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Nazifying Christmas: Political Culture and Popular Celebration in the Third Reich

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Joe Perry
Affiliation:
Georgia State University

Extract

Radical regimes revolutionize their holidays. Like the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks, who designed festival cultures intended to create revolutionary subjects, National Socialists manipulated popular celebration to build a “racially pure” fascist society. Christmas, long considered the “most German” of German holidays, was a compelling if challenging vehicle for the constitution of National Socialist identity. The remade “people's Christmas” (Volksweihnachten) celebrated the arrival of a savior, embodied in the twinned forms of the Führer and the Son of God, who promised national resurrection rooted in the primeval Germanic forest and the “blood and soil” of the authentic Volk. Reinvented domestic rituals, brought to life by the “German mother” in the family home, embedded this revamped Christmas myth in intimate moments of domestic celebration. An examination of “people's Christmas” across this spectrum of public and private celebration offers a revealing case study of National Socialist political culture in action. It illuminates the ways Germans became Nazis through participation both in official festivities and the practices of everyday life and underscores the complexity of the relationship between popular celebration, political culture, and identity production in the “Third Reich.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2005

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96 As a piece of socialist holiday propaganda, from an anonymous agent in Berlin, the letter is somewhat unusual; it is more of a holiday rumination than the “factual” report typical of the Sopade; Sopade, 13081309.Google Scholar

97 MadR, 1822, 3044, 3145, 4502, 4577, etc.

98 Ibid., 1859, 3123, 6203.

99 Ibid., 1888, 3075, 3135–3139, 4598, 4600, 4633.

100 The BA-FA has numerous examples of “War Christmas” newsreels; see, for example, “Vorbereitungen für die ‘Volksweihnacht 1940,” Deutsche Wochenschau Nr. 536, 51 (12 11, 1940). BA-FA, DW 536/1940.Google Scholar

101 MadR, 1888, 3075, 3135–3139, 4598, 4600, 4633.

102 Ibid., 3136.

103 On the church, see ibid., 555, 1864, 6207–6212; compare to “Die Kirche in der Weihnachtszeit,” SD report from 02 16, 1944, in BA-Berlin, NS 6/106.Google Scholar

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108 A copy of the booklet (Licht muβ wieder werden. ed. by Hauptkulturamt der Reichspropagandaleitung with Hermann Liese and Alwin Rüffer, no date) and a hand-signed note from Liese with instructions for distribution in EZA 7/3199.

109 Handwritten note in EZA 7/3199.

110 For one example of this ritual from World War 1, see Mihaly, Jo, … da gibt's ein Wiedersehen! Kriegstagebuch eines Mädchens 1914–1918 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1986)Google Scholar. On Walter Flex's “Weihnachtsmärchen” (Christmas Fairy Tale) and the cult of death in general, see Mosse, George, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 75.Google Scholar

111 Kästner, Erich, “Weihnachtsschwarzmarkt in Berlin,” in Weihnachtsgeschichten aus Berlin, ed. Paulsen, Gundel (Husum: Husum Druck- und Verlaggesellschaft, 1993), 1517.Google Scholar

112 “Nationalsozialistische Weihnacht,” VB, 12 24/25/26, 1933.Google Scholar

113 Fora description of Christmas and the “unmasterable past” in postwar West Germany, see Perry, Joe, “The Madonna of Stalingrad: Mastering the (Christmas) Past and West German National Identity after World War II,” in Radical History Review 83 (2002): 727.Google Scholar

114 As Klaus Vondung concluded in his groundbreaking study of Nazism as a political religion, the systemic and institutional transformations sought by National Socialists to reconstruct German national culture were firmly in place by 1940; Vondung, , Magie und Manipulation, 116–7.Google Scholar