When Josef Goebbels seized control over artistic production in 1933, most of Germany's finest authors fled or stopped writing. But scholars have had the unfortunate reflex to assume that the remaining active ones—those who wrote positively about war, glorified German superiority, slandered Jews and communists, or, worst of all, had commercial success in an era of political and cultural repression—were abject opportunists. As this study of six authors who published during the Third Reich shows, many of the remaining poets and novelists were in fact genuinely popular before 1933 and did not need the Nazi Party to sell their books after 1933. The title Hitler's War Poets is in this regard somewhat misleading. Except for Hans Zöberlein, the other five authors—Rudolf Binding, Josef Magnus Wehner, Edwin Erich Dwinger, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller, and Kurt Eggers—did not have personal, financial, or direct political connections to Hitler. (I should add that two published almost no poems, and the fame of five was due to their prose.) Four of them also had a falling out at some time or another with the Nazi Party. Nevertheless, through their well-liked books, they justified Hitler's rule and spread Nazi worldviews.

The book devotes a chapter to each author, and this organization is perhaps due to the challenge of generalizing about their works as a whole. With the exception that they all hated the Versailles Treaty, these authors had a wide range of opinions on war, nationalism, religion, and anti-Semitism, a gamut of views that characterized the variety and incoherence in Nazi ideology itself. But the book's structure might lead the reader to overlook an important conclusion: the more extreme the position an author had on these subjects, the longer he was permitted to write. This development mirrored the progressive radicalization of racial policy during the Third Reich. The book suggests a corollary to the axiom that in order to win Nazi leaders' favor, one had to plot more violent policies: in order to publish, one had to vilify Jews and glorify war more and more vigorously.

As Nazi Germany developed, moderate positions on war, religion, and anti-Semitism sabotaged an author's career. Rudolf Binding, for example, was an icon of the radical right during the Weimar Republic because his prose and poetry honored fallen soldiers with grace. He became one of the most popular speakers at commemorations of the dead. But as a realist about war, he came under increasing attack after 1933 by party leaders and rank-and-file members for his refusal to adorn his commemorations with nationalist language and heroic imagery. He was blacklisted by Goebbels in 1936. Josef Magnus Wehner's novels Seven at Verdun (1930), which won the Munich Prize for Literature and sold more than one million copies, and City and Fortress Belgrade (1936) suggested that the souls of soldiers entered into a Christian fraternity and that the Reich was spiritually reborn through war. The Propaganda Ministry censored many of his books and manuscripts after 1939, however, because they had these Christian themes, and the later ones also lacked the language of the heroic death. By contrast, the most enduring writers of the six—Kurt Eggers and Hans Zöberlein—were grotesquely anti-Semitic and radically celebratory of war. In Birth of the Millennium (1936), Eggers advanced Hitler's theory from Mein Kampf about a dualism in history between the stronger Aryans and the weaker Jews, who he alleged corrupted the former's blood. Zöberlein's novels glorified the heroic death for the fatherland, and his characters were joyful, brave, ferocious soldiers for whom war was a Dionysian ecstasy. Hitler wrote an introduction to Zöberlein's best seller To Believe in Germany (1931), and Zöberlein's radicalism helped win him the SA Cultural Prize in 1938. Eggers wrote until he was killed on the eastern front in September 1943, Zöberlein until the end of the war.

Jay Baird suggests that though these writers put forth a repulsive ideology, they could nonetheless be talented. Yet his fondness for some of their books perhaps led to long plot summaries in lieu of analysis. To be fair, the thirteen-page summary of Wehner's enthralling trilogy about captivity and adventures in Russia during and after World War I moved me to buy the books. But this plot summary and the twenty-page biographical section on Kurt Eggers, taken almost wholly from his diary, would have been better either shortened or accompanied by evaluation that a reader could not get from the primary sources alone. Baird excels in detailing the reception of these writers' works, but more contextualization and comparison—war literature has, after all, been a staple of European literature since the Iliad—would have been useful. Still, by shedding light on these forgotten authors, this book makes a major contribution to scholarship on literature during the Third Reich. It shows that strands of National Socialist ideology were disseminated without the Propaganda Ministry and, though it never explicitly states so, suggests that the books available for the reading public in Nazi Germany were increasingly radical in their violence and anti-Semitism.