Christmas and Nazi poets / 2

It is the forth of Advent Sunday and tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so not much working on this, at the moment.  However, see a sample of the ideological Christmas song:

It goes like this:

Valley and hills are covered in snow,
and the nights are silent,
as we, at this time, at this time,
bow before the silence,
bow before the silence.

Somewhere deep in the forest,
a little spruce tree is green and hidden.
This makes our hearts glad,
just like the bright morning.

It's pretty terrible, isn't it.

I'm not into obscenities, but something comes to mind, excuse me.   This is so bad.

This one is from the Nazi Party Women's Magazine.  It goes like this:

It will happen:
a new light will rise.
Light must come again,
even after these dark days.
Let us not ask ourselves,
whether we will see it, too.
It will happen:
a new light will rise.


Just lovely.  Lovely.  Genial.

For the word "rise", they actually use "resurrection".  A new light will be "resurrected."
Wonderful.  Aren't we glad.

At the very top of the illustration we seem to have a rooster.  Perhaps because there will be eggs and then there will be chicks and they are like a "resurrection."  --  I don't know.  It's bizarre.

Thank God, we don't have to live under such people.

This is how it ended.  Christmas in the bunker.  My mother was a little girl like this, in the basement in Darmstadt.  The "genius" lead everything to ruin and by force. 

Christmas and what the Nazi poets tried to do to it / 1

There are several things which are coming together here.  Lately, I've been wondering about this mysticism which seems to come up everywhere on the internet, though not with any "real" people I know.  The whole scene is not familiar to me, but then if I attended a different "church" it might not be.

So we have mysticism and we have Christmas.  Now, I have noticed that at my grocery store, they have moved one step further away from Christmas by giving up Santa and red suits and red hats.  There are green hats now and everything "elves".  Somehow elves are green-ish.  In the public sphere, I've never much cared about real Christmas carols blaring through speakers as I'm shopping.  It was at the same time anachronistic and yet a preservation of some cultural heritage.  What I am fearing is that with the banning of anything approaching Christian Christmas we are losing the last set of songs we actually could sing together.  We have hardly any public spaces in this country, besides malls and schools and Walmart, too, now,-- hardly anybody sings, and if we tried to sing together we'd know nothing that we'd all know--the Christmas carols excepted.  We are fractured as a people and culture, the way our families are fractured nowadays.  It maybe some sort of freedom and individualism, but at huge cost to psychological well-being.  We then have to go to Yoga class, where we do some stretching -fine--but also where we sit together trying to think nothing--not to mention not sing anything, except, perhaps, "Om".

We used to be able, not very long ago, to sing Christmas carols together with gusto and joy, and I am new-ish to this country.  But it seems like the next generation won't know them at all.

Between mysticism, elves and disappearing cultural / religious goods of song, I am thinking why am I not writing something nice and Christmas-sy, myself, today, since were are nearly upon the season?  But instead of that I am thinking to link all that with my other concern and upcoming discussion of Poewe's "New Religions and the Nazis".  You see, because in the pre-war years we had something analogous happening.   And one does wonder:  what comes next?

As we could see from Brahms and Wagner and those who thought themselves avant-garde, creative and brilliant, the Judeo-Christian heritage had to go.  It had to be stamped out.  It was hated, distasteful old stuff.  Christianity would have to go perhaps because it was not Darwinian enough.  Eugenically speaking  the weak were coddled and the proletariat was oppressed.  (There is something add odds here. If the "genius", i.e. "leader", i.e. "Fuehrer" was to lead, what was wrong with the monarch?  And if the proletariat was stupid and weak, why encourage it.  Hm.  Something wrong with either their or my thinking. ...)  In any case, Christianity was too Jewish, and the whole thing was distasteful to the Romantic age and their experience of... whatever, whatever experience they were having, Christianity didn't fit properly.  In any case, Christ didn't fit, either because he was either too Jewish and inappropriate or crucifixion to ugly to those with refined taste, else Christianity was said to be to particularistic and against the Jews.  (Again, nothing hangs together here.  Is it me or is it them?).  That Wagner was anti-semitic can be seen by looking simply into his writing against Mendelssohn and other muscicians.  Mendelssohn was was a Lutheran of Jewish extraction.  Neither the Lutheranism, nor the Jewishness, nor the orthodoxy in the oratorios, etc. was acceptable to Wagner.  Likely the resurrection of J.S. Bach facilited by Mendelssohn did not please Wagner either.

At the same time as we have the rise of materialism and Darwinism  we also had this rise in mystical romanticism.  Somehow, all of it combined into one stream of anti-Christianity which facilitated the rise of National Socialism and the racial movement of German spirit and faith.

The German faith movement I want to get into later by looking at "New Religions and the Nazis".  For now lets just look at what Nazi ideologues and poets did to Christmas and its songs.

In my collection I possess several volumes of Christmas songs, which contain hundreds and hundreds of songs, most of which I know and can sing and play.  I am just contrasting this to the narrowing of the repertoire in the grocery store.


Here are two of my books.

1.

It was given to our family a long time by an American family from San Diego.  The family had billeted with us during a choir tour to Germany.  There are about 400 songs in it, and you can see the book is well used.    At the very end of the book are some ancient Latin songs, which are also hauntingly beautiful. 

2.  This is a book given to me by my brother, I think.  It is an astonishing collection of song through the ages and cultural epochs with explanations of the trends that can be discerned--a truly enlightened and illuminating edition.  

It is available at Amazon, here, we note,  for $22.00, truly an amazing value for this kind of book, which also contains wonderful illustrations.  It might be worth getting the book for yourself or a friend, if there is any German-language knowledge.  (This is another thing.  Who knows any German these days except native German speakers.  In North America hardly a soul bothers learning languages because they don't need to.  This may have to led to misunderstandings of many kinds over the years.  I am slightly side-tracked, but this issue may also have contributed to a very shallow understanding of the Nazi movement and war times.)

This is the contents page:

We see that under 6. and 7. we deal with the Youth-movement that merged into the Hitler-youth and the overhaul of Christmas by gutting it of Christian content and substituting a mythology of nature, stars, motherhood and German nation.  The Christmas tree is now the "Jultanne".  I myself remember singing a set of songs which are mostly about snow and walking in snow.  

--I think I will get my day going, at this point.-- We have made a introduction to the subject.  In the next post, I want to have a look at what this "Buch der Weihnachtslieder" can tell us about the Nazi-movement, its songs and its efforts to remove Christmas from Christmas. 

Bloodlands: Europe between Stalin and Hitler.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, gets a lot of criticism for being liberal and so on.  However, I find many of their documentaries, interviews and lectures very enlightening, even if I don't always agree.  Someone might try listening to something on the evening program "Ideas".

(I know only one other person who listens to CBC radio.)
The link below is for an interview with the author of a new book about the second world war titled:  "Bloodlands:  Europe between Hitler and Stalin."  I haven't read it but put it on my Amazon wishlist.

Here is the interview:  http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/02/01/bloodlands/

Here is the book.  It already has 49 superlative reviews, it seems.

Miep Gies died at 100 years old

Miep Gies was the woman, originally from Austria, who brought food to Anne Frank's family during WW II. She also is credited with saving Anne Frank's diary. She says she only did what seemed appropriate at the time. She maintained a website here.

I used to attend Anne-Frank-Elementary-School from grade 1 to 4.

It is a loss that the adults from this time are all getting very old or are gone already. As children we did not want to hear about all the atrocities and sad fates but could not help overhear. It was not always interesting and too upsetting at the same time. But there was no way around it.

I used to be overcome with the ethical dilemmas of it all. To lie or not to lie to save a skin, or your own skin. To sacrifice your own life for another. Are women with children exempt from making such a sacrifice? In Catholic school it seemed like all the literature we studied had to do with the holocaust and also with such dilemmas. Or maybe they just left the greatest impression on me. The one time we went to the movie theater for a field trip was for a film on the holocaust. Of course, we also studied Anne Frank's diary.

Germans have truly beaten themselves up over this over the years. They are honest and conscientious people. It is sad to me when this never comes across in the English media. It is also sad when the whole matter gets treated in a superficial way as explored in the Fabricated Luther. It is also sad that the last witnesses are dying. Yet, we are grateful for their witness and frequent heroism. It is never completely dark.