In commentary on the poem and what the author represents, a collection called Die Fahne Hoch (Up with the Flag) (No, 36, Neues Verlagshaus für Volksliteratur ) carried a short biography of the poet, “His father wished him to study medicine…. Suddenly, in the midst of his studies, he became very ill. He took morphia, became an addict, and remained one after his recovery. His condition was so serious, and his irritability so great, that he himself saw he could not continue that way…. He decided to find a sanatorium for nervous disorders. During his stay at the sanatorium, his first great poetical plans matured….” And the report continues, full of revolutionary pride. “Young Eckart did not allow himself to be caught up in a bourgeois profession; his father gradually realized this and stopped arguing with his son.” After that, it is naturally “comprehensible that the Jewish press rejected this booklet and suppressed it…. His father died in 1895, and left him a considerable fortune… and Dietrich Eckart made such generous use of it that within a few years there was not one cent left.” But when the frivolous young man met Adolf Hitler, “the corporal from the world which was as yet utterly unknown to him… he realized with astonishing clairvoyance the great qualities of a leader in this man, and submitted himself to Hitler unconditionally…. Thus Dietrich Eckart stands before us… the German poet whom his people will never forget, because they cannot forget him.”
They will not forget him and cannot, because the propaganda ministry will not hear of it, because he is part of the myth. This is a German poet in Hitler’s good grace: Dietrich Eckart, called, not by his enemies, but by his Nazi worshipers, a spendthrift, a morphia addict, who would not allow himself to be caught up in a bourgeois profession. He wrote miserable, bloody cant; and he did not become Hitler’s friend in spite of his weaknesses, any more than he wrote his verses in spite of them. Because of his qualities, because he was a useless, refractory wreck, he has been taken into the Nazi Valhalla, to a place beside Horst Wessel, the pimp, and Leo Schlageter, the railway wrecker. What happens inside the heads of school-children who are given such heroes?
RACIAL INSTRUCTION
After a meeting of the Racial Office of the Party, Dr. Bernhard Rust issued an edict, which may be summarized:
Racial Instruction is to be given in all classes. (Appropriate conclusions are to be drawn from Racial Instruction in all branches of public and private life.) The spirit of National Socialism must hold first place throughout the course. It must be enforced in order to:
1. Give pupils an insight into the relationship, causes and effects of all basic facts having to do with the science of heredity and race.
2. Impress the pupils with the importance of the science of heredity and race for the future of the nation and the purposes of the government.
3. Awaken in the pupils a sense of responsibility toward the nation, as represented by both its ancestry and its posterity; imbue the pupils with pride in the fact that the German people are the most important exponent of the Nordic race, and to influence them in favor of complete Aufnordung (Nordification) of the German people.
This is to be accomplished early enough so that no child shall leave school without a conviction of the necessity of pure blood.
The German schools consider no method that may carry out this wish of the Führer too superstitious, too brutal or clumsy.