Hans Herbert Schweitzer

Hans Herbert Schweitzer , pseudonym : Mjölnir or Mjoelnir (born July 25, 1901 in Berlin , † September 15, 1980 in Landstuhl ), was a German graphic artist . He was one of the most famous cartoonists in the service of Nazi propaganda .

Hans Herbert Schweitzer (right) with Joseph Goebbels on a tour of the art exhibition of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Life and work

Youth and education

Schweitzer was born in 1901 as the illegitimate son of a doctor. After spending most of his childhood in the household of his maternal grandmother, he began to study at the “ State University for the Fine Arts ” in Berlin in 1918 or 1919 and probably graduated in 1923.

Worked for the Nazi press before 1933

1943

Schweitzer joined the NSDAP in 1926 ( membership number 27.148). According to Goebbels' book about the Berlin Nazi group, he was one of the first 30 party members in the capital.

In 1927 Schweitzer was one of the founders of the Nazi magazine The Attack . As a result, he regularly received orders as a draftsman of illustrations for the Nazi press, the Völkischer Beobachter , the workers' newspaper , the attack and the Nazi satirical newspaper Die Brennessel . In addition, he took part in NSDAP billposting campaigns: for example, he provided propagandistic image material on the NSDAP and its goals, leaders and ideas that were used in Nazi periodicals, advertising posters, leaflets, etc. The focus of his work was in the field of caricature. Before 1933, for example, he ridiculed the domestic political opponents of the National Socialists and from the late 1930s on their foreign policy opponents in order to expose them to ridicule.

One of Schweitzer's main clients during the period before 1933, which the National Socialists referred to as the " fighting time ", was the later Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels , with whom he was also friendly according to the Goebbels diaries. Goebbels repeatedly called Schweitzer a “god-gifted” artist and later acknowledged that Schweitzer, through his caricature attacks on the Weimar Republic and its representatives, “helped us significantly during the time of struggle to kill a system through ridicule”.

The pseudonym Mjölnir , based on the hammer of the god Thor in Norse mythology, was used by Schweitzer in 1926, on the one hand to show his commitment to the Norse or " Aryan " racial ideology and, on the other hand, to express his artistic self-image The underlying idea was to indirectly “smash” the opponents of National Socialism with his effective propaganda drawings, just as the bellicose Thor smashed his opponents with his hammer Mjölnir. He also needed a pseudonym, since he was also working under his real name as a cartoonist for Alfred Hugenberg's night edition , a national-conservative daily newspaper in Berlin.

Nazi period (1933-1945)

The motifs of the postage stamps designed by Schweitzer for the Nazi Party Rally in 1934 and Heroes' Remembrance Day in 1935.

With the »seizure of power« in January 1933, Schweitzer advanced - not least because of his close friendship with Joseph Goebbels - to an important cultural functionary of the Nazi regime. In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed Schweitzer “draftsman of the movement”. In 1934 and 1935 two stamps each with a motif designed by him were published by the Reichspost . In 1935 Schweitzer was appointed Reich Commissioner for Artistic Design and chairman of the "Exhibition Management Berlin eV". He had his official seat in the Berlin "Haus der Kunst" or the "Berliner Kunsthalle", of which he was artistic director; National Socialist art was presented in these houses. The obverse of the German Reich coins with the Nazi sovereign eagle, which have appeared since 1936, were designed by Hans Herbert Schweitzer. In 1936 he became a member of the Presidential Council of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts , and on January 30, 1937, he was appointed professor. In 1940 he became chairman of the “Committee for the Appraisal of Inferior Art Products”. In all of these positions, he was jointly responsible for the confiscation and ostracism of so-called degenerate art . On July 5, 1937 he was instrumental in the confiscation of paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which were later defamed in the Munich exhibition Degenerate Art .

The Wroclaw coat of arms from 1938 designed by Schweitzer .

During the Second World War , Schweitzer, who was also chairman of the Reich Committee of Press Illustrators, was able to build on the successes of the period before 1933 in some cases . In 1942 he became SS- Oberführer (SS-Nr. 251.792) and from 1943 worked as a draftsman for a propaganda company . At the exhibition German Artists and the SS in Breslau in 1944 , he exhibited the picture Waffen-SS Champion against the World Enemy . At the end of the war in May 1945 he followed the so-called Rattenlinie Nord and settled twenty kilometers southeast of the city of Flensburg, in the village of Hollmühle .

post war period

In the postwar period Schweitzer 1948, as part of the denazification by a denazification process in mountain village to a fine of 500 DM convicted. The Schweitzer and Goebbels in 1928 in Munich Franz Eher Verlag published book Isidor. A picture of the times full of laughter and hatred , for which Schweitzer had made anti-Semitic caricatures of Goebbels' opponent Bernhard Weiss , was included in the list of literature to be sorted out in the Soviet Zone .

As an illustrator , Schweitzer remained largely unsuccessful in the Federal Republic - where he was widely boycotted as "Goebbels' illustrator". However, he worked as a poster designer for the Federal Press Office and as a draftsman in right-wing extremist newspapers.

literature

• Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .
• Carl-Eric Linsler: Mjölnir - draftsman of the National Socialism. In: Handbook of Antisemitism. Anti-Semitism in Past and Present, Vol. 7: Literature, Film, Theater and Art. Edited by Wolfgang Benz , Berlin 2015, pp. 313–316.
• Gerhard Paul : The stab in the back. A key picture of the National Socialist politics of remembrance , in: Gerhard Paul (Ed.): The Century of Pictures. Picture atlas . Volume 1. 1900 to 1949 . Göttingen: V&R, 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-30011-4 , pp. 300-307
• Birgit Witamwas: Hans Schweitzer, the draftsman of "Kampfzeit". In: Same: Glued Nazi Propaganda. Seduction and manipulation through the poster, Berlin 2016, pp. 57–75, ISBN 978-3-11-043808-6 .
• Mario Zeck: Hans Schweitzer. In: The same: Das Schwarze Korps: History and shape of the organ of the Reichsführung SS, Tübingen 2002, pp. 75–78.

Web links

Commons : Hans Schweitzer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Hans Herbert Schweitzer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Wolf Oschlies : Schweitzer-Mjölnir, Hans (1901–1980). Thor's hammer in Goebbels' service - "draftsman of movement". In: The future needs memories
• Hans Schweitzer. "Mjölnir". In: German graphic designers during the Hitler period. Biographical and bibliographical references by Gerald Cinamon (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Joseph Goebbels' diaries, edited by Elke Fröhlich , Part I, Vol. 1 / II, Munich 2005, p. 166, entry from January 1, 1927.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 560.
3. ↑ The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Part I, Vol. 8, Munich 1998, p. 274, entry from August 16, 1940.
4. ^ Claudia Molnar: From the bourgeois villa to the NS art gallery. The Berlin Hardenbergstrasse 21 - 23, Norderstedt 2018, ISBN 978-3-7481-8039-5 , p. 35 ff.
5. ^ Rainer Wohlfeil : Money . In: Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke , Hendrik Ziegler (eds.): Handbook of political iconography . tape 1 . CH Beck oHG, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-57765-9 , p. 398 .
6. ^ Gerhard Paul : Zeitllauf: Flensburg comrades. In: Die Zeit , from September 8, 2013, accessed on October 23, 2019.
7. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone, list of literature to be sorted out 1948.