Nazi ideas about “German culture,” 101, 110–11, 122–23 politicizing cultural activities, 20, 201n95 reinforcing Nazi ideology, 3, 12–13 reshaping cultural life, 17–18 role of individuals and local institutions in cultural life, 5, 195n20 sharpshooting as, 25, 202n8. See also sharpshooting in Göttingen synthesis of local and national influences on, 188–89

Third Reich monitoring cultural associations in the 1930s, 56 use of for political change, 75 women becoming involved in Federal Republic, 26, 188 See also Händel Opera Festival Currid, Brian, 75 Page 263 → Dawes Plan to stabilize Reichmark (1924), 141, 175 DDP. See German Democratic Party “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Barron), 3 “Degenerate Music” exhibit, 112 democracy, sharpshooting as manifestation of, 28, 30, 31 denazification, 179, 188–89, 237nn119–20 Dennis, David, 99, 214n22 Dent, Edward, 218n99 The Diamonds of the Tzars (film), 170 Die Musikwoche (journal), 120 Die Nibelungen (film), 137, 143 Dietrich, Marlene, 153, 155, 157, 158, 200n90, 233n12, 234n21 Disney, Walt, 174–75 DNVP. See German National People's Party Döblin, Alfred, 16 documentary films. See cinema Dolmetsch, Arnold, 94, 213n2 Dortmund (city), 127 Drexler, Hans, 226n112 Driessen, Heinrich, 165 Dundzila, Audrius, 217n80 DVP. See German People's Party DVSTB. See German Racial League for Defense and Defiance

Eddy, Nelson, 184 Eden Theater, 136, 137, 148, 179, 180, 228n11, 232n72, 237n121 Educational Film Association, 134, 135 educational films. See cinema in Göttingen Eichberg, Richard, 182 Eighty-Second Regiment garrisoned in Göttingen, 7 Eisentein, Sergei, 165, 166, 234n51, 235n55 elections. See Göttingen; Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Party) Enabling Act of 1933, 15, 168 “enlightenment films.” See cinema Expressionism in film, 129, 137, 138 and staging of Händel's operas, 73–74, 78, 80–81, 82, 87, 91, 100, 101, 109, 119 and Baroque music, 73, 79, 84, 85, 86, 88, 102, 112 edited Expressionism, 98, 104, 106, 110, 112, 114 and historical accuracy, 98, 103, 106, 110, 111, 114, 123 Ezio (Händel), 81, 96–97, 102 “Falling in Love Again” (Holländer), 157, 233n12 False Modesty (film), 231n58 Faust (film), 143–45, 185, 231n55, 232n59, 236n96 Federal Republic, creation of in 1979, 188 Federicus Rex (film), 137 Film Censorship Board, 167, 169, 171 Film Construction Göttingen (Filmaufbau GmbH), 187–88 Film Credit Bank, 172, 175 films, distinguishing between film and cinema, 142 See also cinema The First Right of the Child (film), 166–67, 186 “flashpoint films.” See All Quiet on the Western Front (film); The Blue Angel (film); Westfront 1918 (film)

Fontane (critic), 178 Former Hunters and Shooters Club, 35 “For the Protection of Volk and State” (1933 law), 62, 63 Four from the Infantry, Westfront 1918 (Johannsen), 159 Frauen in Not (§218), 233n75 Frederick the Great, film about, 164 French Chauvinism, 204n35 Freytag (critic), 178 Frisch, Walter, 79, 95 Frisco Express (German title for Wells Fargo) (film), 182 Fritsche, Peter, 204n44 Froelich, Carl, 164 Fröhlich, Rosa “Lola Lola” (fictional character), 155, 157 Page 264 → From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer), 184–85 “Führer Principle,” 58 Garbo, Greta, 234n21 Gardiner, John Elliot, 121 “Gauadeamos igitur” (song), 238n133 Gay, Peter, 3, 4, 75 Geertz, Clifford, 190 Geismar (village of), 204n45 Gengler, Thomas, 111, 226n112 George August II (king), 7 George August University (University of Göttingen), 7, 20, 73, 74, 76, 120, 200n93 German arms agreement with Britain in 1935, 63 German Dance Stage, 112 German Democratic Party, 10, 50, 131 German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 56–57

German Empire. See Kaiserreich (German Empire) German Glee Club Association, 77 German Labor Front, 116 German Movie Theater Association (Deutsche Filmbühne), 168 German music, 76–77, 95, 101, 214n22 dichotomy between “Jewish” and “German” music, 108–9 efforts to eliminate music alien to Germans, 107 Händel Opera Festival defining German music in Göttingen, 75, 108, 111, 118, 119, 121, 162–63, 173. See also Händel Opera Festival efforts to “Germanize” Händel, 78, 114, 225n91 Kaiserreich (German Empire) as a disruption to, 75 monumentalizing “German” culture, 109 Nazi influence on, 101–2, 108, 123 Nazi attempts to define, 114, 115, 122, 223n62 political ideas drawing inspiration from, 103 tradition of playing music at home (Hausmusik), 77, 87, 97, 104–5 use of at Sharpshooting Festivals, 60, 210n76 German mythology, 32, 44, 217n80 in music, 87, 137 mythic vision of sharpshooting, 30, 36, 40, 41, 48, 60, 65, 68 Nazi use of, 19, 65, 68, 185 German National Committee for Physical Education, 55 German National People's Party, 8, 32, 104, 141, 146 German People's Party, 18 German Racial League for Defense and Defiance, 10 German Sharpshooting Association, 64 German Soccer Association, 204n32 German Sport Shooting Association, 57 German Student Union, 16 German Workers Glee Club Association, 77

Gleichschaltung (coordination), 3, 9, 16–17, 19, 55, 58, 163, 193n8, 197n43, 209nn59–60 See also cultural activities Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 87 Gnade, Albert, 60, 177, 191, 224n69 and cinema, 179, 184, 186 relationship with the Heidelbergs, 181, 237n120 as Lord Mayor, 18, 184, 202n22 in Magistracy, 18 as Mayor, 18, 56, 57, 59, 62, 66, 119, 178, 200n82 as a Nazi, 18, 19, 56, 58, 59, 178 head of local SS group, 111, 181 as Police Director, 18, 59, 62, 119, 176, 178 reorganization of sharpshooting, 56, 57, 58–61, 62, 65, 66–67, 210n81 as sharpshooting “Führer,” 17, 58, 59, 67 Goebbels, Joseph, 16, 17, 108, 112, 160, 169, 170, 199n70 involvement in movie policy, 129, 163, 167, 174 allowing no negative remarks in reviews, 178, 183 efforts to expand German filmmaking, 183–84 Page 265 → as Minister for Enlightenment and Propaganda, 171 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 105, 106, 113, 143 Gothaer Insurance Company, 52–53 Göttingen culture and politics through the 1920s, 7–20 difficulty in obtaining materials on interwar years, 198n62 elections in 1924, 1 in 1929, 14, 151, 154, 162, 198n59 in 1930, 153–54

in 1932, 15, 53, 199n67 establishing Educational Film Association, 134 financial concerns, 34, 50, 51, 53, 68, 103–4, 214n10 financial support of Händel Opera Festival, 116, 123, 225n98 Gutingi as early name of, 7 population characteristics, 8 student activity as a reason for city's support of Nazi Party, 227n130 See also cinema in Göttingen; Händel Opera Festival; Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Göttingen; Magistracy of Göttingen; Mayor (Bürgermeister) of Göttingen; sharpshooting in Göttingen; taxes in Göttingen; Town Council of Göttingen Göttingen Händel Society, 17, 19, 106, 119, 121, 226n111 See also Händel Opera Festival Göttingen Life (publication), 143, 145 Göttingen Nachrichten (Nazi party organ), 212n97 “Göttingen style” in productions at Händel Opera Festival, 73–74, 89, 91–98, 100, 119 Göttingen Veterans Association, 26 Göttingen Zeitung (newspaper), 34 Göttinger Nachrichten (Nazi party organ), 64, 120, 168, 171, 174, 175, 178, 182 Göttinger Tageblatt (newspaper), 8, 10, 11–12, 19 on 1932 election, 53, 54 antisemitic articles, 204n35 blaming Social Democratic government, 15 conservative tendencies of, 34, 140, 143 covering cinema in Göttingen, 143–44, 145, 146, 147, 149, 155, 158, 159, 160–61, 167, 169, 170, 174, 178, 182, 231n58, 237n114 covering Händel Opera Festivals, 82, 84, 89, 90, 110, 113 covering sharpshooting, 32, 45–50, 66 Sharpshooting Festival, 34, 48, 50–51, 54 Koch causing shutdown of, 218n113 and Nazism, 14, 168 purchase of Göttinger Zeitung (newspaper) in 1935, 226n111

running ads against Universum Theater, 165–66 Göttinger Zeitung (newspaper), 48, 50–51, 54, 168, 217n83, 224n69 closing of, 174, 226n111 conservative tendencies of, 140 covering cinema in Göttingen, 137, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 155, 157, 159, 161, 164, 165, 170 on subject of taxes, 229n28 covering Händel Opera Festivals, 82, 84, 89, 90, 100, 111 covering Sharpshooting Festival, 34, 48, 50–51, 54 covering the Lay Festival, 105 running ads against Universum Theater, 165–66 The Grabber (film), 166 Grapengießer, Major, 40 Great Britain, arms agreement with Germany in 1935, 63 Great War. See World War I Grone (village of), 8, 29, 204n45 Gropius, Walter, 88 Guelph Party, 33, 196n28, 197n47 Gutingi (early name for Göttingen). See Göttingen gymnastic clubs. See Turner (gymnastics) associations Haase, Ludolf, 13–14 Hagemann, Karen, 208n19 Page 266 → Hagen, Oskar, 77–78, 87, 116, 122, 135, 231n55 aesthetics and idealism of, 74, 82–83, 98, 101–2, 105, 119, 120 seeing festival as healing, 77, 85, 99, 104 beginning Festival concept in home, 87, 96, 97, 105 creative interpretation and staging of Händel, 74, 78–80, 82, 83, 84–85, 87–88, 94–95, 96, 97, 98–99, 103, 109, 111–12, 113, 219n135 growing disenchantment with, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102–3, 113, 115, 219n125 and the Händel Opera Festival

in 1920, 73, 74, 75–83, 85 in 1921, 83–88 in 1922, 89, 91, 93 in 1923, 90, 91 in 1924, 91–94, 102 in 1926 using Hagen's staging, 96 in 1927 recognizing Hagen's work, 97 in 1928 using Hagen's staging, 100, 102 in 1934 reversing Hagen's style, 113, 224n70 in 1935 reversing Hagen's style, 117 leaving Festival to go to University of Wisconsin, 94, 99, 104, 108, 121, 219n132 and Niedecken-Gebhard, 78, 88–89, 94 and Stechow, 82, 85, 91, 216n48 and Thiersch, 77, 80, 83–84, 88, 89, 91, 94 Hagen, William, 190 Hagen-Lesiner, Thyra, 90 Hake, Sabine, 142, 185 Hall, Sara, 230n45 Händel, George Frideric, 8, 73, 77–78, 105, 217n82 death of, 85 experiments with lesser-known works of, 218n99 Nazi attempts to “Germanize,” 78, 114, 225n91 Händel Bayreuth, 73, 83, 85 Händel Opera Festival, 7, 151, 157, 173, 188, 200n93 of 1920, 73, 74, 75–83, 85 of 1921, 83–88 of 1922, 89, 91, 93 of 1923, 90, 91 of 1924, 91–94

of 1926, 96 of 1927, 97, 101, 114 of 1928, 98–99, 100, 101, 102–3 between 1928 and 1934 (no Performances), 73–74, 100 effort to do a modified festival in 1930, 104–5. See also Lay Festival (non-musical theater performances) of 1934 as Nazi supported festival, 110–13, 224n70 of 1935 as Nazi supported festival, 113–17, 119, 121 of 1936 as Nazi supported festival, 119 of 1937 as Nazi supported festival, 119, 120 of 1938 as Nazi supported festival, 119 in the 1960s, 121 in the 1980s, 121 celebrating German culture, 13, 14, 20 defining German music in Göttingen, 75, 108, 111, 118, 119, 121, 162–63, 173 efforts to “Germanize” Händel, 78, 114, 225n91 financial support for, 13, 74, 76, 81, 82, 83–84, 88, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111, 116, 118, 119, 123, 225n98 as high culture, 6 Koch reporting on, 12 lending support to Nazism (Natzification), 2–3, 100–123 synthesis of local and national influences on, 188–89 use of modernism, 73, 74, 86 See also Göttingen Händel Society; Hagen, Oskar; historical accuracy in staging Händel's operas; Page 267 → Meyerhoff, Walter; Niedecken-Gebhard, Hanns; Thiersch, Paul Händel Yearbook (publication), 102 Handschin, Jacques, 86 Hannoverscher Kurier (newspaper), 84, 117 Hanover (city), 208n38, 212n95 Hanover, Kingdom of, 7, 196n28, 197n47 Hanover-Münden (village of), 8 Hanseatic League, 7, 26

Harbou, Thea von, 166–67 Harmful Publications Act (1926), 48 Harsch, Donna, 203n15 Hausmusik, 77, 87, 97, 104–6 Heckroth, Heinrich, 96 Heidelberg, Ernst, Jr., 19, 180–81, 187–88, 237nn119–21 Heidelberg, Ernst, Sr., 139, 186, 191, 230n45 as a Nazi, 179–80 denazification of, 179, 237n120 Gestapo arresting, 181 ownership of movie theaters in Göttingen, 136, 179–82, 188, 232n74. See also Capitol Theater; Eden Theater efforts to gain audiences, 148–49, 154–55, 179–80, 237n114 making theaters available for SPD-related programs, 147 relationship with son, 19, 180–81, 187, 237nn119, 121 relations with local authorities, 137, 139, 165–66, 179, 180, 181, 183 playing “acceptable” films, 137, 139, 165–66 and taxes, 19, 139, 148, 165, 166, 179–80, 230n45 Heimat (hometown), 1, 32, 170–71 Heimat Association, 57 Helmich, Bernhard, 86 Herf, Jeffrey, 204n43 Herting, Karl, 66 Hessischer Kurier (newspaper), 114 Hexter, J. H., 190 high culture, 6, 122, 134–35, 143, 231n56 See also Händel Opera Festival Himmler, Heinrich, 184 Hindemith, Paul, 76, 220n138 Hindenburg, Paul von, 15, 30, 146, 153, 160, 199n67

historical accuracy in staging Händel's operas, 74, 79, 100, 104, 105, 109, 113, 117, 213n2 and Expressionism, 84, 98, 103, 110, 111, 114, 123 and Göttingen style, 91–98, 119 and modernism, 95, 98, 99, 100–101, 104 “historicist modernism,” 95 History of German Music (Moser), 82 Hitler, Adolf, 63, 141, 153, 160, 169 as Chancellor, 15, 53, 107, 164 comparison to Frederick the Great, 164 failed 1923 Putsch, 13 in presidential election of 1932, 15, 199n67 receiving emergency dictatorial powers, 165 Hitler Youth, 17, 20, 55, 58, 169, 226n109 Hitler Youth Quex (film), 169–70, 179 Hoffmann, Fritz, 136, 137, 139, 154–55, 165–66, 167, 179, 184, 186 Hohenzollern kingdom, 7 Holländer, Friedrich, 157 Hollywood, 146, 158, 160, 173, 234n21, 236n98 and German movies, 139, 141, 174, 175, 182, 183–84 Holocaust, 193n7 Hugenberg, Alfred, 141, 146, 155–56 Hyenas of Lust (film), 131 I Have Always Loved You (film), 155 Ihlert, Heinz, 117 Impossible Love (film), 170 Independent Gymnastics Club, 211n85 Independent Social Democratic Party, 206n79 Interior Ministry, 127, 131, 161–62, 163, 229n28 Island of Demons (film), 175–76

It's About Love (film), 170 Jack the Ripper, 166 Jannings, Emil, 144, 155, 157, 170, 175 Page 268 → The Jazz Singer (film), 141 Jelavich, Peter, 3, 4 Jewish population, 8 claim that Meyerhoff's grandmother was Jewish, 225n108 Goebbels making a few exceptions to ban on Jews involved in films, 171 impact of Jewishness on artists and musicians, 112, 224n75 and sharpshooting, 38, 211n86 See also antisemitism Johannsen, Ernst, 159 John, Eckhard, 214n22 Johnny Strikes Up the Band [Jonny spielt auf] (Krenek), 103 Jooss, Kurt, 89 Joyless Streets (Pedro), 233n19 The Judas from Tirol (film), 171 Julius Caesar (Händel), 88, 89, 90, 91, 97, 100 Jung, Bruno, 18, 19, 56 Justice Ministry (Prussian), 127 Kahn, Karl, 38, 206n79, 211n86 Kaiserreich (German Empire), 7, 9, 18, 185, 188, 189, 223n55 and cinema, 129, 132, 151, 168 and music, 75, 76 and sharpshooting, 27, 28, 29, 30, 42, 65 Kater, Michael, 123 Kautz, Hermann, 1, 193n4 Keaton, Buster, 175

Keil Händel Festival, 102 Keith, Jens, 96 Kleist (critic), 178 Klemperer, Otto, 85 Klie, Walter, 136 Knüllig, Heinrich, 61 Kobelt, Johannes, 83, 84 Koch, Heinz, 11–12, 186, 188, 191, 231n55 causing shut down of Göttinger Tageblatt (newspaper), 218n113 on cinema in Göttingen, 143–44, 145, 153, 157, 159, 164, 169–70, 171, 174, 178, 182, 183, 185, 233n14, 234n21, 236n96 on cultural activities, 29 on Händel Opera Festivals, 84, 89, 91, 93, 95, 100, 103, 113, 216n58 helping shape Göttingen cultural life, 19 on the Lay Festival, 105–6 on sharpshooting, 23–24, 26, 31, 34, 43, 50, 201nn1–2, 207n1, 216n58 Kohut, Thomas, 6 Korte, Helmut, 165 Koshar, Rudy, 5 KPD. See communism and the Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) Kracauer, Siegfried, 184–85 Krasselt, Andreas, 212n95 Krenek, Ernst, 76, 103 Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, 56, 109 Laban, Rudolf, 89 La Habanera (film), 185 La Jana (dancer), 182 Lambach, Harry, 35 Lampe, Felix, 136 Lampe Committee, 136, 139

Lang, Fritz, 137, 143, 146 Lange, Wilhelm, 67, 188, 226n111 Larson-Thorisch, Alexa, 217n80 Law for the Reconstruction of the Civil Service (1933), 108 Lay Festival (non-musical theater performances), 100, 104–5, 110, 123 League of German Girls, 182 Leander, Zarah, 185 Leaver, Ilse, 237n120 Lehmann, Fritz, 111, 114 Lehrstücke (cautionary tales), 78 Leichetentritt, Hugo, 219n125 Leimbach, Gotthelf, 134–36, 165, 166, 186, 230n35 Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten (newspaper), 114 Leisner, Emmy, 231n55 Lessing (critic), 178 “Let's Rejoice While We're Young” (song), 238n133 Lind, Heinrich, 32 Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Page 269 → Göttingen, 9, 17, 18, 27, 56, 148, 172, 181, 184, 200n82, 202n22 Lost Daughter (film), 131 Love ’47 (film), 188 Love that Gives Itself for Free (film), 131 Lower Saxony, 23, 26 Maaß, Max, 100, 102, 105, 111, 144, 155, 157, 171, 224n69, 231n56, 233n14 Magistracy of Göttingen, 1, 9, 10, 14, 18, 50, 53, 56, 148, 206n76 monitoring cinema, 132, 133, 136, 140, 154, 185 police monitoring film screenings outside of movie theaters, 161–62 and taxes on cinema, 133, 136, 139, 163, 166, 168, 172, 230n44 political leanings of, 136 regulating cultural activities, 27

male control of the public sphere, 13, 24, 36, 47, 157, 158, 208n19 absence of female actors, 19, 200n90 dominating sharpshooting, 38, 68 goal to have every man a shooter, 13, 24, 25, 41, 42, 47, 48, 50, 65, 189 equating Nazi ideals to, 59 Mann, Heinrich, 16, 155, 233n8 Mann, Thomas, 16 Marshall, Barbara, 13, 198n62 Marshall Forward (film), 165 Marx, Karl, 16 masque, term to describe Acis and Galatea, 224n70 mass culture, 6, 13, 127, 134 as accepted culture, 140–51 codifying of in Germany, 1919–21, 129–35 harnessing for purposes of education, 164 Volkskultur, people's culture rather than mass culture, 141 See also cinema Master Detective (film), 170 Mayor (Bürgermeister) of Göttingen, 18, 53, 56, 57, 59, 62, 66, 119, 178, 200n82 Meister, Kurt, 60 Meseke, Hanns, 120, 226n121 Messiah (Händel), 85 Metropolis (film), 141, 146–47 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 217n76 Meyerhoff, Walter, 19, 188, 191, 223n55 as director of Göttingen Händel Society, 19, 107, 113, 117–18, 121, 122, 226n112 finding funding for Händel Opera Festival, 109–10, 111, 118 forcing Jews out of, 107, 108, 109, 117 working with Nazi Party, 111, 119–20, 225n108

as head of Regional Court (Landgericht), 107, 118 MGM, 146, 184 Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare), 105 Mies van der Rohe, 88 Milestone, Lewis, 153, 160 military, growth of authority of, 176 Ministries. See specific names, i.e., Interior Ministry, War Ministry, etc. modernism, 4, 74, 79, 80 attack on, 214n10, 219n125 in Händel Opera Festival, 74, 86, 90, 93, 97, 103, 122 Hagen's use of, 95, 98, 99, 100, 112, 115 historical accuracy and modernism, 98, 99, 100–101, 104, 109 “historicist modernism,” 95 promoting Nazism, 75 Soviet Proletkult modernism, 80 Monteverdi, Claudio, 94 monumentalism and Händel Opera Festival, 90, 92, 101, 109–10, 112, 119 definition, 223n57 Morris-Keite, Peter, 217n80 Moser, Hans Joachim, 78, 82, 103, 214n22 Mosse, George, 3 Motion Picture Law of 1934, 171–72 Motion Picture Law of May 1920, 127, 129, 131–32, 151, 163, 229n25 revision of in 1934, 171–72 Page 270 → movie theaters in Göttingen, 11, 129, 135, 136–37, 139–40, 147–50, 151, 164, 165, 179, 228n11, 231n58, 232n72 first sound (talkie) film in Göttingen, 155 police monitoring cinema and theaters, 161–62 regional regulation of, 163

taxes paid by, 132–33, 137, 138–39, 163, 229nn25, 27, 28, 31, 230n45, 236n102 use of provocative dance to introduce a film, 148, 155, 232n74 See also cinema Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 83, 86, 98, 114 Muhs, Hermann, 18, 60, 66, 107, 108, 111, 116 Multhopp, Karl, 182 Murnau, F. W., 143–45 nationalism, 218n113 equating with amateur performances, 105 fitting with Nazi ideas, 100–101 nationalist aesthetic, 78, 215n24 Nazi desire to promote “German” culture, 110–11 promoted by DNVP, 141 and promotion of “German culture,” 122–23 nationalist epic films, 165 National Socialist Culture Association, 178 National Socialist Party. See Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Party) National Socialist Physical Education Union, 55 “Nazi culture.” See cultural activities Nazi Culture (Mosse), 3 Nazification of cinema, 128 of Händel Opera Festival, 101, 107, 109, 110–17, 122–23, 222n47 personal politics in 1936–38, 117–21 of sharpshooting, 52, 208n38 See also denazification The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Taylor and Will), 3 Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Party), 1, 161, 193n4 ability to resolve contradictions, 201n95

basic tenets of, 12–13 branch in Göttingen founded, 13 denouncing Versailles Treaty, 69 early support for in Göttingen, 6 elections, 53 in 1929, 14, 52, 104, 151, 198n59 in 1930, 104, 153–54, 160 in 1932, 53 fighting Communism, 14 impact of events in 1933, 3, 193n7 as a political force outside party politics, 2 remilitarizing in violation of Versailles Treaty, 45, 61, 63, 69 screening a film about their Party Day, 147 and sharpshooting, 44, 48, 51, 53, 55, 67, 209n59 attempts to reshape sharpshooting to fit, 52, 55, 57, 61, 63–64, 65, 68, 70, 208n38 Nazi's promoting individual shooting over clubs, 211n89 and use of Händel Opera Festival, 74 use of voluntary associations, 209n57 using older symbols to build authority, 65 as voice of right-wing, anti-democratic ideas, 13 See also Third Reich The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town (Allen), 4 New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit), 81 newspapers in Göttingen, 11–12, 39 covering cinema, 140–47, 149, 155, 157–58, 168, 174, 182, 185–86, 232n73, 233n75 Third Reich efforts to use to bolster film industry, 178 covering competitive and “traditional” Page 271 → shooting, 39, 57, 209n61, 212n97 regional newspaper devoted to sharpshooting, 49 reinforcing connections of sharpshooting and Nazi regime, 66

covering Händel Opera Festivals, 84 ferreting out “Jewish” influence, 175 See also specific newspapers, i.e., Göttinger Tageblatt, Volksblatt, etc. New York Metropolitan Opera, 105 Nibelungen, 65 Niblo, Fred, 145 Niedecken-Gebhard, Hanns, 188 death of, 121 efforts to start Lay Festival, 104–5 and Hagen, 78, 88–89, 94 Händel Opera Festival replacing Hagen as director, 95, 96, 100–101, 102, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121, 122 as theatrical/artistic director, 78, 88–89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 119 monumentalist tendencies of, 109 use of dance, 89, 92, 93, 112 Niedersächsische (Lower Saxon) Morgenpost (newspaper), 39–40, 41, 232n59 A Night in Paradise (film), 170 Night of the Long Knives (1934), 112 Northeim (city), 209n60 Notholt, Franz, 96 November 1918 Revolution, 10, 127, 188 NSDAP. See Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Party) Nuremberg Laws, 108 oak tree symbol, 65 Oberlin College, 222n47 October: Ten Days that Shook the World (film), 234n51 The Old and the New (film), 165, 166 Olympia (film), 179, 182–83 Olympic Games in Berlin (1936), 66, 112, 182–83

Opium, The Girl and the Men (film), 131 Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (Bergerson), 5 Orff, Carl, 220n138 Orpheus (Gluck), 87 Otto and Theophano (Händel), 80, 83, 88, 96 Otto I (emperor), 7 outlawing of clubs and organizations, 62, 211n85 confiscation of goods, 63, 211n89 Ovid, 112 Owens, Jesse, 183 Pabst, G. W., 153, 159, 161, 233n14 Pandora's Box (film), 141, 233n14 Papen. Franz von, 53 Paprika (film), 170 Paramount, 146, 182 Partenope (Händel), 114, 115, 117, 119 Passion Plays, 65 Pedro, Patrice, 233n19 “Pensionopolis,” 8 “People's King” competition, 65 Peukert, Detlev, 99 phonograph, impact on opera, 98, 219n135 police in Göttingen arresting students for disrupting screenings at Central Theater, 184 keeping youth away from films not approved of, 163 monitoring film screenings outside of movie theaters, 161–62 monitoring politically oriented organizations, 162, 165, 234n41 monitoring safety issues in theaters, 172 Police Director, 9, 18, 53, 56, 59, 62, 119, 176, 178

rules prohibiting film screenings after 11:00 p.m., 176 political activities cinema's political function, 171, 187–88, 236n83 in Göttingen through 1920s, 9–20 loss of apolitical völkisch unity, 14–15, 199n66 move toward right-wing politics, 13 Page 272 → personal politics and the Händel Opera Festival (1936–38), 117–21 politics of entertainment, 173 promoting “apolitical” activities, 14–15 sharpshooting as part of political change, 24 sports activities as escape from and vehicle for, 29 use of music for political change, 75 using cultural politics, 107, 222n42 using The Blue Angel to make political points, 158 See also denazification; Göttingen, elections; Nazification Popplow, Ulrich, 9, 227n130 popular culture, 6 See also sharpshooting in Göttingen Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Ministry, 167, 172 populism, 204n44 Porter, Cole, 184 Potter, Pamela, 76, 101, 214n22, 225n91 Powell, Eleanor, 184 Preetorius, Emil, 225n94 Preminger, Otto, 236n98 private activities, 2 private cultural activities, 11 sharpshooting as both public and private cultural practice, 24–25

Professor Unrat (Mann), 155, 233n8 propaganda, 174 Nazi propaganda films in 1933, 169 number of propagandistic films, 238n132 Universum-Film-Aktiensgesellschaft (Ufa) handling, 130 Prussian Education Ministry, 136 Ptolemy (Händel), 119 public activities, 2 cultural activities as way to participate, 20 dominating sharpshooting reinforcing male control of public sphere, 13, 24, 25, 41, 42, 47, 48, 50, 65, 189 public action and anti-politicism as form of populism, 204n44 sharpshooting as both public and private cultural practice, 24–25 reinforcing male control of public sphere, 13, 24, 38, 68 sports as way to join public life, 29 Puccini, Giacomo, 86, 98 Putsch of 1923, failed, 13 Raabe, Peter, 74, 108, 120, 200n93 Radamisto (Händel), 97, 114 radio, impact on opera, 98, 100, 219n135 Rath, Immanuel (fictional character), 155–56, 157, 233n9 Rathenau, Walter, 33–34, 218n113 rearming of Germany, 19, 24, 45, 61, 63, 64, 67, 69, 119, 173, 176, 189 The Rebel (film), 171 Red Front Fighting League, 28 Refugees (film), 165 Regional Court (Landgericht), 107, 118 Rehkopf, Willi, 118, 226n109

Reich Association of German Cinema Owners, 167, 179, 180 Reich Banner Red-Black-Gold, 28, 62, 211n89 Reich Center for Promoting Small-Bore Sharpshooting in Germany, 39 Reich Culture Chamber, 17–18, 115, 167, 178 Reich Film Bank, 167 Reich Film Chamber, 19, 129, 167–68, 172, 176, 179, 180, 181 Reich Film Script Director, 171 Reich League for Physical Education, 64 Reich Music Chamber, 55, 74, 108, 120, 170, 200n93 “Degenerate Music” exhibit, 112 financial support of Händel Opera Festival, 116, 117, 119, 225n98 Händel Opera Festival as member of, 118 membership required to perform in public, 108–9, 223nn53–54 Reich Sport Ministry, 57, 59–60, 64, 66 Reichstag, 3, 32, 49 dissolving of in 1930, 160 Page 273 → elections, 8, 14, 15, 52, 53, 154, 160, 212 fire in 1933, 15, 165 Reifenstahl, Leni, 170, 174, 182–83, 236n90 religious identity in Göttingen, 8 lack of religious overtones in, 52, 64, 208n38, 212n95 as a Protestant town, 8, 81, 91 Remarque, Erich Maria, 16, 159 Reuper, August, 50, 51, 68 Riefenstahl, Leni, 170, 174, 182–83, 236n90 Rodelinde (Händel), 73, 76, 79–80, 82, 88, 90, 97, 106 Romantic music, 80, 86–87, 94, 95, 98, 217n76 Rootham, Cyril, 218n99

Rosalie (film), 184, 186 Rosenberg, Alfred, 108 Roth, Hermann, 113, 219n125 “Rumpelstilzchen” (pseudonym of Stein), 145 Rust, Bernhard, 60, 116, 117 SA (Stormtrooper) group, 13, 17, 20, 112, 116, 169, 181, 203n25 Gnade's participation in, 56, 59 paramilitary activities of, 28, 59, 63, 211n93 purge of, 59, 112 and sharpshooting, 55, 58, 63, 67, 203n25 Saldern, Adelheid von, 9–10, 207n98 Salzburg Festspiel, 86 SA Man Brand (film), 169 Schirach, Bladur von, 169 Schley, Dr., 89, 90 Schneider, Katja, 219n132 Schönberg, Arnold, 224n75 Schumann, Robert, 114 Schütt, Alfred, 180 Schütz, Heinrich, 77 Science, Art and Education and Popular Education Ministry, 163 Science, Art and Education Ministry (Prussian), 94, 136 Scipio (Händel), 119 Seitz, Franz, 169 serenata, term to describe Acis and Galatea, 224n70 Sharpshooting Club Lower Saxony. See Club Lower Saxony Sharpshooting Club Scharnhorst, 33, 35, 38, 39, 48, 52, 203n25, 210n67 Sharpshooting Festival, 23, 24–25, 27, 56 in 1921, first post-war Festival, 30–32

in 1922, 33–35 in 1923, 38 in 1924, 40–41 in 1925, 41, 46–47 in 1929, 50–51 in 1932, 53, 54 in 1934, 57, 59–61, 62–63; estimated growth, 210n81 in 1935, 64–65 in 1936, 66, 67, 212n110 in 1939, limited to army teams, 67 as a beloved tradition, 23, 201n2 as both public and private cultural practice, 41 drawing new technology and attractions, 41, 207n98 growth over the years in number of prizes awarded, 41 intensifying nationalism and German identity, 60 lending support to conservative politics, 42 as litmus test for city prosperity, 36 as manifestation of Volksgemeinschaft, 48 movies played during, 228n11 music at, 60, 210n76 pre-1914 festivals, 41 social ritual nature of, 25, 202n6 Sharpshooting Führer, 17 Sharpshooting Hall, 43–44, 49, 50, 69, 207n1 and the flying of the Republic's flag, 51 sharpshooting in Göttingen, 51, 151, 188, 201n1, 202n11 before 1921, 25–30, 65, 212n101 between 1925 and 1938, 43–70 1935 and after, 61–68 as a beloved tradition, 23, 201n2, 202n5

and Berlin Olympic Games, 66 Page 274 → as both public and private cultural practice, 24–25 as bridge to Volksgemeinschaft, 50, 51 changing meaning of what it meant to be a “shooter,” 25, 202n5 compared to sport shooting, 39 as a cultural activity, 25, 202n8 and German rearmament, 19–20 giving status to participants, 26, 202n12 goal of every man a shooter, 13, 24, 25, 41, 42, 45–50, 65, 189 growth of clubs and sharpshooting, 29, 37–38, 45–50, 162 decline in numbers in 1930s, 55–56 during Weimar's stable years, 36–41 during World War II, 67–68 forced memberships in, 59 groups competing for members, 33, 205n47 Nazi reports on growth, 210n81 returning to prominence after 1934, 67, 212n110 impact of sport shooting on, 42, 49, 53, 57 as local means for national renewal, 32 newspaper coverage of, 212n97 paramilitary nature of, 28, 211n93 as popular culture, 6 as a “psychological necessity” 1921–24, 30–36 reinforcing male control of public sphere, 13, 24 relationship with Nazism, 2–3, 45, 51, 53, 67, 209n59 application of the “Führer Principle,” 58 attempts to reshape sharpshooting to fit, 52, 55, 57, 58–59, 61, 63–64, 65, 68, 70, 208n38 embedding Nazi ideology in everyday lives, 55

as manifestation of ideas of, 44 Nazi's promoting individual shooting over clubs, 211n89 supporting Sharpshooting Hall. See Sharpshooting Hall synthesis of local and national influences on, 188–89 See also sport shooting Siris, Bella, 155 Small-Bore Sharpshooting Club Republic, 205n73 Small-Bore Sport Club, 35 small-bore sport shooting, 52–53 Smith, Helmut Walser, 193n7 Social Democratic Party, 8, 10, 14, 15, 158, 179, 204n32, 206nn76, 79, 232n72 believing popular participation and democracy mutually reinforcing, 47 and cinema, 131, 161, 179 giving working-class associations sociability and equality, 203n15 male control of, 208n19 seeing Volksgemeinschaft as reinforcing Nazism, 48 and sharpshooting, 45, 47, 48, 51, 69 suppression of, 27, 45, 164 outlawing of, 16, 62 See also Association of Proletarian Sharpshooters; Volksblatt (newspaper); Volkshaus Theater; Workers Sharpshooting Club Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Koshar), 5 Sontag, Susan, 235n78 sopranos, roles for, 87, 225n106 Soviet Proletkult modernism, 80 SPD. See Social Democratic Party Sport Club “Forwards” Fighting Society, 62 sport shooting, 33, 35, 36, 41, 43, 50, 52–53, 56, 208n40 compared to sharpshooting, 39 efforts to popularize, 58, 59, 64

impact of on sharpshooting, 42, 49, 53, 57 militarizing of, 64, 209n60, 212n95 as reaction to Versailles Treaty restriction of German military, 28 and young shooters, 45, 49 See also sharpshooting in Göttingen sports organizations, 14 coordination of by Nazi regime, 16–17, 193n8 Page 275 → as escape from and vehicle for politics, 29 growth of associations in 1920s, 37 promoting competitive “English” sports, 29 as substitutes for military exercise, 28 See also Reich Sport Ministry; Volkssports SS (Schutzstaffel), 16, 17, 20, 55, 56, 58, 67, 111, 169, 181 St. Hubertus Hunting Club, 63 St. Matthew's Passion (Bach), 121 Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet), 1, 28, 206n77 The Stars Shine (film), 182 Stechow, Wolfgang, 82, 85, 94, 118, 216n48, 222n47 and Hagen, 82, 85, 91, 216n48 removed from Händel Society Board, 107, 108 Steglich, Rudolph, 91, 93–94, 102–3, 115, 219n125 Stein, Adolph, 145–46, 155, 169 Stephani, Hermann, 85, 92 Sternberg, Josef von, 153, 155, 158 Strauss, Richard, 85, 108, 114, 170 Strength through Joy (group), 17, 20, 107, 116, 119, 226n116 Sudentenland, 1938 annexation of, 182 “Summerfest” concerts, 107

Tasch, Karl, 66 taxes in Göttingen, 14 belief in need to tax and monitor mass culture, 9, 129, 133, 134 and cinema, 129, 132, 133–34, 136, 166, 173–74, 229n31, 230n44 taxes and Heidelberg, Sr., 19, 139, 148, 165, 166, 179–80, 230n45 and Händel Opera Festival, 13, 93 “indirect taxes,” 229n28 tax discounts to encourage certain events, 17, 20, 132, 136, 137–38, 139, 151, 164–65, 172, 175, 179, 229n25 Gnade ruling on, 176–77 military events discounted, 19, 176 support of Winter Help Drive as discountable, 236n102 See also Magistracy of Göttingen Taylor, Brandon, 3 Telemann, Georg Philipp, 77 tenors, roles for, 87–88, 217n82, 219n135 Thalia Theater, 232n72 Thiele, Rolf, 187 Thiersch, Paul, 100 death of, 104 and Hagen, 77, 80, 83–84, 88, 89, 91, 94 as scenic designer for Händel Opera Festival, 78, 80, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 218n107 Thingspiele, 65, 109, 119 Third Reich aestheticization of politics, 186 “apolitical” backing of, 199n66 becoming reality in 1933, 54–55 official creation of in Potsdam in 1933, 15 breaking the Versailles Treaty by rearming, 45, 61, 63, 69 and cinema, 17, 154, 158, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172–73, 174, 182, 183–84, 185. See also cinema in Göttingen

replacing Motion Picture Law of May 1920 in 1934, 132, 171 “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of free-time activities, 3, 9, 16–17, 19, 55, 58, 163, 193n8, 197n43, 209nn59–60 and economic measures, 15, 53–54, 116, 164, 173, 178, 181, 183 importance of 1937 as a turning point, 201n94 and music, 74, 90, 101, 107, 109, 112–13, 114–15, 116, 117–21, 118, 119, 122, 173, 222n42, 223n53, 224n75. See also German music; Händel Opera Festival rise of, 2 and sharpshooting, 24, 44, 45, 53, 55, 57, 61, 64, 65, 67, 173, 211nn89, 93 (see also Sharpshooting Festival; sharpshooting in Göttingen) Page 276 → and voluntary associations, 56–57, 58, 67, 69. See also voluntary associations efforts to remove leftist associations and parties, 62–63 forcing to have only Aryan members, 17, 57–58 outlawing of, 62, 211n85 and Weimar Republic, 2, 3, 6, 9, 19, 68, 74, 164, 185, 188, 190, 191, 223n55 See also cultural activities, and Nazism; Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Party) Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 26 Three Blue Boys and One Blonde Girl (film), 170 Tietjen, Heinz, 225n94 Tiger from Eschnapur (film), 182 Toch, Ernst, 76 “tone film,” 155 Tourist Association (Fremdenverkehrverein), 143 Town Council of Göttingen, 9, 14, 15, 60, 154 Triumph of the Will (film), 170, 174, 179, 235n78 Trumpff, Gustav Adolf, 120 Tschammer und Osten, Hans von, 55, 59 The Tunnel (film), 171 Turner (gymnastics) associations, 28, 29, 39, 52–53, 203n28, 204n32 twelve-note scale, 224n75

Ufa (Universum-Film-Aktiensgesellschaft), 130, 141, 146, 155–56, 168, 169, 170 Universal Studios, 160 University League (Universitäsbund), 73, 82 financial support of Händel Opera Festival, 76, 81, 84, 88, 106, 111, 116, 119, 225n98 University of Erlangen, 102 University of Göttingen, 73 See also George August University (University of Göttingen) University of Marburg, 92 University of Wisconsin, 94, 108, 121, 222n47 University Orchestra (Akademische Orchester-Vereinigung), 73, 76, 83, 91, 94, 97, 107 University Orchestra Association, 118 Universum-Film-Aktiensgesellschaft. See Ufa (Universum-Film-Aktiensgesellschaft) Universum Theater, 165–66, 167, 180, 181, 235n55 Urania Society, 135–36, 137 Urania Theater, 139–40, 143, 144, 148, 166, 231n58, 232n73, 232nn72–73 Urfaust (Goethe), 105 USPD. See Independent Social Democratic Party van Cleve, Major, 64, 65 varieté theaters, 11 Verdi, Giuseppe, 98 Versailles Treaty of 1919, 10, 34, 42 as catalyst for promoting sharpshooting, 28, 54, 69 Germany breaking, 45, 61, 63, 69, 176 restricting German military activities, 15, 26, 28, 30, 33, 40, 54, 61, 63, 68–69 efforts to circumvent, 54, 57, 61 Victory of Faith (film), 169, 170, 179, 235n78 Vivaldi, Antonio, 77, 105 Volk, English translation of, 195n22, 230n33 Völkische Beobachter (newspaper), 226n121

Volksblatt (newspaper), 12, 38–39, 47–48, 51, 144 on 1932 election, 53, 54 cartoon, 156 closing down of, 168, 186 covering cinema in Göttingen, 146, 147, 152, 155, 157–58, 159, 161, 231n58, 237n114 covering Frauen in Not (§218), 233n75 Volksfests, 23, 30, 40, 41, 56, 60, 68 Page 277 → difficulty in translating into English, 204n37 racialist implications of, 58 Volksgemeinschaft (“people's community”), 5–6, 15, 55, 68, 183, 195n22 as apolitical, 52 National Socialist aim to create, 44–45 racialist implications of, 58 Sharpshooting Festival as manifestation of, 48, 50 Sharpshooting Festival exhibiting characteristics of, 60 Volkshaus Theater, 134, 135–36, 137, 139–40, 148, 165, 166, 232nn72–73, 234n51 Volkshochschule offering vocational and continuing education classes, 230n35 Volkskultur, people's culture rather than mass culture, 141 Volkssports, 28, 44, 54, 68, 203n24 racialist implications of, 58 “shooting must become a Volkssport,” 58, 59 Voluntary Association Police, 37 voluntary associations beginning to screen movies, 147 Nazi efforts to lessen role of in sharpshooting, 58–59 and the Third Reich, 58, 67, 69 adaptable and important to Nazism, 209n57 efforts to remove leftist associations and parties, 62–63

forcing to have only Aryan members, 17, 57–58 government monitoring of, 56 outlawing of, 62, 211n85 See also sports organizations; Turner (gymnastics) associations; working-class associations Voßische Zeitung (newspaper), 82, 91 Vows of Chastity (film), 131 Wagner, Richard, 83, 84, 85, 86, 98, 114, 217n80 See also Bayreuth Festival Walter, Georg, 97 Warmbold, Paul, 53–54 War Ministry, 130, 131 Water Sport Association, 62 Webern, Anton, 224n75 Wedding Night in the Woods (film), 131 Wedekind, Frank, 233n14 Weende (village of), 8, 29, 204n45 Weill, Kurt, 76 Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Gay), 3 Weimar Penal Code's Paragraph 218, 179 Weimar Republic, 2, 13, 38, 51, 62, 133, 189, 223n55 and cinema, 129–35 curtailing cinema in Constitution, 127 cultural activities, 74, 75, 92 “Weimar culture,” 3, 4 as a divisive democratic society, 28 and growing influence of conservative groups, 33 republicanism in, 197n47 and sharpshooting, 36–41, 65 and the Third Reich, 2, 3, 6, 9, 19, 68, 74, 164, 185, 188, 190, 191, 223n55

Weitz, Eric, 4 Welge, August, 46, 62 Wendhausen, Fritz, 166–67 Wenz, Josef, 97 Werktreue. See historical accuracy in staging Händel's operas Werner, Theodor Wilhelm, 84, 93 Wessel, Horst, 170 Westfront 1918 (film), 13, 128, 158–59, 160, 161 West Germany, 67–68 The White Hell of Piz Palu (film), 141 Wigman, Mary, 89, 112 Wilde, Oscar, 178 Will, Wilfried van der, 3 Winter Help Drive, 236n102 Wittorf, Fritz, 206n76 A Woman of No Importance (film), 178 women and cinema, 88 sexual power of movie stars, 157–58 and music, 88 Page 278 → “feminized” world of Hausmusik, 105 singing roles for, 87, 217n83, 225n106 in organizations, 1, 29, 60, 68, 200n90 participating in cultural and public life, 26, 188 and sharpshooting, 39, 47, 188 voting rights for, 47 Worker and Soldier Council of Dortmund, 127 Worker Bicycle Club “Star,” 211n85

Workers Händel Festival, 92 Workers Sharpshooting Club, 17, 38, 39, 52, 62, 206n75 outlawing of, 61, 63 Worker Turner and Sport Association, 204n32 working-class associations, 26, 203n15 World War I, 10, 26, 27–28 Xerxes (Händel), 92–93, 102, 106 Yorck (film), 165 Young German Order, 1, 28, 33, 203n25 Young Plan (to refinance Germany's war reparations payments), 158, 159, 175 youth police keeping youth away from films not approved for, 163 in sharpshooting activities, 48–49, 50 youth military training, 211n93 Zeiss, Carl, 135 Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft (publication), 93 Zerlett, Hans H., 182 Zimmermann, Bernhard, 200n93 Zweig, Stefan, 16