Jay W. Baird: Hitler’s War Poets. Literature and Politics in the Third Reich

How are we to classify the subject matter in question? Ought it to be called ‘awkward’, ‘embarrassing’ or merely ‘distasteful’? Are we to pity the author for having exposed himself to ploughing through the muddy fields of ‘brown literature’ that foreshadowed, and eventually served, Nazism in one way or another? To be sure, this monograph deals with, at the time, best-selling second or third-rate authors who were all engaged in a complex project. It was informed by the humiliating German defeat in 1918, the attempt to rally the ‘German spirit’ throughout the Weimar Republic, which all of these authors detested, and some serious involvement with Hitlerism.

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