Empire, Authorship and Völkisch Fairy Tales: Hans Friedrich Blunck and the Re-invention of Tradition after World War I

Abstract

This article explores the close interplay between Hans Friedrich Blunck’s aesthetic and (geo-)political projects after World War I. In particular, it shows how Blunck situated himself in a lineage of political writers who idealized the notion of a German cultural nation or Reich in times of territorial loss, and re-invented this tradition to challenge the nation-state order enshrined in the Versailles Treaty. These endeavours rested on a triadic model of historical development and found expression in his ‘völkisch’ literature, his European reading tours — especially to communities of so-called ‘Auslandsdeutsche’ — and his involvement in the International PEN Club. Whereas previous studies have often approached Blunck from the vantage points of 1933 or 1945, this article explores his construction of traditions and myths from World War I onwards. In doing this, it reassesses the place of apparently traditional, ‘backward-looking’ actors and modes in Weimar’s wider cultural landscape.

Keywords:

• Hans Friedrich Blunck
• Fairy tales
• Myth
• Völkisch nationalism
• Imperialism
• National socialism
• Weimar culture
• Ernst Moritz Arndt
• Auslandsdeutsche
• International PEN

Notes on Contributor

Tara Talwar Windsor is Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is an historian of modern Germany, focusing on cultural responses to war and dictatorship, international cultural relations and the relationship between literary intellectuals and the state. She is currently preparing a monograph entitled Authors across Borders: Weimar Writers and the International Politics of Culture.

Notes

1 Hans Friedrich Blunck, ‘Volkstum und Dichtung’, Deutsche Rundschau, 59 (1932), 162–76 (pp. 162–63).

2 Blunck, ‘Volkstum’, p. 63, original emphasis.

3 Volker Dahm, ‘Künstler als Funktionäre: Das Propagandaministerium und die Reichskulturkammer’, in Hitlers Künstler. Die Kultur im Dienst des Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Hans Sarkowitcz (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 2004), pp. 75–109 (p. 79). See also Bettina Hey’l, ‘Hans Friedrich Blunck, Mitläufer und Romancier’, in Literaturwissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Holger Dainat and Lutz Danneberg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), pp. 167–83 (p. 171).

4 Guy Tourlamain, ‘Völkisch’ Writers and National Socialism: A Study of Right-Wing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 5.

5 Tourlamain, ‘Völkisch’ Writers and National Socialism, p. 109. On Blunck’s career in Nazi Germany, see, for example, Kai-Uwe Scholz, ‘Chamäleon oder Die vielen Gesichter des Hans Friedrich Blunck: Anpassungsstrategien eines prominenten NS-Kulturfuntionärs vor und nach 1945’, in ‘Dann waren die Sieger da’: Studien zur literarischen Kultur in Hamburg 1945–1950, ed. by Ludwig Fischer and others (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1999), pp. 130–67 (pp. 139–45).

6 See ‘Hans Friedrich Blunck (1888–1961)’, in Lexikon nationalsozialistischer Dichter: Biographien — Analysen — Bibliographien, ed. by Jürgen Hillesheim and Elisabeth Michael (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993), pp. 63–74 (p. 64); Hey’l, ‘Hans Friedrich Blunck, Mitläufer und Romancier’, p. 174; Scholz, ‘Chamäleon’, p. 133 and pp. 146–47.

7 Jay J. Rosellini, Literary Skinheads? Writing from the Right in Reunified Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2000), pp. 27–28.

8 John Klapper, Nonconformist Writing in Nazi Germany: The Literature of Inner Emigration (Rochester: Camden House, 2015), p. 36. See also Scholz, ‘Chamäleon’, esp. p. 153.

9 Hey’l, ‘Hans Friedrich Blunck, Mitläufer und Romancier’, p. 181.

10 Hey'l, ‘Hans Friedrich Blunck, Mitläufer und Romancier’, p. 174. Scott Hoerle writes that although ‘Blunck’s views did not inevitably lead to Nazism’, he was part of a ‘literary tide that helped sweep the National Socialists to power’: W. Scott Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck. Poet and Nazi Collaborator, 1888–1961 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 104 and 213. For a critique of Hoerle’s assessment of the rise of Nazism, see Volker Dahm, ‘Review of W. Scott Hoerle: Hans Friedrich Blunck. Poet and Nazi Collaborator, 1888–1961’, in sehepunkte, 5 (2005), Nr. 3 [15.03.2005], <https://www.sehepunkte.de/2005/03/5053.html> [accessed 18 August 2020].

11 Tourlamain, ‘Völkisch’ Writers and National Socialism, p. 7.

12 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 72.

13 Sabina Becker, Experiment Weimar: Eine Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1918–33 (Darmstadt: wbg, 2018), p. 51. For Becker’s discussion of conservative writers’ opposition to artistic modernisms, see pp. 53–75 and 173–83.

14 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 46–48.

15 Rudolf Alexander Schröder, ‘Geleitwort zu den Kriegsgedichten’, in Blunck, Sturm überm Land: Gedichte der Kriegszeit (Jena: Diederichs, 1916). On German cultural policy during the war, see Ulrich Tiedau, ‘Kultur durch Macht oder Macht durch Kultur: Deutsche Kulturvermittler in Belgien 1914–1918’, in Carl Einstein in Brüssel: Dialog über Grenzen. Carl-Einstein-Kolloquium 1998, ed. by Roland Baumann and Hubert Roland (Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 143–67.

16 See Tiedau, ‘Kultur durch Macht oder Macht durch Kultur’, p. 148.

17 Tiedau, ‘Kultur durch Macht oder Macht durch Kultur’, pp. 145–48.

18 See Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 48.

19 Christian Jenssen, Hans Friedrich Blunck: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Buch- und Tiefdruck-Gesellschaft, 1935), pp. 48–49.

20 Blunck, Belgien und die niederdeutsche Frage (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1915). See also Blunck, Licht auf den Zügeln: Lebensbericht (Mannheim: Kessler, 1953), i, pp. 234–65 and Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 47–49.

21 Blunck, Belgien, p. 20.

22 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 48.

23 See Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 66–110, esp. pp. 68–76.

24 Tourlamain, ‘Völkisch’ Writers and National Socialism, p. 17.

25 Blunck, Tagebuch, 2 November 1918, Hans Friedrich Blunck Nachlass, Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, Kiel (hereafter HFBN).

26 Rüdiger Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), p. 288.

27 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 40–41.

28 Helmuth Kiesel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1918 bis 1933 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2017), pp. 1213–14.

29 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 52–54 (p. 54).

30 Kiesel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1918 bis 1933, p. 1213.

31 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 54.

32 Hans Friedrich Blunck, Berend Fock. Die Mär vom gottabtrünnigen Schiffer (Munich: Georg Müller, 1923), extract reproduced in Kiesel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1918 bis 1933, p. 1213.

33 Carl Müller-Rastatt, ‘Stilwende?’, Die Literatur. Monatsschrift für Literaturfreunde, 26 (1923–24), 656–59 (p. 658).

34 Müller-Rastatt, ‘Stilwende?’, p. 658.

35 Müller-Rastatt, ‘Stilwende?’, pp. 656–57.

36 Müller-Rastatt, ‘Stilwende?’, p. 657.

37 Werner Mittenzwei, Der Untergang einer Akademie oder Die Mentalität des Ewigen Deutschen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1992), pp. 195–97 (esp. p. 196) and Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 57.

38 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 56.

39 Jack Zipes, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 68.

40 Mittenzwei, Der Untergang einer Akademie, p. 196.

41 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 56–57.

42 Müller-Rastatt, ‘Stilwende?’, p. 658.

43 Lothar Blum, ‘Die “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” der Brüder Grimm: Eine literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Einordnung eines “Bestsellers”’, <https://literaturkritik.de/id/17417> [accessed 26 August 2020].

44 Hans Friedrich Blunck, Märchen von der Niederelbe (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1923), pp. 1–2 (p. 2). Further references, abbreviated to M., appear in the text.

45 Blunck, Tagebuch, 1 August 1923, HFBN, and following quotation.

46 On the relationship between völkisch-nationalism, modernity and artistic modernism, see Tourlamain’s introduction in ‘Völkisch’ Writers and National Socialism, esp. pp. 3, 6–7 and 10–16.

47 Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 57.

48 Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales & Fables from Weimar Days: Collected Utopian Tales (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), esp. Introduction: ‘Recovering the Utopian Spirit of Fairy Tales and Fables from the Weimar Republic’, pp. 3–26.

49 Zipes, Weimar Days, p. 9.

50 Florian Krobb, ‘Catholicism, Conservative Revolution and the Fairy Tale: The Case of Wilhelm Matthießen’, in Beyond Glitter and Doom: The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, ed. by Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex (Munich: Iudicium, 2012), pp. 119–34 (p. 133).

51 See Moritz Föllmer, ‘Which Crises? Which Modernity? New Perspectives on Weimar Germany’, in Hung, Weiss-Sussex and Wilkes, Beyond Glitter and Doom, pp. 19–30 (p. 25).

52 Müller-Rastatt, ‘Stilwende?’, p. 659.

53 Mimi I. Jehle, ‘Das moderne Kunstmärchen’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 33 (1934), 452–61 (p. 460).

54 For a discussion of the ‘Streit um die Kameradschaft’ across Weimar’s political spectrum, see Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 51–67.

55 Franz Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation (Berlin: Frundsberg-Verlag, 1929), p. 375. See also David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp 242–48.

56 See Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 21–38 and 48–50.

57 Jochen Hung, ‘“Bad” Politics and “Good” Culture: New Approaches to the History of the Weimar Republic’, Central European History, 49 (2016), 441–53 (pp. 448–50).

58 Blunck, Tagebuch, 28 October 1927, HFBN. See also Walther Blunck, Thomas Mann and Hans Friedrich Blunck: Briefwechsel und Aufzeichnungen (Hamburg: Troll-Verlag 1969), pp. 8–48.

59 Blunck, Tagebuch, 20 April 1928, HFBN.

60 Scholz, ‘Chamäleon’, p. 138. On völkisch political activism and the Weimar parliamentary system, see Tourlamain, ‘Völkisch’ Writers and National Socialism, p. 97.

61 Blunck, Tagebuch, 21 April 1925, HFBN.

62 Blunck, ‘Volkstum’, pp. 163–64.

63 Blunck, Tagebuch, 21 April 1925, HFBN. On Blunck’s view of the Holy Roman Empire, see Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, p. 115.

64 See Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 111; Jürgen Elvert, Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918–1945) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999) and Christian Bailey, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe 1926–1950 (New York: Berghahn, 2013).

65 Blunck, Tagebuch, 25 May 1925, HFBN. A marginal note in this diary entry reveals that the word ‘liberal’ was crossed out in 1928.

66 Christoph Jürgensen, Federkrieger: Autorschaft im Zeichen der Befreiungskriege (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2018), p. 189.

67 Erin R. Hochman, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp. 28–29.

68 For a critical reassessment of Stresemann’s popular image, see Karl Heinrich Pohl, Gustav Stresemann: Biographie eines Grenzgängers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), esp. 245–51. Pohl also underlines Stresemann’s own right-wing sympathies, pp. 284–93.

69 See Carole Fink, ‘Defender of Minorities: Germany in the League of Nations, 1926–1933’, Central European History, 5 (1972), 330–57.

70 Kurt Düwell, Deutschlands auswärtige Kulturpolitik 1918–1932: Grundlinien und Dokumente (Cologne: Böhlau, 1976).

71 Blunck, Tagebuch, May 1924 [Tagebuch der Schweizer Reise], HFBN.

72 Blunck, Unwegsame Zeiten: Lebensbericht (Mannheim: Kessler, 1952), ii, p. 139.

73 Blunck to Ulrich von Hassell (Deutsche Gesandtschaft Belgrad), 24 May 1930, Cb92 HFBN.

74 Blunck to Ernst Timm (Nordische Gesellschaft), 15 October 1927, HFBN, Cb92.62.4:1,13,02.

75 Blunck, ‘Volkstum’, p. 163.

76 See Tara T. Windsor, ‘Dichter, Denker, Diplomaten: German Writers and Cultural Diplomacy after the First World War, 1919–1933’ (doctoral thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013), pp. 142–47.

77 Bradley D. Narynch, ‘Inventing the Auslanddeutsche: Emigration, Colonial, and German National Identity, 1848–1871’, in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. by Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz and Lora Wildenthal, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), pp. 21–40.

78 Blunck extended this cultural imaginary beyond Europe in his so-called Romane des Auslandsdeutschen entitled Die Weibsmühle: Ein Roman aus Brasilien (1927) and Land der Vulkane: Eine Geschichte von drüben (1929). See Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 69–70.

79 Blunck, Tagebuch, 21 December 1926, HFBN; Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 58–59.

80 See Tara T. Windsor, ‘“Extended Arm of Reich Foreign Policy”? Literary Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy and the First German PEN Club in the Weimar Republic’, Contemporary European History (forthcoming, Spring 2021).

81 Blunck, ‘Kulturbindungen für die Zukunft Europas’, Die Literarische Welt, 12 September 1930, pp. 1–2 (p. 2).

82 Megan Doherty, ‘A “Guardian to Literature and its Cousins”. The Early Politics of the PEN Club’, Nederlandse Letterkunde 16 (2011), 132–51 (p. 141).

83 Doherty, ‘A “Guardian to Literature and its Cousins”’, p. 141.

84 See, for example, Becker, Experiment Weimar, p. 27.

85 See Benjamin G. Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 225 and Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck, pp. 174–193.