Nietzel / Domeier »Und morgen die ganze Welt«

Nationalsozialismus und internationale Öffentlichkeit
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-593-45652-2
Verlag: Campus Verlag GmbH
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Deutsch, 406 Seiten

Das »Dritte Reich« war kein abgeschotteter Propagandastaat, sondern intensiv in eine internationale Medienöffentlichkeit eingebunden. Der Nationalsozialismus wurde global wahrgenommen und debattiert; NS-Deutschland versuchte seinerseits weltweit, sein Ansehen zu erhöhen und andere Gesellschaften zu beeinflussen. Hierzu nutzte es nicht nur Propaganda und Massenmedien, sondern auch Formen der Kulturdiplomatie. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes beleuchten die Geschichte des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands aus einer transnationalen und globalgeschichtlichen Perspektive und verbinden dies mit neueren Ansätzen der Medien- und Kommunikationsgeschichte. Sie zielen nicht zuletzt darauf, der aktuellen Diskussion um Propaganda, Informationskriege und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit diktatorischer Systeme eine historische Tiefendimension zu verleihen. Mit der Frage, wie sich eine Diktatur international darstellte und wahrnahm, wie ein brutaler Eroberungs- und Vernichtungskrieg in der globalen Öffentlichkeit thematisiert und beurteilt wurde, besitzt das Buch auch eine gegenwartspolitische Relevanz.

Benno Nietzel, PD Dr. phil., ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder und Privatdozent an der Universität Bielefeld. Norman Domeier, PD Dr. phil., ist DAAD-Gastprofessor an der Karls-Universität Prag und Privatdozent an der Universität Stuttgart.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nietzel, Benno

Domeier, Norman

Leseproben

›To Watch a Revolution at First Hand‹ – U.S. Exchange Students in the Third Reich, 1933-1934
Elisabeth Piller On the evening of 24 November 1934, a group of American students and recent alumni of California universities gathered to listen to a radio broadcast of that year’s »big game«, held between the University of California and Stanford University football teams. A photograph taken in the early morning hours shows young faces beaming with exuberance, flashing broad smiles, waving University of California and Stanford pennants, and holding cigarettes and wine glasses into the camera, as if to underline the great time they were having. While similar scenes must have played out all over California, the picture was not taken on the Pacific Coast, or even in the United States. It was taken in Nazi Berlin. Figure 1: German and American Students celebrate the ›big game‹ between California teams in Nazi Berlin, 1934. Source: Rockefeller Archive Center, IIE, RG4, FA#1288, Box 35/286; Courtesy of Rockefeller Archive Center. This startling image of American students in 1934 Berlin raises a number of questions: What were these American students doing in Nazi Germany in the first place? And, more importantly, what did they think of their time there? The first of these questions is fairly easy to answer. The young people in the photograph were part of the American German Student Exchange, a transatlantic student exchange program founded in the early 1920s. After the First World War, internationally minded groups on both sides of the Atlantic had sought to restore pre-war academic ties. During the nineteenth century, thousands of American students had flocked to German universities in search of higher education and academic prestige, but wartime hostilities had eroded those connections.65 In 1924, the New York-based Institute of International Education (IIE; founded in 1919) and the newly established German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD; founded in 1923 in Heidelberg and moved to Berlin in 1925) began to develop a student exchange program that would rekindle academic contacts and overcome wartime antagonisms by sending students across the Atlantic. The American German Student Exchange soon grew into one of the largest exchange programs of the interwar period, ultimately exchanging more than a thousand students between 1923 and 1940. As these dates suggest, the student exchange did not falter in 1933. Although there were many in the United States who called for an end to student exchange with Nazi Germany, there was also a manifest interest on both sides in maintaining it: for Germany, cultural exchange was an excellent way to project a sense of »normality« about the German situation to an international audience and to cultivate the sympathies of an elite group of young Americans.66 In the summer of 1933, the Nazified DAAD was quick to assure the Institute of International Education that American students would be perfectly safe and particularly welcome in Nazi Germany.67 The Institute of International Education, for its part, saw the continuation of the exchange as a way to broaden the minds of young Germans, who were otherwise closed off from the wider world. Institutional survival also played a role. A general policy of severing ties with autocratic countries would have doomed many of the IIE’s existing exchange programs with Europe. Although exchange with Nazi Germany was always controversial (and many U.S. universities ended their fellowships for German students after 1933)68, the IIE retained the hope that U.S. college life would help democratize German students.69 The exchanges continued until the Second World War finally made them impossible. From 1933 to 1940, the IIE sent about 350 carefully selected U.S. students to Nazi Germany, including the sports fans pictured above. The following chapter explores the 1932/33 and 1933/34 cohorts of American exchange students and discusses their impressions of Nazi Germany, particularly German university life. The chapter is based on a unique set of primary sources: the biannual reports that American exchange students in Germany submitted to the Institute of International Education. These reports had been a routine feature of the exchange since the 1920s, but in April 1933 the IIE – under pressure to end student exchanges with Germany – requested a special report, asking students to share their observations of Nazi Germany. In light of the increasing Nazification of German higher education and public life, the student reports took on a new urgency. For historians, these reports, which have only recently become available at the Rockefeller Archive Center, provide a remarkably vivid window into (academic) life in Nazi Germany, which is why this chapter contains an unusually large number of direct quotations. These student reports are by no means the only available American impressions of Nazi Germany. Historians have long studied U.S. diplomats in Germany, with U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd and his family receiving the lion’s share of attention.70 American news correspondents in Berlin, have also attracted increasing scholarly interest. They often had special insight into German politics and society because they tended to live in Berlin for long periods of time (some of them had been in Germany since the First World War). A few studies have also focused on international tourists’ impressions of Germany, including those of British and American visitors.71 As these studies have shown, U.S. reactions to Hitlers rise to power were in many ways much more ambiguous than we might imagine today. Americans long debated the Nazi regime and, while they were often appalled by Nazi repression, they were unsure what it might mean for American-German relations.72 While diplomats and correspondents often penned prescient and critical accounts, tourists, in particular, tended to offer more benign impressions of Germany in the 1930s.73 Visitors to the Third Reich, as Kristin Semmens has argued, were crucial to creating an international image of »normality« and a relative continuity of life in Nazi Germany. This raises the question of what American students – less trained than correspondents and diplomats, but much more familiar with Germany than tourists – thought about Nazi Germany. In fact, students have received only limited scholarly attention.74 This is partly due to a lack of sources. Unlike diplomats and news correspondents who left behind published diaries, memoirs, and personal papers, students – at least at first sight – have left few of these behind.75 At the same time, student observations of the »Third Reich« seem particularly relevant for two reasons: First, universities and academic life have long played a key role in shaping the global image of Germany as a highly cultured and learned nation.76 The Nazis, too, were eager to capitalize on the prestige associated with German institutions of higher education, and used occasions such as the 550-year anniversary of the University of Heidelberg in 1936 to link German academic standing to Nazi politics.77 Second, the academic public was an important subset of the American public. The Institute of International Education had close ties to U.S. universities and opinion-shaping organizations such as the Foreign Policy Association. Edward R. Murrow, the Institute’s young assistant director in the early 1930s, would become a famous CBS broadcaster and war correspondent, hinting at the intertwined worlds of academia and journalism.78 American exchange students were also perceived – by Germans as well as Americans – as...