The importance of being Horst: popular support and given names in Nazi Germany

ABSTRACT

In a country such as Nazi Germany, coercively devoid of all liberal pre-requisites such as free speech and freedom of association, with no free or practising parliament, with no possibility of citizens expressing themselves through the ballot box, without even rudimentary opinion polls, how can we retrospectively interpret citizen support for the regime? Cultural indicators such as the names given to newborn boys offer a door to study the degree of support for totalitarian regimes, but also to go some way towards reconstructing the ambience in which names were invested with meaning. With the Nazis in power, the political opportunity structure of taste underwent a substantial change, as the regime formally and informally fostered the repository of male Germanic names. This trend was related to modernisation and its accompanying secularisation process, but the Nazis also encouraged traditional Germanic names. One such name, Horst, become very popular during the Third Reich.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology of memory
• sociology of taste
• cultural indicators
• totalitarianism
• National Socialism
• onomastics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See: Bruhn et al. (2012), Gerhards (2003), Gerhards and Hackenbroch (1997), Laversuch (2010), Mahlburg (1985), Mattlinger (1996) and Wolffsohn and Brechenmacher (1992, 1999).

2. See: Hesterkamp (1965), Link (1966), Lorenz (2006) and Mattlinger (1996).

3. Totalitarianism is an ideal-type referring to a form of political domination that laminates the plurality intrinsic to a society with the discretional use of violence or the perennial and plausible threat of resorting to it. Before the effective implementation of violence, totalitarians point out internal enemies (so-called ‘alien social elements’ in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Jews and Marxists under the Nazis), mobilize resentment and request blind conformity from their subjects.

4. Klemperer accurately describes the totalitarian imposition that took place in 1938: ‘Now more than ever, politics has become the secret game of a few who decide the destiny of millions, claiming that they incarnate the people’ (1995, vol. 1: 427. Underlined in the original. I cite the original German version; the English version, which is incomplete, does not include this quote). Political language corrupted by synecdoches is a common feature among all totalitarian projects. A constant element of all ultra-nationalist discourse is the pretence of representing an entire people – who have in fact not delegated their original power sine die to any political group or person.

5. This meant total or partial rejection of psychologically, physically or socially disabled persons from the ‘national body’, including alcoholics, prostitutes and criminals, by means of euthanasia or compulsory sterilisation programmes.

6. Among the official sources used to track down relations between the regime and the populace during the years of Nazi rule are the reports of district governors and provincial presidents compiled for the Ministry of the Interior between 1934 and 1936; the reports of functionaries at various levels in the Nazi party; the Gestapo reports; and the reports of the intelligence apparatus (Sicherheitsdienst, SD). From a totally different political perspective, the reports published between 1934 and 1940 by the German Socialist Party in exile (Sopade) should be highlighted (Bankier, 1992; Kershaw, 1983).

7. Klemperer inaugurated this imaginative and suggestive door to access the public opinion of that era: ‘A comfort to Jews in general are the death notices with a swastika. Everyone counts: How many? Everyone counts how many still die ‘for the Führer’ (2006, p. II: 31. Diary entry for 16 March 1942. Emphasis in the original). After the war, he made the following reflection:

When someone did not agree with National Socialism, when someone wanted to express freely their rejection or even hatred without being accused of acting in opposition, since courage did not extend that far, people would write “Our only son fell fighting for the Homeland”, leaving aside any mention of the Führer (2010, pp. 140–141).

Kershaw shows that even before the German collapse in the Soviet front in 1942–1943 fewer and fewer relatives inserted obituaries with the wording ‘Fallen for Führer, People and Fatherland’, and more and more with the phrasing ‘For People and Fatherland’ (1987, pp. 188–189).

8. On the concept of political opportunity structure in the study of collective action, see Johnston (2014), McAdam (1999 [1982]) and Tarrow (1998).

9. According to Laversuch (2010, p. 223), of the 22 different most popular girls’ names between 1934 and 1938, exactly half fell into the ‘Germanic’ category.

10. The association of Germanic names with values such as courage, strength and bravery was not a Nazi invention. Ludwig Steub, a nineteenth-century writer, claimed once: ‘In them [these names. Note: J.C.] resonates the fearless spirit of the Volk that conquered Europe by sword and spear’. In: Kurzmann, 1937, p. 5.

11. In broader terms, this ‘revolution’ aimed at cleansing the language from foreign influences, naming practices being but a specification of this overall trend – an issue that also appeared in other nationalist contexts. I thank one of the reviewers of the paper for this insight.

12. Hitler set the tone on the Nazi view on women when he wrote: ‘In the education of the girl the final goal always to be kept in mind is that she is one day to be a mother’ (2016, Vol. 2, p. 1057). In 1936 during the Nuremberg Rally he remained loyal to a sharp division of tasks according to gender:

Do not get confused! In the life of every country there are two worlds: the female world and the male world. Nature has correctly decided to place man in charge of the family and has assigned him one more task: the defence of the country, of the whole. The world of the woman is, if she is lucky, the family, her husband, her children, home [ … ] Both worlds form a whole that makes possible a people to live and persist. We want to build this combined world, one in which its gender assumes the tasks that he alone can perform and, consequently, he alone shall perform (Hitler, 1936, pp. 45–46).

The Nazi movement was in accordance with the guidelines set by its Führer and made the fields of politics and defence exclusive male domains. During the Weimar Republic the NSDAP was the only party that did not send a single woman to the Reichstag. Out of the 411 party members and sympathizers abridged in the official list of ‘martyrs’ of the movement up to the end of 1938, only two were women. Official list in: Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 1/395, ‘Ehrenliste der Ermordeten der Bewegung’.

13. In: Zeitschrift für Standesamtswesen, 1938, p. 339.

14. On Wessel’s life, death, and legacy during the Third Reich and afterwards, see: Knobloch (1993), Oertel (1988), Siemens (2013) and Vierkent (2008).

15. For a similar set of values associated to Germanic names, see: Metzner (2012, p. 5).

16. The film was originally entitled ‘Horst Wessel: Ein deutsches Schicksal’, but was renamed by Goebbels prior to its release because he found the treatment of the Wessel legend unsatisfactory.

17. Wessel led the SA-Troop 34, thereafter the SA-Unit V in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The unit was re-named the ‘Horst Wessel Unit’ through an order by Hitler published on a symbolically loaded date, namely Hitler's anniversary on 20th April 1931. See: Hitler, 1992, p. (IV/1): 320–321.

18. In the elections of 6 November, 1932 he Nazi party obtained 33.1% of the national vote. In the electoral districts of the cities mentioned, the results were: 41.2% in Hessen (capital Frankfurt); 45.7% in Schleswig-Holstein (capital Kiel); 24.6% in Bavaria (capital Munich), 22.5% in Berlin and 36.63% in Saxony. There is thus a correlation between votes for the Nazis and a higher or lower frequency of the name Horst. Electoral results in Falter et al., (1986, p. 74).

19. In 1924 Adolf ranked 37th; in 1934 24th; in 1944 and 1954 it did not feature (Naumann, 1973, p. 161–166). On the other hand, the same author shows a similar trend in 1940 in the major district town of Grimma, likewise in Saxony (Naumann, 2003, pp. 143–144).

20. See http://lexikon.beliebte-vornamen.de/horst.htm, accessed on 20 October 2015. In the mid-1960s most of the males that still held Nazi convictions were over 40, an age from which paternity rates decline significantly. It is likely that many of those who gave their sons this name until this time (other than by family reasons) did so to show adhesion to the Nazi ideology and its politics of death.

21. The study by Horst Naumann cited before shows the following results: 7 boys named Adolf in 1924 and 37 in 1934,. Even so, it remained well below Gunther (145), Manfred (128) or Wolfgang (124). Ten years later, not a single boy was registered as Adolf (1973, pp. 161–166). The name Adolf never appears among the 20 most popular names in the city of Kiel during the Third Reich (Mattlinger, 1996).

22. Bareuther Ritze, ‘Streifzüge in das deutsche Namensrecht und die Namenskunde’, in Zeitschrift für Standesbeamtwesen, Personenrecht, Eherecht und Familiengeschichte, 13 (1933), p. 267.

23. ‘Wahl von Vornamen’, in Zeitschrift für Standesbeamtwesen, Personenrecht, Eherecht und Familiengeschichte, 13 (1933), p. 230. Similar decrees followed suit in other districts such as Thüringen, Sachsen, Anhalt or Oldenburg. See: Ibíd., pp. 253, 284, 314 and 392.

Hitler did not like girls named after him by his last name, but Stalin seemed not to have trouble with it. On the contrary, at the end of the 1920s, one of the most popular female names in the Soviet Union was Stalina (Alexijewitsch, 2015, p. 198).

24. See Note No. 13.

25. The list omitted those names which were traditionally popular among Gentiles, such as Maria, Anna, Eva, Joseph, David, Joachim or Jacob, because ‘in the popular mind’ they were no longer alien but had to be typically ‘German names’ in their own right. See: Rennick, 1970, p. 69, 77–79, including the list.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of the Basque Country [grant number GIU 14/30]; the Spanish State Secretary for Research, Development and Innovation [grant number HAR2015-64920-P]; and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.