National Socialist propaganda has created an aesthetic legacy that is difficult to shake off. Filmic images of well-trained athletes preparing for the Berlin Olympics or mass scenes from Nazi Party rallies have become familiar features in history documentaries. While many of us lack personal memories of the Third Reich, we think we know what Nazism looked like.Footnote 1 In addition, Walter Benjamin's concept stressing the use of aesthetics in politics has become commonplace in interpretations of Nazi representation.Footnote 2 “Gesamtkunstwerk of political aesthetics” or “formative aesthetics” are terms used to analyze festivities and spectacles in the Third Reich, suggesting that the Nazis developed a specific style with a focus on aesthetics, symbols, and festive set-up.Footnote 3 This allegedly distinctive Nazi style is emphasized even more by contrasting it favorably with celebrations of the Weimar Republic.Footnote 4 Once again, the German republican experience is placed in “the antechamber of the Third Reich.”Footnote 5
The division of the Weimar years into spectacular, often urban, culture and disastrous politics has long impeded scholars from seriously concentrating on an area in which the fusion of culture and politics was practiced—republican state representation. In the light of current research new approaches question the concept of a “doomed” republic and turn away from presenting Weimar democracy as an accumulation of mistakes, shortcomings, and failures.Footnote 6 Furthermore, scholars have shown that even contemporaries attached multilayered meanings to the term “crisis,” sometimes linking it to positive future opportunities and options.Footnote 7
Challenging the notion that the Nazis invented the use of aesthetics for the staging of their mass events, I argue instead that the time span from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s can be considered as a whole in regard to the development of political aesthetics and festive culture. While the importance of rituals, symbols, and festivities as means of constructing and expressing identity has been examined in detail for Imperial Germany and, in parts, for the Third Reich, the Weimar years remain largely ignored in this area.Footnote 8 Festivities and political symbols in the 1920s and 1930s have been presented as exemplifying opposing milieus in a fragmented German society with a focus on the political extremes.Footnote 9 It is equally important, however, to examine the festive culture of the Weimar state and of groups, parties, and organizations that supported republican democracy. After all, Weimar Germany was much more than a republic sandwiched between political extremes, and it certainly was not “a republic without republicans.”Footnote 10
A stress on rhythm, moving bodies, wholeness, and national community characterized the Weimar Republic and strongly influenced festivities, parades, sporting events, and spectacles organized by the republican state. By the mid-1930s the public had been well accustomed to the use of aesthetics in mass events staged by political organizations and the state alike. Grounding what is often termed “Nazi aesthetics” in the time of the republic changes commonly assumed ideas on state representation in Weimar and Nazi Germany. The republic was more keen on and successful with the staging of political spectacles than is generally assumed. But for this very reason, it paved the way for the Third Reich's successes in the same realm.
Spaces, Bodies, and Discipline: Occupying Public Space
Public spaces have always been important political arenas. They can be filled with bodies serving as carriers of political demands and convictions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Social Democrats used peaceful street demonstrations to manifest their claims of greater political participation in Imperial Germany. Therefore, discipline and order were essential to show that one was to be a reliable agent in the state.Footnote 11 Peaceful Social Democratic demonstrations consciously used the impact that masses of bodies made on spectators. Body language became an important tool as well as the spatial dimension of the event, the style of walking, the clothing of the demonstrators, and the sounds of their steps.Footnote 12 Frequently, demonstrations marched from assembly points in working-class neighborhoods to wealthier quarters of the city or to sites of national importance. This was to imprint political connotations symbolically on these areas.Footnote 13 At the turn of the century, the visible occupation of urban space in Imperial Berlin was not solely the privilege of the monarchy. Yet, the Social Democrats hardly ever managed to stage their demonstrations at the center of monarchical power around the city palace, the main street Unter den Linden, the Lustgarten, and the Brandenburg Gate due to the heavy policing of this area.Footnote 14
In the Weimar Republic, the constitution guaranteed the right of assembly outdoors without previous permission as long as people assembled peacefully and unarmed. Police authorities could prevent assemblies and demonstrations if they endangered public safety, if violent clashes with others could be expected, or if the traffic was to be seriously interrupted. Theoretically, demonstrations and assemblies forbidden for these reasons should only have been suspended temporarily. In reality, restrictive measures regarding demonstrations and assemblies, especially of the extreme left, remained in practice for months, sometimes years. The early and the last years of the republic, periods characterized by political and economic crises, saw the most suspensions of demonstrations in Weimar Germany.Footnote 15 A study of the middle period of the 1920s during which demonstrations and outdoors assemblies were allowed, however, will illustrate how the republican state made conscious efforts to participate in these public demonstrations of power.
Spatial aspects—for example the route of a parade—and the bodily presence within the urban environment played an important part in the Weimar years, too. Parades, marches, and assemblies held by political parties, war veteran societies, paramilitary organizations, and various other groups characterized public life in 1920s Germany.Footnote 16 They were manifestations of power and strengthened the feeling of unity within a group while creating a strong and coherent impression to the outside. Republicans who claimed that the inclusiveness of their parades distinguished them from similar events in the Kaiserreich denied a clear-cut division into participants on the one hand and spectators on the other.Footnote 17 Festive representative forms, aimed at staging a “national body,” were frequently promoted as a rhythmical experience for participants and viewers alike. Most demonstrations, however, only created a feeling of rhythm for those actively involved in marching down the street.Footnote 18
Demonstrations and parades were not left to the political extremes in Weimar Germany. The growing strength of the republican war veteran organization Reichsbanner schwarz-rot-gold, founded in 1924 to defend the republic and to mobilize its supporters, provided the organizers of republican festivities with thousands of men orderly walking down the streets and carrying black-red-gold flags.Footnote 19 This was an asset the republican state was keen to utilize and, consequently, included the Reichsbanner in state festivities. The most important of these were the Constitution Day celebrations staged in honor of the signing of the Weimar Constitution on August 11, 1919. Although the day was not turned into a public holiday—a majority in the German parliament never voted for it—it was celebrated annually by the national government from 1921 onward. Over the years, festive routines and traditions developed, and Constitution Day festivities grew in size and scale.Footnote 20
A regular highlight of Constitution Day celebrations in the capital was a torch-lit march passing the city palace and the Lustgarten, along the street Unter den Linden, to the Brandenburg Gate and the parliament buildings. In so doing, the republican parade took the most public route through Berlin. It passed symbols of republican power and marched through the center of former Imperial authority where previously only military parades and monarchical festivities had been allowed to take place. In August 1927 the first big Constitution Day parade was staged in Berlin and included 12,000 participants, half of them Reichsbanner members. The other 6,000 participants were a mixed group consisting of members of the unions, the German Association of Civil Servants, the Jewish War Veteran Organization, and Berlin choirs to name the numerically largest organizations.Footnote 21 In the following years, the parade increased continuously. A year later, the number of participants had almost tripled to 30,000. While the Reichsbanner once again mobilized the largest single group with 10,000 members, the police listed sixteen other organizations. Unions and the Association of Civil Servants participated again alongside Berlin's fire brigade with 700 participants and the Socialist Working Class Youth with 2,500 people.Footnote 22
Before the event, a meeting between representatives of municipal offices, governmental ministries, and the police demonstrated how seriously the issue of a republican parade as a means of state representation was taken. Suggestions on having four separate marches, some deliberately leading through the working-class areas of Berlin to reach the people there, and then uniting them into one big parade in front of the Reichstag building were debated. The impression, everyone agreed, would be overwhelming.Footnote 23 Eventually, the plans were reversed: one big parade was held that at the end broke up into three to four smaller ones marching through different quarters of the capital.Footnote 24
Following the principles of republican planners, who wanted to organize parades with an inclusive character, mirroring the inclusiveness of the new democracy, liberal newspapers enthusiastically described Constitution Day parades as visual representations of the whole nation. In August 1928, the Berliner Tageblatt wrote, “with torches and music they walk in the same rhythmical step, young couples, children, lads with their girlfriends, men and women from all classes of society and from all professions … Who has watched this, has not only seen an organized parade, but the celebration of the whole nation and the confession of this nation to the republic.”Footnote 25 The Reichsbanner pointed out that it was the German people who were marching with the republican organization at its core.Footnote 26 In so doing, the organization reacted to antirepublican reproaches that claimed that the general public did not care about the young democracy and that republican parades only mobilized Reichsbanner members.Footnote 27 Films and photographs of these festivities, however, contradict this interpretation. Streets were packed with spectators, and children sometimes tried to accompany the parades by running alongside them. On the other hand, the interpretation of an inclusive event, resembling the republican nation consisting of equals, was not quite accurate, either. Films also depict a division between men marching, many of them in Reichsbanner uniforms, and spectators observing from the sidewalks.Footnote 28
Critical voices lamented that Constitution Day parades imitated a militaristic style. On the tenth anniversary of the republic in 1929, the left-wing journalist Carl von Ossietzky cautioned that the Weimar state was fooling itself when it lightheartedly equated big republican parades with deep-rooted democratic beliefs. He criticized, “What could have been a celebration of all freedom-loving citizens has turned into a parade day for republicans … its lack of original style recalls the day of the Reich foundation, only this time in the summer.”Footnote 29 The political right formulated similar criticism. Friedrich Everling from the German Nationalist People's Party stated that the Reichsbanner “had borrowed its uniforms from Hitler, its colors from democracy, possessed degenerated generals as leaders, and exercised a discipline resembling a new kind of militarism.”Footnote 30 In August 1932 the nationalist war-veteran organization Stahlhelm stated that even the “antimilitaristic” left paid tribute to the spirit of order and discipline by copying the appearance of the Stahlhelm. According to its journal, these actions were in vain because Stahlhelm marches characterized by discipline, order, and obedience reflected the principles of the nationalist war-veteran organization.Footnote 31 Despite the criticism, the Stahlhelm revealed a little uneasiness when recognizing that the political opponent was up to par.
With hindsight, Friedrich Stampfer, editor of the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, wrote about the importance of the Reichsbanner to visualize the republic, “The times in which the monarchists could call the new state a republic without republicans were over. Now the republicans were present; visible in their uniforms, they marched and played their drums and pipes … New republican conviction and old German preference for uniforms and militaristic style were combined to its own representative form.”Footnote 32 Discipline and militaristic appearance became important for the republican movement to match the competition on the far right and left from the late 1920s onward. Clear disciplinary guidelines for the participants of parades, however, had been commonplace since Imperial times. Polite and disciplined behavior was expected of Reichsbanner men anyway, but in particular when they were part of a parade. Smoking, for example, was tolerated on other occasions but not when the men marched through the city because “it destroys the overall impression.”Footnote 33 Nevertheless, it was obvious for most commentators in Weimar Germany that the Reichsbanner's “militaristic appeal” was far behind other organizations. A lack of “goose-stepping” characterized Reichsbanner parades and instead there was cheering and singing. Carl Misch rightly reminded his readers in September 1928 that the Communists did not criticize the Reichsbanner for its appearance, but for its support of Weimar democracy.Footnote 34
Public space did not remain uncontested in Weimar Germany. To turn the fleeting moment of an annually staged event into a longer-lasting impression, political organizations and parties linked urban space to their respective political narratives. For republicans the cities of Weimar, as site of the national assembly, and Frankfurt am Main, commemorating German democracy in 1848/49, could be easily integrated into a republican founding narrative.Footnote 35 When cities could not be explicitly linked to a republican cause, the Reichsbanner applied a tactic also used by other political organizations; it created a special importance. In 1926 the Constitution Day celebration of the Reichsbanner took place in Nuremberg. The city, situated in antirepublican Bavaria, was celebrated as the first Bavarian city to host a big republican event. With celebrations in Nuremberg, so the message went, the republican organization had successfully conquered enemy ground.Footnote 36 In reality, the impressive festivities there had less to do with having won over opponents than by gaining the support of Nuremberg's mayor Hermann Luppe.Footnote 37 The Reichsbanner depended on this municipal support for the staging of its festivities. Consequently, the political conviction of mayors and other members of the local elite was an important factor.Footnote 38 Despite the Reichsbanner success, the case of Nuremberg illustrates that the interpretation of urban space never remained unchallenged. Two years after the Reichsbanner's celebrations, the Nazis held their party rally there. In the Third Reich Nuremberg turned into “the city of the Nazi Party rallies.”
The population of the West German city of Koblenz, situated where the Mosel River flows into the Rhine, experienced the interpretative scope of urban space at two mass gatherings in 1930 and 1931. In early October 1930, after the foreign troops that had been stationed in Koblenz and the Rhineland since the end of World War I withdrew during the summer, the Stahlhelm held its annual meeting in the city. Marches, parades, and oaths of loyalty to the German nation characterized the day.Footnote 39 The Stahlhelm left no doubt concerning its nationalist message and stressed that Germany's former soldiers had gathered in Koblenz to defend the area.Footnote 40 According to the right-wing organization, the French could not be trusted. A nationalist newspaper described the appeal of the day: “The area that used to be full of foreign soldiers was now filled with the thunder of disciplined steps of former German soldiers and healthy youth.”Footnote 41 The title page of the Stahlhelm's journal, announcing the event, showed a soldier with a torch under the caption “Germany, we are on guard,” and next to it was a quotation from Nikolaus Becker's 1840s piece on the Rhine: “They shall not have the free German Rhine until its waves bury the last man's remains.”Footnote 42
A year later, in August 1931, the Reichsbanner staged its Constitution Day celebration in Koblenz and presented a more peaceful message. The organization's journal wrote, “When German men meet at the liberated Rhine to swear an oath of loyalty to the republic, we want to look westward. We are not seeking revenge but brotherhood, and we reach out for the hands of the French people.”Footnote 43 Republican newspapers stressed the different kind of political demonstration Koblenz had experienced this time.Footnote 44 Both organizations connected their events to the “liberation” of the Rhineland. But the Stahlhelm used the city on the Rhine for anti-French propaganda, while the Reichsbanner presented Koblenz as a symbol of European peace and future Franco-German friendship. Furthermore, they also presented very different interpretations of World War I's legacy. The Stahlhelm clearly stressed that there was still the need to defend German soil, while the Reichsbanner suggested that soldiers, whether on the French or the German side, aimed for peace and friendship.
Sports and Spectacles in Weimar Germany
Officials organizing Constitution Day celebrations realized quickly that the inclusion of sporting activities enhanced the day's appeal. One of the most prominent advocates of republican state representation and, indeed, the person responsible for giving cultural and artistic shape to Weimar democracy was the Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob. His small office was created by the republican state in 1920 and linked to the Reich Ministry of the Interior. The Reichskunstwart was involved in the creation of new state symbols, the erection of monuments, and the staging of celebrations.Footnote 45 Redslob recommended in April 1923 that in order to turn state celebrations into popular festivities, “The youth should celebrate Constitution Day with dances, singing, and sports competitions because this will help to root the commemoration of the republican constitution in their minds.” He suggested that celebrations should take place in all stadiums and sports fields of the country.Footnote 46
Indeed, many Berlin schools located in the same district joined together to stage sports competitions on Constitution Day. In August 1929, the police reported a sports festival of the schools in Berlin's working-class district Prenzlauer Berg with more than 10,000 participants. The schools there already traditionally celebrated Constitution Day celebrations at the common sports ground. Starting with 5,000 participants in 1926, the number had doubled in three years.Footnote 47 Sometimes, however, this strategy backfired. For republican festivities in August 1928, the Prussian state government had suggested that sporting activities as part of the celebrations could commemorate the 150th anniversary of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.Footnote 48 Jahn was admired as the founding father of German gymnastics and stood for the combination of German nationalism, sports, and youth in the nineteenth century. Antirepublican schoolteachers seized the opportunity and turned the gymnast Jahn into the sole focus of the day while neglecting to mention the Weimar Constitution. Newspapers brought these incidents to the attention of the school authorities.Footnote 49
Sporting activities also strongly influenced the political aesthetics of the time with a focus on masses, order, and bodies. In the summer of 1925 the Workers' Olympics were staged in Frankfurt. This international event was promoted as serving the reconciliation among the peoples in contrast to “the bourgeois Olympics” that allegedly “pit nations against each other.”Footnote 50 Frankfurt's municipal authorities supported the sports festival, and working-class publications gratefully praised Frankfurt's generosity, reminding its readers of the city's role as the “cradle of democracy” in 1848.Footnote 51
While the Workers' Olympics included the traditional components of any sports festival, there were also obvious differences from other sporting events. For example, the performance of the festive mass play “Struggle for the Earth,” written by Alfred Auerbach, a well-established member of Frankfurt's theater house, illustrates how attempts were made to offer more than sporting activities. The play was staged in Frankfurt's stadium before 50,000 people, with mass choirs and acting groups of Frankfurt's two theaters as well as Socialist youth organizations making up the cast.Footnote 52 A contemporary publication described that “This is the first short version of a modern play that, performed outdoors, speaks to the masses. Mass choirs bring to life the struggle of the masses.”Footnote 53
The play's content was reminiscent of left-wing narratives. Unlike the staging of spectacles in the late 1920s, which concentrated greatly on visual impressions, the focus of “Struggle for the Earth” was on its political message. Different roles were allocated to several choir groups, including “the Choir of the Powerful” and “the Choir of the Diplomats.” Two groups fought for dominance and power on earth: the powerful political and financial elites against the working-class masses. The powerful had miscalculated, however, and war broke out between the nations. After the war had destroyed everything, the youth was presented as new hope for the future. The play concluded with a call for unity among all those who wanted to help to shape the future. The play was concluded by Schiller's “Ode to Joy” with the audience joining in.Footnote 54 Thus, the mass play at the Workers' Olympics finished exactly with the same musical piece that was to be used at the festive play in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the Third Reich.Footnote 55
In addition to the play, the opening ceremony also made the political framework of the 1925 event clear. Accompanied by the music of the socialist anthem “The International,” athletes from several countries entered the stadium, which was filled with 45,000 spectators. The athletes carried red flags with the name of their countries.Footnote 56 After the athletes had assembled, official speeches were delivered by representatives of international working-class sports organizations, which stressed the principles of the Workers' Olympics, namely peace, solidarity, and workers' community.Footnote 57 Mass gymnastic exercises were also part of the opening ceremony. The performance was characterized by uniformity of dress, good posture, and synchronized movement.Footnote 58 A commemorative book described the gymnastic mass exercises in Frankfurt: “8,000 gymnasts in twelve columns marched into the stadium like powerful battalions of the proletariat behind a sea of red flags … well-trained harmonic bodies, only dressed with short black trousers, stood stiff like stone pillars or waved in the rhythm of the music. It was an unforgettable sight of health, life, and strength.”Footnote 59 To create such an impression, the gymnasts had to follow meticulously a blueprint that indicated where to stand, when to start, and how to position themselves on the stadium ground.Footnote 60
Gymnastic exercises illustrate a feature characteristic of mass events staged by the working class in general. Orderly masses came to represent the disciplined worker's body. The stress on clean clothing was part of this interpretation, which was designed to counteract bourgeois fears of dirt and filth.Footnote 61 A year after the Workers' Olympics, the nationalist Kampfspiele were staged in Cologne. In addition to sports competitions, the event also included mass exercises described similarly to the ones performed in Frankfurt: “2,000 gymnasts entered in twelve rows … the impression was incredible: a sea of men perfectly performing their exercises to the music.”Footnote 62 Clearly, the aesthetic appeal of orderly masses could be linked to several political factions.
Critical voices within the workers' sports movement requested that more attention be placed on spontaneity and rhythm rather than on the perfection of previously practiced exercises. Simultaneously performed mass exercises resembled drill and impeded personal liberation, so the criticism went.Footnote 63 From the mid-1920s onward, youth organizations of left-wing sports associations intensified their demands to replace traditional mass exercises with movements that shifted the focus from precision to rhythmic self-expression.Footnote 64 It took the workers' sports organizations until 1929, however, to put some of these ideas into practice.
Contemporary discourses in the Weimar years used the words community, masses, and rhythm for numerous fields. Gymnastic exercises as well as synchronized steps at parades have been described as rhythmical experiences. But many dancers and choreographers connected rhythm to continuous flowing movements. Parades and sports exercises, on the other hand, represented cadence due to their more static nature.Footnote 65 They were interpreted as dominating public space without inviting the involvement of others. Movement groups and mass choirs were believed to achieve a feeling of involvement because rhythm, as understood in dance theory, suggests a less rigid distinction between participants and spectators.Footnote 66 In contrast to the critical eye on sports, many theater directors and choreographers were interested in the spatial dimensions of the stadium. They believed that their stages and playhouses had become too small.Footnote 67
These concepts heavily influenced republican state representation. It was no coincidence that the mass spectacles commissioned by the Weimar state and performed at Constitution Day festivities in 1929 and 1930 were characterized by movement groups and mass choirs. The aesthetic appeal of trained bodies performing gymnastic exercises was replaced with a focus on choir and movement groups of schoolchildren and amateurs performing flowing movements. While nowadays mass plays are often associated with the political aesthetics of totalitarian regimes, dancers, choreographers, theater directors, and organizers of state representation attributed numerous political messages to the sense of community expressed in these plays.
To honor the tenth anniversary of the constitution in August 1929, parades, sports, and spectacles were brought together. For the first time, a sports stadium was used as the location for part of the official Constitution Day program commissioned by the republican state. The official ceremony, which took place in the parliament, was complemented by afternoon activities. The festivities in the stadium consisted of a mass movement play including large movement groups and mass choirs organized by Edwin Redslob. The play's director, Josef von Fielitz, had experience directing mass spectacles.Footnote 68 Involving the youth in the play was essential and deliberately emphasized.Footnote 69 The Vossische Zeitung enthusiastically reported that 11,000 schoolchildren participated in the mass play, although at the beginning only 7,000 had been envisaged. The enormous number of applications had led the organizers to increase the number of participants.Footnote 70 Redslob cooperated with the school authorities of the area Berlin-Brandenburg to communicate with schools and coordinate rehearsals.Footnote 71 The Reichskunstwart pointed out that a sense of community could be formed through the play and that it was important for the German people to achieve a joyful self-representation.Footnote 72
When the play was performed in the afternoon on Sunday, August 11, 1929, approximately 50,000 people came to see it in Berlin's Grunewald stadium. Its choir groups consisted of 7,500 schoolchildren and the movement groups of 3,500. Altogether, 12,000 people participated.Footnote 73 The play commenced with approximately 500 workmen entering the stadium. They attempted to connect ten golden poles to each other to represent the country's unity and shouted simultaneously, “Brother at the other side, listen. We are the people. We create a piece of work, the living Reich.” The men failed and called upon the German youth for help. The youth entered colorfully dressed and proceeded to connect the poles successfully, thus bringing the youth and the workers together. More young people entered, some dressed in black, some in red, and some in gold. They were placed so as to represent the black-red-gold flag on the stadium ground. Redslob described the impression this moment should achieve in his notes: “The carriers of the republican colors form a living flag, which takes possession of the stadium in swinging movements. The singers accompany these movements by waving their hands.” A children's choir sang “Freiheit, die ich meine,” while the “living flag” moved through the stadium. Sports groups entered, and the choir groups sang the popular song “Wann wir schreiten Seit' an Seit'.” Afterward the workmen reminded the youth of the importance of the day, and the youth swore an oath to the fatherland. In the end, the republican flag was raised and the national anthem played. Several planes carrying republican banners flew over the stadium.Footnote 74
Two crucial symbols expressing the authority of the republic—its flag and the national anthem—were placed at the end of the Constitution Day celebration in the Berlin stadium. In so doing, the Weimar Republic combined festive aesthetics with a political message suggesting that mass spectacles were a clear expression of democracy. In fact, the young people in the play who helped to create unity under the banner of the republic represented a positive symbol for the future.Footnote 75 The Vossische Zeitung wrote, “and now the whole youth represents the flag, a storm of colors organized first to represent flags of the German states, and then a new group in black-red-gold presents the banner. Sports, games, and dances change to festive oath and confession.”Footnote 76
Indeed, the symbolic meaning of the play is significant. Youth and workmen, the future and the foundation of the republic, were the main participants, and unity between them was the achieved goal. The singing of the popular song “Wann wir schreiten Seit' an Seit'” was a clear reference to the working class. Furthermore, the explicit display of the republican colors, made up by young people, suggested that the republic consisted of individuals who together formed the state. This play was among the first in Germany in which the state symbol was represented using people, a device the Nazis later incorporated into their own ceremonies by having the swastika represented in this way.Footnote 77 A photograph in the Reichsbanner journal Illustrierte Reichsbanner Zeitung in 1926 showed an American stadium in which 6,000 children formed the U.S. flag.Footnote 78 Clearly, the festive culture Edwin Redslob and Josef von Fielitz wanted to use to represent the republic had an international dimension.Footnote 79 In 1933 the spectacle The Romance of a People performed before 120,000 spectators in Chicago featured the presentation of the U.S. flag with silk banners.Footnote 80 The stated aim of creating a community that included both participants and spectators was, as theater historian Erika Fischer-Lichte states, “the promesse de Bonheur” of all mass spectacles in the interwar years.Footnote 81
In Weimar Germany many were impressed by the play staged for the republic.Footnote 82 The Reich Ministry of the Interior congratulated Edwin Redslob for “the new way of celebrating in the stadium.”Footnote 83 Inspired by this success, state officials envisaged a mass play linked to every annual Constitution Day celebration from 1929 onward. In practice, the republic staged two plays, both under the direction of the Reichskunstwart: one to commemorate its tenth anniversary and one to celebrate the withdrawal of troops from the Rhineland in August 1930. Advanced plans for a mass spectacle in 1931, focusing on the nineteenth-century Prussian reformer Freiherr vom Stein, were jeopardized by financial cuts.Footnote 84
The influences of theater, sports, and dance upon the 1929 play are obvious and can be located within a modern festive culture partly inspired by concepts of left-wing mass performances. Many dance choreographers in the 1920s, including the extraordinary Rudolf von Laban, experimented with mass amateur choirs calling for unity of dance, sound, and word.Footnote 85 Redslob knew and admired Rudolf von Laban and both men even had plans to work together.Footnote 86 The Reichskunstwart believed in a new festive culture that should reflect a democratic community. For a radio lecture shortly before Constitution Day in August 1929, Edwin Redslob formulated some of his principles regarding republican state representation. He pointed out that “One demands that the state be expressed in visual terms. But one does not demand this out of the feeling of the spectator who wants to be entertained but out of the feeling of the citizen who wants to be an active part of the state.”Footnote 87 The Reichskunstwart was convinced that the German population consisted of emancipated citizens who wanted to be involved in their state and its festive representation.
Redslob stressed the importance of community and togetherness; both factors, he believed, characterized the new state. Pompous parades that divided people into participants and spectators belonged to the time of the Kaiserreich. The Reichskunstwart stated, “the Constitution Day is a popular celebration that aims to overcome the sharp division between participants and audience. It has developed a form that represents the people's state. It is a commitment of all to the republican state.”Footnote 88 In another essay, the Reichskunstwart wrote that the former Imperial tradition of pompous self-representation had been replaced by a serious confession to state and people with the main aim of visualizing the people's community: “Dedicated people come together, display the banner, find a rhythm, and find a symbolic form.”Footnote 89 The Reichskunstwart believed that this was the essence of a new festive culture that had developed in the young republic.
Republican newspapers praised the 1929 Constitution Day celebration in Berlin as a true expression of popular festivity. Stressing the involvement of the youth as essential for the festive style of the republic, the journal Deutsche Republik wrote, “The Imperial State borrowed from the colorfulness of the military for its celebrations; the republican state asks, and this question honors the state, the young people to bring the brightness of their festivities to state celebrations.”Footnote 90 In fact, the Constitution Day festivities had been steered in an impressive and spectacular direction. Elements of left-wing festive culture were taken up and incorporated into a republican spectacle commissioned by the Weimar state. At the same time the spectacle remained inclusive. Unlike its Communist and Socialist predecessors, the mass play of August 1929 did not call for revolutionary change or represent enemies of the republic but stressed community and wholeness within an unambiguous republican setting.
Thingspiele and the Berlin Olympics in the Third Reich
Aesthetic forms used in the republic were continued, expanded, and perfected in the Nazi period. Institutionalized through the newly created Ministry of Propaganda, the resources and personnel the Nazi state allocated to festive representation far surpassed those of the republic. This did not mean “better” festivities per se, but provided a different organizational framework for matters of public representation and propaganda. Unlike the pluralistic Weimar democracy, the Nazi state did not allow for alternative or opposing views challenging its interpretative authority of the nation's symbolic landscape. The best-known mass events staged by the Nazis were the party rallies in Nuremberg. In contrast to the common modern perception, the Nazi Party rallies did not create aesthetically original features. Instead they combined and expanded, often on an unprecedented scale, well-known elements characteristic of political assemblies. Parades and—increasingly so—popular entertainment determined the days in Nuremberg, as the organizers quickly realized that entertaining activities sustained people's interest.Footnote 91 Nazi Party rallies provided a National Socialist interpretation of urban space as well as a demonstration of strength, community, and subordination. Essentially, the rallies remained characterized by the premodern meeting between the leader and his followers. The emphasis on Hitler walking through Nuremberg for people to see him as well as the time-consuming and exhausting parades were part of this concept.Footnote 92
Unlike National Socialist Party rallies, Nazi attempts to create their own mass theater, the Thingspiel, have long been considered a spectacular failure. In fact, the Thingspiel idea was rapidly abandoned after only a few years in the mid-1930s. The notion of involving large groups of people in mass spectacles performed outdoors in arenas especially designed for these events fascinated organizers of festivities in the early years of the Third Reich. While its links with ancient and Germanic performing traditions were stressed, the Thingspiel made use of many concepts characteristic of the period's public performance culture, namely the involvement of the masses, the choreography of bodies, as well as the community of participants and spectators. Preferred venues were open-air stages embedded into scenic landscape. Focusing exclusively on the Third Reich, the Thingspiel movement was a rather short-lived experiment.Footnote 93 But when interpreted as linked to debates on reformed performance spaces, mass choreographies, and the unity of different art forms, the Thingspiel comes to represent the concluding phase of concepts discussed much longer than merely from 1933 to 1936.Footnote 94 This is not to suggest that the Thingspiel movement was not extraordinary in particular with regard to the architectural design of its theater arenas.
From 1933 to 1935/36 the Thingspiel movement was strongly supported—financially and ideologically—by the propaganda ministry and institutionalized in the Reichsbund der deutschen Freilicht- und Volksschauspiele. As Otto Laubiger, the head of the Reichsbund, formulated in July 1933, “Our German playwrights need to be aware that we want new plays that express the rhythm of our time; the choral play—expressing the longing of our people—will blossom at our new people's stages.”Footnote 95 The Thingspiel tried linking alleged Germanic traditions to National Socialist festive practices. One of the main concerns was the creation of appropriate plays. This proved to be more difficult than anticipated as only very few plays were considered truly to express the ideas of the movement. In contrast to intense debates about the staging and performing of the Thingspiel, discussions on its architectural challenges remained limited. It was envisaged that within a few years the Thingspiel should have 400 places of performance, creating one stage in every area. In fact, only a small fraction of this number was actually built. While the selection of the first sixty-six Thingspiel arenas in 1934 reflected the attempt of an even spread throughout Germany, the locations were also chosen for their alleged historical importance and spectacular scenery.Footnote 96
Fading popularity and a lack of good-quality plays spelled an end to the Thingspiel and to similar spectacles. In May 1936 Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels restricted the use of mass choirs to Nazi Party rallies.Footnote 97 At the end of 1935, the propaganda ministry had already advised the press not to use the term Thing anymore.Footnote 98 Traditional plays—heroic tragedies as much as light comedies—performed conservatively on picture-frame stages were brought back to the German theater.Footnote 99
The Loreley Thingspiel stage in the small town of St. Goarshausen, close to Koblenz, exemplified a number of key aspects of the Nazi mass theater movement. Despite the scenic beauty of the place—on top of the Loreley rock spectacularly overlooking the Rhine—the open-air stage was only completed in 1939. By that time, the Thingspiel idea had long been abandoned. Instead of symbolizing the climax of a new National Socialist theater, the Loreley Thingspiel arena came to represent a different strand characteristic of Nazi propaganda from the mid-1930s onward: a stress on entertainment and tourism.
At the end of April 1934, a festive celebration was held to mark the laying of the foundation stone for the open-air arena on the Loreley rock.Footnote 100 Financial, organizational, and technical difficulties delayed its completion until five years later. The space for the open-air arena was created by blasting through 17,600 square meters of the Loreley rock.Footnote 101 In June 1939 the Loreley Thingspiel arena was inaugurated with a festive performance of Friedrich Schiller's “Wilhelm Tell.” Thus the newly created open-air stage relied on a German classic. The play was staged by the artistic director of Frankfurt's municipal theater Hans Meissner, whose cast consisted of not only actors from his theater house but also citizens of St. Goarshausen for mass scenes. This was praised as emotionally connecting the new stage to the people living in the area. Consequently, the press described the rehearsals of the play as inclusive and joyful festivals.Footnote 102 Asked about the staging of his play, Hans Meissner pointed out that he had made one fundamental change. At the end of the play, the actors reentered the stage with the character of Wilhelm Tell in the middle and again swore the famous Rütli oath. In Schiller's original version, these words were only spoken in Tell's absence. At the Loreley, a choir repeated them and, according to the newspapers, the audience rose and joined the oath.Footnote 103
Not everything went smoothly at the Tell performances on the Loreley rock during summer 1939. There was criticism of the play and its staging. Although the General Anzeiger praised the location of the Thingspiel stage, the newspaper noted slightly disapprovingly that the Loreley “festive arena” had opened with “a drama of the traditional theater.” But eventually, the paper continued, a poet would find “new words for this new festive culture.”Footnote 104 Furthermore, critical voices found that the play's staging had not solved the difficult task of integrating the natural environment. The fact that the actors referred to specific Swiss landmarks in the play's original setting made it difficult for the audience to connect the environment they saw with the play.Footnote 105 The eagerly anticipated combination of spectacular landscape and Nazi mass theater, so excitedly discussed in 1933 and 1934, had long lost its drive. The summer of 1939 saw five performances of Schiller's “Wilhelm Tell,” and the Nazi organization Strength through Joy offered inexpensive bus journeys to the area.Footnote 106 The Volksblatt wrote that 25,000 spectators had seen the Tell performances.Footnote 107 Approximately 5,000 spectators per performance in an arena that could accommodate 10,000 people was certainly not what had been hoped for.
One of the last nationally staged events in which festive spectacles still played an extraordinary role were the Olympic Games in 1936. Unquestionably, the games were an important success for the Nazi system to present an allegedly peaceful face of the Third Reich to the world. Its representational forms, however, were still very similar to sports festivities held in the 1920s.Footnote 108 Representatives already involved with state representation or mass spectacles in the Weimar years included the sports functionary Carl Diem, the president of the German Olympic Committee Theodor Lewald, the modern dance choreographer Mary Wigman, and the composer Carl Orff. They were not young, ambitious National Socialists but well-established bourgeois representatives in the fields of sports, administration, dance, and music. Edwin Redslob's former assistant Dr. Kurt Biebrach organized the art exhibition that accompanied the games.Footnote 109 A closer look at the festive play at the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics shows significant similarities to spectacles staged in the 1920s, in particular the ones organized by Edwin Redslob on behalf of the Weimar state.
Carl Diem wrote the play for the opening ceremony entitled Olympic Youth, and Dr. Hans Niedecken-Gebhard directed it. Niedecken-Gebhard was not an unknown director. He had also already worked in the 1920s, and, like so many at the time, was fascinated by the staging of mass spectacles with amateurs.Footnote 110 Diem was a high-ranking functionary of Germany's bourgeois sporting elite and an internationally recognized advocate of the Olympic sports movement.Footnote 111 His festive play for the Olympic Games was divided into four scenes. The first two showed games and dances of the youth, including a representation of the Olympic flag on the sports ground using children. Within the second scene the well-known modern dancer Gret Palucca performed a solo with dancing girls surrounding her. Approximately 5,700 children between eleven and eighteen years old took part in these two scenes. In the third scene several thousand boys carried the flags of the participating nations into the stadium, marching in festive procession around the tracks. A narrator stressed the games as a peaceful celebration in which the youth of all nations were to compete for the honor of their countries. In the fourth and last scene the youths were called upon to sacrifice their lives if the fatherland was in danger. A sword dance represented by the dancers Harald Kreutzberg and Werner Stammer and a group of sixty male dancers followed. After the two opponents in the sword dance died, Mary Wigman and her dancing group of eighty female dancers performed a dance of women mourning the dead. The ceremony ended on a more hopeful note with the piece “Ode to Joy” and with all participants of the play present on the stadium ground.Footnote 112 In total, more than 10,000 children participated, most of them from Berlin schools.
Performed in the evening, the play required the use of light, a medium the Nazis perfected as part of their festivities. The much-quoted “dome of light,” creating the impression of a roof of light above the stadium, ended the play. While often characterized by later commentators as a typical feature of manipulative Nazi propaganda, this spectacular use of light was described as strengthening the community of participants and spectators and was understood as an embodiment of the Olympic idea.Footnote 113 Indeed, the creation of a community through the application of light was not a Nazi invention. Theater directors, including Max Reinhardt, had used it to create a sense of community in their plays.Footnote 114
Outlining the main ideas of his play, Carl Diem stated, “The spectacle has to enable the audience to participate in it; the youth is surrounded by a festive community that frames and carries the play.” Diem stressed the play's friendly and peaceful meaning in which the scene of women mourning the dead was followed by the all-embracing “Ode to Joy,” asking for peace and understanding among all nations.Footnote 115 In fact, youth and national sacrifices were universally usable themes. The notion that the young, in particular, had to defend the country was widely accepted among most participating nations. By 1936 the most recent memories Germans had of national sacrifices were the war dead of World War I. Commemorating the country's dead in public ceremonies and rituals was commonplace and heavily practiced in Weimar and Nazi Germany.Footnote 116 But despite the play's roots in a Weimar tradition, the clearly gendered divisions in which scenes showing female and male groups alternated meant a shift from mass spectacles staged in the 1920s. The dance historian Yvonne Hardt draws attention to the fact that movement choirs as part of Nazi spectacles became more structured and were often divided into male and female groups, an aspect that had not been characteristic earlier.Footnote 117
The play's director Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard described the importance of correctly using the space in the stadium. He stated that the tempo and coordination of the participants were essential for the creation of images, which the audience should perceive as a whole.Footnote 118 Niedecken-Gebhard stressed that the stadium as a venue for festive plays required very careful staging. After all, the audience would judge any play on the general impression it made. Coordinating the dances of the girls in the first and second scene, the modern dance teachers Dorothee Günther and Maja Lex stated that they wanted to create “an organic and fluid movement circle” and by no means an impression of militaristic drill.Footnote 119 Discussions on the connotations of movements, as pointed out here by Günther and Lex, had dominated discourses on modern dance and theater for more than a decade before 1936. The staging of the play at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in 1936 showed many elements also applied in republican representation. After Edwin Redslob had seen the performance, he congratulated his friend Carl Diem on the well-staged and impressive ceremony. Diem replied that obviously many ideas for the spectacle were based on the celebrations the former Reichskunstwart had choreographed in the Weimar years. According to Diem, in particular the idea of a “living flag” had been inspired by Redslob's staging of the 1929 spectacle in the Berlin stadium.Footnote 120
Conclusion
The appeal of order and the promise of community characterized Germany in the 1920s and 1930s in numerous ways. Parades, mass spectacles, and gymnastic exercises fascinated many because large numbers of people were moving in an orderly and synchronized manner. The sociologist Siegfried Kracauer critically acknowledged the aesthetic pleasure the audience gained from watching ornamental mass movements in his 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament.” Using the Tiller Girls (a 1920s show-dancing group) as an example, Kracauer pointed out that the girls mattered only in their small contribution to the bigger picture.Footnote 121 But this appeal seemed to fade away in the mid-1930s, and the experimental search for new forms of representation was coming to an end. Innovative staging concepts were brought to a halt and replaced by the picture-frame stage, the reliance on classical plays, and the ever increasing stress on entertainment. In June 1936, Propaganda Minister Goebbels informed regional leaders who had responsibility for propaganda activities that he wished the number of Nazi festivities to be decreased and better coordinated for fear that the population would become indifferent to the really important events.Footnote 122
The Nazis realized that many had grown weary of constant political mobilization. Consequently, entertaining activities became a main focus of National Socialist festive culture even before the outbreak of World War II.Footnote 123 This is not to suggest that this strategy did not prove to be effective in linking the population to the Nazi state. Indeed, the National Socialists showed that the inclusive, spectacular, and representative forms tried out as part of visualizing the republic could be easily extended and reinterpreted to reflect the structure of their own political system. Despite continuities in festive representation, differences existed, too. The financial and organizational resources that the Nazi state made available for the staging of festivities were far greater than the resources deployed by the republic. Although the National Socialists did not invent the use of light for rallies and spectacles, they perfected it. Mass choirs and movement groups became more structured and organized along gender lines, while the rhetoric on movement choirs changed from integration and participation in Weimar Germany to subordination and duty in the Third Reich.
In particular, the National Socialists shifted the focus from innovative representative efforts to traditional forms of political choreography, best exemplified by the Nazi Party rallies with their seemingly endless parades and assemblies. Rather than inventing mass spectacles, the Nazi movement brought them under the state's control and eventually abandoned them.Footnote 124 A great deal of overlapping concepts, themes, styles, and ideas regarding forms of representation existed between the Weimar and Nazi state, but many of them did not outlive the mid-1930s. After the end of World War II, representative forms broadly categorized as “mass choreography of bodies” survived in limited form as ceremonial features at international sporting events.
