“Whatever moves the soul of a people, in joy and sorrow, in meditation and battle, in creation and festivity, vibrates in unison with the entire curriculum, and by no means least in the teaching of language. Here, too, it is a matter of coinciding with life itself! Proximity to the present! Relation to the people! For that reason let us also give utterance to the mighty events of the time in our lessons in German! That which fills the heart of the people is spilled by the tongue of youth! The stream of strong blood-folk thought, feeling, and will must be permitted to flow, warm with life, into the form of the word. The result will be a teaching of folk-culture in the mother tongue, and to make this live and be watchful in the growing generation, so that this may, with its own treasure of words belonging to our day and age, express the new treasure of thought, gather it into itself, and let it root ever deeper in the German essence ( Wesensart ), growing ever more deeply rooted, growing ever more into the German mode of thought, the German mode of living, and the German view of the world ( Weltschau ).”
The preface to a grammar! Doesn’t it sound more like one of Hitler’s “cultural speeches”? And the examples in the book carry it farther:
“Example 52. Horror tales from foreign countries affirm that after the National Socialist revolution Jews were assassinated in Germany; that their property was taken from them, that they were spat upon, shot down, thrown into prison, their garments torn from their bodies, and left to starve in concentration camps.
“Example 53. (On the prefix ‘un-,’ corresponding to the English ‘in-’.) If the German people remain unified they will be invincible, incomparable, inimitable, indomitable….”
If the manner in which the German people sing their own praise seems more innocuous than invincible, that must be due to the fact that it is the only way in which the “mother tongue” can be rooted deeply in the German view of the world.
In the old days, the grammars used absurd sentences to teach the rules. You might get: “The penknife of my grandfather is nice,” and be asked to write the plural of subject and predicate, being careful not to pluralize the grandfather too. But when you have: “The bombing plane of my fatherland brings destruction,” you have only to think of the content. You’ll get the idea! “The bombing planes of my fatherland bring destruction!”
The Readers deal almost exclusively with race, ancestors, roots in a common soil, heroism, the mystery of the German mission, and the German soul. The German Romanticists, properly expurgated, are in, but there is a general feeling of apology for them. The Nazi conscience is not quite clear here. The N. S. Bildungswesen (Nazi Educational World) says, on the occasion of a new edition of Herder, Grimm, Claudius, etc.: “There were no National Socialists before Adolf Hitler. But before him there were human beings, poets, scientists, and prophets among our people, who became the guardians and awakeners of German essence, and so helped to prepare the raw material out of which Adolf Hitler was able to make his movement and a new Reich.”
The German poets of the past are misused as awakeners of Nazi material. Herder, Grimm, and Claudius are innocent; aside from that, they are thrown in with writers whose names will be forgotten in Germany before they are known outside it, names like H. Fr. Blunck, Maria Kahle, H. Hanselmann (who, according to the N.S. Educator, has written, in Jakobli, a “Novel about Jacob” in two volumes, “the best novel of development” of the present age). Maria Kahle has a lot to say, particularly in the Readers of western Germany, probably because she has a fortunate way of expressing the Nazi demand for “broadening the territory of German life.” She writes:
Unser Haus ist zerstört, unsre Scholle entweiht,
Dock im Heimwehnot und in Knechtschaftsleid,