Nervous Nazis: War Neurosis, National Socialism and the Memory of the First World War (original) (raw)

War and Society, 2003

Abstract

When it appeared in German cinemas in 1930, the film version of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front presented an image of German soldiers in war that shocked civilians and outraged many veterans, particularly those organised in rightwing paramilitary and veterans' organisations. Thousands of men organised by Berlin's Nazi leader Josef Goebbels and the paramilitary Stahlhelm veterans' organisation protested outside Berlin cinemas and disrupted screenings.! Audiences were shocked by the film's depiction of German soldiers breaking down under stress. The newspaper Vossische Zeitung praised the film's accurate representation of combat and asserted that traurnatised soldiers and civilians were finally ready to discuss the war: 'Immediately after the defeat, people's nerves were worn down. In the ten years since, they have relaxed again, and this allows an objective review of the widespread trauma of the war'.2 Stahlhelm member Hans Grote shot back: 'The nerves of front soldiers remained like steel ... (Remarque] passes over the many unforgettable happy hours of the war at the front', and he suggested that Remarque's work reflected 'the war experience of the weak' and was a figment of the pacifist imagination.3 Ministry of the Interior official and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche/ who

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