“Mercilessly Torn to Shreds.” A 1944 Nazi novel : between propaganda and censorship

Abstract

The study discusses the suppression of Heinrich Eisen’s novel Wehrbauer Burglinger, which was to be published in the Nazi party’s publishing house Franz Eher in 1944. By describing the commitment of special agricultural leaders in German-occupied Ukraine in 1941–1942 deployed by the Wehrmacht to rebuild, administer and secure agricultural production, the aim of the novel was to spur the war-weary homeland to persevere. With the Eher Verlag, the Nazis had a powerful instrument at their disposal to disseminate such literary propaganda. As the case shows, the Nazi’s literary production in wartime was monitored both by Eher’s internal censorship office and the censorship department of the Wehrmacht. The fact that several actors were involved in censorship without a uniform policy led to an obstruction in the decision-making process, which was only resolved by Eher’s director Max Amann. Contrary to his editor, who recommended the book as a “National Socialist standard work,” Amann seems to have followed the arguments of the Wehrmacht censor, who considered the book “unacceptable” due to its damaging portrayal of occupation policy and its unfavorable timing given the “regressive development” of the war. The case demonstrates the precarious situation of war-related fiction and how literary control in wartime enforced a shift from more ideological criteria to mainly extra-literary concerns of situational propagandistic utility, which hampered even the Nazi’s literary production.