Goebbels And Der Angriff by Russel Lemmons;

Author:Russel Lemmons; [Lemmons, Russel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813182858
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Appeals to the Proletariat

Berlin was a working-class city. Of its total population of about four million in 1922, around 956,000 (24 percent) were workers. There were around 25,000 businesses employing ten or more people, the German capital being a center of the metal, chemical, and clothing industries. Berlin was the most industrialized city on the European continent and the fourth most industrialized urban center in the world (trailing only London, New York, and Chicago).1

Because of the working-class origins of so much of Berlin’s population, the two proletarian parties dominated politics in the city. During the period 1924-1933, the KPD and SPD together received anywhere from 41 to 57.6 percent of the vote in Reichstag elections. Support remained constant at over 54.3 percent after the 20 May 1928 Reichstag election. The most the Nazis ever polled was 28.6 percent in July 1932. Although these results belie Goebbels’s claims to have “conquered” Berlin, they do mark a significant improvement over the 1.5 percent polled in May 1928.2

The social and political composition of Berlin’s population presented serious difficulties to the editors of Der Angriff. Even after the party’s supposed change of course in 1928—away from appeals to the proletariat in favor of attracting peasant support—the paper continued its mission to Berlin’s working classes. Goebbels and his editors simply had no choice. If they ceased to appeal to the proletariat, they would be neglecting a significant group. This shows that the Nazi party had not given up completely on Germany’s workers.

Attempts to win working-class support also call into question claims that National Socialism was ultimately an anti-modernist movement. The proletariat, after all, is the most modern of social classes. Further, as was shown in chapter two, circumstantial evidence implies that a significant number of Der Angriff’s readers were workers. Yet criticism of historians who approach Nazism as an antimodernist movement can be countered by the fact that, as evidence culled from Der Angriff will show, the Nazis tried to attract the support of workers with appeals to tradition.3

On the other hand, many of the propaganda techniques employed by Der Angriff, which were derivative of KPD and SPD methods, were modern in origin. Among these was the “proletarian novel,” which the working-class parties had been publishing for years. From the inception of the paper—they only became a regular feature after the Berlin organ became a daily—the staff of Der Angriff made occasional use of serialized proletarian novels to emphasize Nazism’s affinity for causes affecting Berlin’s working classes. These stories graphically portrayed life in the proletarian districts of the German capital and suggested a cure for the ills that plagued the city’s streets. The serials often recounted the conversion of the main character to National Socialism, indicating the path the reader should take to secure Germany’s redemption.4

Among the serials to appear in the first year of Der Angriff’s publication was “Hans Sturm’s [Storm’s] Awakening” by Otto Baugert. It is the story of a mechanic who becomes a Nazi after attending a rally in Berlin. The first

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