Hanns Johst and his Völkisch mission of Art

Hanns Johst (July 8, 1890 in Seerhausen near Riesa ; November 23, 1978 in Ruhpolding) was a German poet and playwright, directly aligned with National Socialist philosophy and cultural functionary, as a member of the officially approved writers’ organisations in the Third Reich. The statement “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”, variously misattributed to Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, was in fact a corrupted version of a line in his play Schlageter.

Hanns Johst was born in Seerhausen near Dresden as the son of an elementary school teacher. He grew up in Oschatz and Leipzig. As a juvenile he planned to become a missionary. When he was 17 years old he worked as an auxiliary in a Bethel Institution. In 1910 he earned his Abitur in Leipzig and then started studying medicine and philosophy and—later—history of art. He volunteered for the army in the First World World in 1914 at the age of 25 (he was married the same year). In 1918 he settled down in Allmannshausen (part of Berg) at the Starnberger See. In the 1920s, during the turmoil of the Weimar Republic , he wrote his first dramas. He was a master of pure, beautiful, unadulterated language, written with great idealism. After graduating from Humboldt University in Leipzig , he worked as a nurse in the Bodelschwingh institutes in Bethel. However, this work gave him no inner satisfaction. He first studied medicine , then philosophy and art studies in Munich , Vienna and Berlin . The First World War interrupted his training and at the same time increased his love for his folk and nation.

His early work is influenced by Expressionism. Examples include "Der Anfang (The Beginning)" (1917) and "Der König (The King)" (1920). Later, he turned to a naturalist philosophy in plays such as "Wechsler und Händler (Money changers and Traders)" (1923) and "Thomas Paine" (1927). His first works "Der Junge Mensch" (1916) and "Der Einsame" (1917) showed the later Johst from the very beginning. In 1921 "Mutter" was created, a book of gratitude towards the German mother's spirit of sacrifice . At the beginning of the 1920s his works adopted his famous style, he became a conscious German . He called it "the völkisch mission of poetry". The term “folk” became a declaration of loyalty for him.

Bertolt Brecht's first play Baal was written in response to Johst's play Der Einsame (The Lonely), a dramatization of the life of playwright Christian Dietrich Grabbe. In 1928 Johst joined Alfred Rosenberg's "Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur" (Militant League for German Culture) designed to combat Jewish influence in German culture. Johst's literary work was soon joined by a political outlook for the emerging National Socialism and in 1932 he joined the National Socialist German Workers Party, explaining his agreement with Hitler's ideology in the essay "Standpunkt und Fortschritt" ("Standpoint and Progress") in 1933.

H.Himmler w. Wife, Coler & Johst

When the National Socialists achieved power in 1933, Johst wrote the play Schlageter, an expression of National Socialist ideology which was performed on Hitler's 44th birthday, 20 April 1933, to celebrate His victory. It was a heroic biography of the martyr Albert Leo Schlageter and a prime example of the National Socialist stage play, loyal to the country, with a passionate love for the nation and the German people. A beautiful play that brought out the heroism of patriotic young men in the desperate years and graphically illustrated the utter barbarity of the French tyrannical occupation of the German Nation... The famous line "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun", often associated with N.S. leaders, derives from this play. The actual line in the play is, however, slightly different: "Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!" "When I hear 'Culture'… I release the safety catch on my Browning!" (Act 1, Scene 1). It is spoken by another character in conversation with the young Schlageter. In the scene Schlageter and his wartime comrade Friedrich Thiemann are studying for a college examination, but then start debating whether it is worthwhile doing so when the nation is not free. Thiemann argues that he would prefer to fight rather than study:

SCHLAGETER: Good old Fritz! (Laughing.) No paradise will entice you out of your barbed wire entanglement!

THIEMANN: That's for damned sure! Barbed wire is barbed wire! I know what I'm up against.... No rose without a thorn!... And the last thing I'll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from '18 ..., fraternity, equality, ..., freedom ..., beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook 'em. And then, you're right in the middle of a parley and they say: Hands up! You're disarmed..., you republican voting swine!—No, let 'em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish ... I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture ..., I release the safety on my Browning!"

SCHLAGETER: What a thing to say!

THIEMANN: It hits the mark! You can be sure of that.

SCHLAGETER: You've got a hair trigger.

— Hanns Johst's Nazi Drama Schlageter. Translated with an introduction by Ford B. Parkes-Perret. Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, Stuttgart, 1984.

The line is frequently misattributed, sometimes to Hermann Göring and sometimes to Heinrich Himmler. In December 2007, historian David Starkey misattributed it to Joseph Goebbels in comments criticizing Queen Elizabeth II for being "poorly educated and philistine".

The premiere in Berlin was an unparalleled success and ended with thunderous applause and the Horst Wessel song.

"We are the writing of the coming time"

With these words the poet Hanns Johst, the President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer , introduces a book handwritten by 67 German poets, to the Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels at the opening of the book week in Weimar .

Hanns Johst's life was now dominated by a love for genuine German written works. His works “Ich glaube (I believe)” (as early as 1928) as well as the books “Maske und Gesicht – Reise eines Nationalsozialisten von Deutschland nach Deutschland (Mask and Face - Journey of a National Socialist from Germany to Germany)” (1935) and “Meine Erde heißt Deutschland (My Land is Germany)” (1938) can be seen as great works of poetic creation. As a poet and dramaturge, he led the German people to new shores in the truest sense of the word.

In 1933, Johst signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, a declaration of loyalty to Hitler by pro-N.S. writers. Succeeding Hans-Friedrich Blunck in 1935, Johst became the President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (writer's union) and of the Deutsche Akademie für Dichtung (poetry academy), powerful organisations for German writers. Due to his services to German writing and at the same time to National Socialism, he received a number of awards. At the 7th Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg in September 1935 , he was the first to receive the NSDAP Prize for Art and Science. In the same year the last prominent Jewish writers, e.g. Martin Buber, were expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer and Johst was appointed head and president. By this time these organisations restricted membership to writers whose work was either pro-N.S. or at least approved of by the National Socialists as non-degenerate. He was now also the leading writer in the German Reich. In 1936 the romance novel "Die Torheit einer Liebe (The folly of a love)" followed. In the novel "Mutter ohne Tod (Mother Without Death)" (1933) a beautiful and faithful kind of motherly love was conveyed. Johst was not only a writer and creator of an elegant language, he also conveyed idealism and a healthy sense of mission as a person and citizen to young people (“Hanns Johst spricht zu Dir (Hanns Johst speaks to you)”, 1942). Hanns Johst also made a name for himself as a dramatic poet. In "Ruf des Reiches" (1940) the act of the German soldier as an eternal fighter for the justice of a leading cultural nation was put into words. When the creator of the Reichsautobahn, Fritz Todt, was killed in a plane crash near Wolfsschanze in Rastenburg, East Prussia, in 1942, Johst was commissioned to write a requiem for him.

Johst receives a literary prize from Alfred Rosenberg

Johst achieved other positions of importance within the National Socialist state, and he was named in the Gottbegnadeten list of September 1944 as one of the Reich's most important artists. During the war he held various positions within the SS and he was a very close friend and admirer of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler to whom he dedicated the book Maske und Gesicht.

For Heinrich Himmler in True Friendship

After the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht, Johst was deported by the Allies to a KL, his works were placed on the prohibition index . Envy, resentment and hatred of his opponents accompanied the rest of his life. At first he was classified "only" as a follower and in July 1949 was fined 500 marks. Johst appealed and was then the "main culprit" for three and a half years in a labor camp sentence. In addition, he lost half of his fortune. Furthermore, he was banned from publications for ten years, which for Johst amounted to a death sentence. Nonetheless, in 1955 Hanns Johst was able to publish “Gesegnete Vergänglichkeit (Blessed Evanescence)” in which he remained true to his national ideals. With that he finally fell under official ostracism, because a US-American lack of culture had meanwhile taken hold. He spent the last years of his life at Lake Starnberg in his beloved nature in Ruhpolding, Bavaria, where he died on November 23, 1978.

Hanns Johst's books with their pure and noble language have an impact up to the present day.

"The harder this war is becoming and the longer it takes, the more do we experience the clear certainty of the true value of culture. The intellectual and spiritual forces reveal their solace, their splendor, and their grace. The outward life is constantly getting simpler and harder, burdened with the sacrifice of our time, but the inner life gets new, young and rich confirmation. Nothing can endanger this inner richness, on the contrary the more cruelly the outward world attacks spirit and soul, the more redeeming does the marvel of art prove to be." (June 1943, in a speech about Robert Schumann)