PhD student publishes on poetry in the Third Reich

Stefanie Hundehege, a PhD student in the Department of German, supervised by Dr Deborah Holmes, has just published a chapter in an anthology about writers in the Third Reich.

The chapter is published as part of the volume Dichter für das Dritte Reich Band 3 [Poets Writing for the Third Reich Volume 3] (Aisthesis, 2015).

The article, entitled ‘Baldur von Schirach – der “Sänger der Bewegung”’ [‘Baldur von Schirach – The “Singer of the Movement”’], highlights Baldur von Schirach’s impact as head of the Hitler Youth, the Reich’s Governor of Vienna and as a self-proclaimed poetic authority on literature and culture during and before the Third Reich.

Schirach, who was an early follower of the National Socialist movement and later a high-ranking party member, first became active as a writer as a student in Munich in the late 1920s. He produced a great number of poems, which he devoted to the service of the National Socialist party and its leader. Previous studies on Schirach focused almost exclusively on his political role in the Third Reich. By focusing on a literary and ideological analysis of his main poetry anthology, Die Fahne der Verfolgten [The Flag of the Persecuted] (1931), Stefanie’s chapter is an attempt to place him as writer in the National Socialist movement and focus on his cultural and ideological contribution to the establishment and stabilisation of the Nazi dictatorship.

The chapter was published in cooperation with the German Institute of the University of Osnabrück as part of the publisher Aisthesis’s research series on biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology in the Third Reich.

For more information on the book, please see the publisher’s page (in German) here: www.aisthesis.de/titel/9783849810795.htm