Nordic society

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The house at Breite Straße 50, built in 1821 by JC Lillie around 1900, was the seat of the Nordic Society from 1926 until it was destroyed in 1942

The Nordic Society was founded in 1921 in Lübeck and based there, initially dedicated to promoting economic and cultural relations between Lübeck and the countries of the north of Europe. After the Nazis took power in 1933, she was " brought into line " and transformed into a Nazi propaganda tool. At the center of their national and racist ideology was the idea that the “Nordic race” manifested the Germanic-German cultural superiority.

Founded and worked until 1933

In the years after the German-Nordic Trade and Industry Exhibition in Lübeck in 1896, various plans arose to improve the cultural and economic relations between (North) Germany and Scandinavia . However, the basic idea was only taken up again after the First World War .

After the war, senator George Kalkbrenner entrusted with Lübeck's relations to other countries , especially in the countries of the North to re- establish . In 1921 he founded the Nordic Society with Erich Wallroth and other representatives of Lübeck's politics and economy and took over its management.

Nordic Week 1921

Since the Nordic Week 1921 (September 1-11, 1921) his efforts have been successful.

Poster for the Nordic Week 1921
Alfred Mahlau , 1921
Print,
97.7 cm × 63.5 cm
Busch-Reisinger Museum ; Cambridge, Massachusetts

linked image
(please note copyrights )

The poster for this event, designed by the commercial artist Alfred Mahlau , was extremely controversial. Mahlau had arranged a multitude of stylized fishing trawls with red and black masts around a red Duckdalben . The poster was referred to in the press as a “bloody porcupine”, while the Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob described it as “one of the best-resolved posters that has been found recently”. Mahlaus style shaped the city advertising Lübeck well into the 1960s.

The Nordic Week 1921 consisted of a series of events with which the Hanseatic city wanted to free itself from its isolation in a peripheral location and to remember and reconnect with its centrality in the Baltic Sea region. The local handicrafts and the Lübeck industry presented themselves in a fair in front of the Holsten Gate . In the Katharinenkirche as a museum church " Emil Nolde's religious pictures" were shown, supplemented by religious sculptures in the main nave of the church. An exhibition on German and Nordic architects was shown in the lower choir of the church and documents, seals and incunabula from the company's own holdings in the upper choir . The newly opened Behnhaus showed the century exhibition of Lübeck art from the beginning of the 19th century to the present day and the Schabbelhaus art from Scandinavia. The program was supplemented by music events and concerts as well as numerous lectures. Thomas Mann spoke about Goethe and Tolstoj , the art historian Johnny Roosval about relations between Lübeck art and Scandinavia . In the field of performing arts, Hans Holtorf gave the dance of death , the singer Grete Stückgold gave a recital and Mary Wigman gave a dance recital. The Stadttheater performed Der Schatzgräber by Franz Schreker and Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg .

Exhibition of Icelandic Art 1928

In 1928 the society showed its first major exhibition of Icelandic art in Lübeck, Kiel, Hamburg and Berlin, which was first organized in Copenhagen in 1927 by Georg Gretor and for which he wrote a catalog.


Exhibition Nordic Caricature 1930

In 1930 there was an exhibition Nordic Caricature, for which Fred J. Domes published a portfolio with works by 18 participating artists on behalf of the company, 50 of which were numbered copies on handmade paper.

International Baltic Sea Year 1931

Emil Stumpp : Participant in the Nordic-German Writers' Conference (1931)

In 1931 the Nordic Society hosted the International Baltic Sea Year with a series of events.

It all started with a Baltic Sea year tour of the airship LZ 127 from May 12th to 15th, 1931. 23,000 people witnessed the landing of the airship on May 14th, 1931 on the Priwall .

Hans Henny Jahnn was commissioned in 1930 to write a festival. Together with Werner Helwig, he created the drama New Lübeck Dance of Death . Influential Lübeck citizens, however, prevented the planned premiere because they found the work too pessimistic and unchristian. The Berlin critic Herbert Ihering stood up for Jahnn and wrote in a letter to the Nordic Society that Lübeck had "missed the opportunity to add a Nordic counterpart to the Salzburger Jedermann every year". The play, which had already been announced in many newspapers as the highlight of the Baltic Sea year, was now forgotten until it was reprinted by Rowohlt in 1954 with a cover photo by Alfred Mahlau together with the music of the Danish composer Yngve Jan Trede April 1954 saw its first performance at the Cologne theater .

At the turn of the month of August / September 1931, the Nordic Society organized the Nordic-German Writers' Conference in Lübeck as part of the Baltic Sea Year together with the PEN Club .

Synchronization

Breite Straße 50 (left) with the inscription House of the Nordic Society and coat of arms designed by Alfred Mahlau

Originally politically not bound, was the Nordic company that "had had no more than local significance" until then, from the summer of 1933 into line and in June 1934 the Foreign Affairs Office of the NSDAP assumed (APA). The support from the National Socialists led to a considerable expansion of their activities. In addition to solstice celebrations and other events, the annual Reich meetings of the Nordic Society, which were held annually from 1934 to 1939, served to spread their ideology and cultural propaganda for National Socialist Germany . In addition to the headquarters, the Reichkontor in Lübeck, there were last 43 (coinciding with the districts of the NSDAP) throughout the Reich. There were also liaison lines in the capitals of the Nordic countries.

On June 2, 1934, Hinrich Lohse , Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Schleswig-Holstein, took over the chairmanship of the society, a position he held until 1945. The APA's liaison to the Nordic Society was Rosenberg's private secretary Thilo von Trotha until 1938 . In addition to Lohse and von Trotha, Heinrich Himmler , Alfred Rosenberg and Walther Darré also belonged to the “great council” of the company .

An APA activity report written by Rosenberg in October 1935 states, among other things:

“In terms of trade policy , in my opinion, far more sins of omission have been committed and so the APA has deliberately limited itself to its cultural-political tasks. For this purpose, the Nordic Society expanded, what used to be a small society has become a crucial intermediary for all German-Scandinavian relations in these 2 years of support from the APA . Its director (Lohse) is determined by the APA, the counting houses in all districts are led by the respective Gauleiter. Corresponding agreements have been made with economic groups and other organizations and branches of the party that have relations with Scandinavia , so that almost all traffic between Germany and Scandinavia is now handled by Nordic society. "

Reich Managing Director Ernst Timm has been with the company since the very beginning. In 1938, he had to resign from this position and was replaced by Hans-Jürgen Krüger, the previous head of organization. The nominal president was the mayor of Lübeck, Otto-Heinrich Drechsler . The artistic advisor was Alfred Mahlau , the cultural department was initially headed by Alfred J. Domes , later by Heinrich Jessen.

In 1936 the Nordic Society merged with the Nordic Ring , an organization that had been founded ten years earlier by the Ministerialrat Hanno Konopacki-Konopath and which was primarily dedicated to the dissemination of Hans FK Günther's racial doctrine .

activities

The company had three main goals:

  1. Close relations between Germany and the north, based on a "Nordic idea".
  2. Promotion of this "Nordic idea" in Germany.
  3. All “Nordic” -oriented efforts should be centered in the Nordic society.

For this purpose, on the one hand, the ideology of a superior "Nordic race" should be spread in Germany, on the other hand the Nordic countries ( Scandinavia and Finland ) should be won over to the National Socialist ideology.

The most important company-owned publication was the monthly Der Norden . With the "Nordic Ring" in 1936, its monthly Rasse was also created. Nordic Movement Monthly . The Nordic Society also published books such as: B. Dialogue between the peoples: Germany and the North and the Nordland Primer .

Relations with the Nordic countries were cultivated, among other things, through invitations and lectures by authors who were able to use the company's former Possehl villa in Travemünde as the “German-Nordic Writer's House” for study visits . In addition, the Nordic Society organized propaganda receptions, concerts and exhibitions and participated in the implementation of the German trips to the north .

However, these efforts met with only a minority in the Nordic countries. The disappointment about their relative unsuccessfulness becomes clear in an "Open Word" in The North in early 1940:

“The north did not understand the new Germany. The North did not respond to the German appeal to the idea of ​​a community of fate in the Baltic Sea. "

- The north , year 17 (1940), p. 1

In 1956 the Nordic Society was dissolved after it had largely ceased its activities during the war. Her fortune fell to the German foreign company founded in Lübeck in 1949 .

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karsten Jessen: "Nordic Society" . In: Wolfgang Benz et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . Munich 1997, p. 615.
  2. ^ Lübeck mourns Senator Kalkbrenner. : In: Lübecker Nachrichten . Volume 11, number 116, May 19, 1956, p. 3.
  3. ↑ Senator i. R. Dr. Lime burner, 75 years old. In: Lübeckische Blätter. Volume 86, number 21, edition of December 24, 1950, p. 325.
  4. ↑ Nordic Week Lubeck by Alfred Mahlau. Retrieved August 21, 2017 .
  5. ↑ a b Abram Enns: Art and Citizenship . The controversial twenties in Lübeck. Lübeck 1978, pp. 46-54. (Chapter: The "Nordic Week 1921" and its exhibitions.)
  6. ↑ First steps in promoting Icelandic art in Copenhagen , accessed on January 31, 2017
  7. ^ Georg Gretor: Iceland's culture and its young painting. Edited by the Nordic Society, Jena: E. Diederichs 1928
  8. ↑ Baltic Sea Year Tour of the Graf Zeppelin airship (LZ 127) from May 12 to 15, 1931 ( Memento of the original from February 6, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed February 6, 2016 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.briefmarkenverein-bielefeld.de
  9. ↑ Maike Wegner: A historical journey across the Priwall. In: Lübecker Nachrichten of April 23, 2014, p. 16.
  10. ^ Paul Th. Hoffmann: Hans Henny Jahnns Lübeck Dance of Death . In: The circle . No. 11/1931
  11. ^ Thomas Freeman: Hans Henny Jahnn. A biography . Hamburg 1986, page 175
  12. ^ The poets' march. Lübecker Volksbote, August 31, 1931, accessed on August 21, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Jürgen Elvert: Europe and the North . The story of a mutual misperception in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. In: End of the war in the north . From the hot to the cold war. Edited by Robert Bohn and Jürgen Elvert. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, p. 358.
  14. ↑ Wolfgang Benz / Hermann Graml / Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . 3rd edition, Munich 1998, p. 615, ISBN 3-608-91805-1 .
  15. ^ Ernst Piper : Alfred Rosenberg . Hitler's chief ideologist, Munich 2005, p. 291, ISBN 3-89667-148-0 .
  16. ↑ Quoted in: Hans-Günther Seraphim : Alfred Rosenberg's political diary . 1934/35 and 1939/40. Göttingen / Berlin / Frankfurt 1956, p. 32. (Cited source: Document PS-003, reproduced in: IMT, vol. XXV, p. 15 ff.)
  17. ↑ Stefan Breuer : The Völkische in Germany. Empire and Weimar Republic. Knowledge Buchges., Darmstadt 2008, pp. 165f.
  18. ↑ Quoted from: Antjekathrin Graßmann (ed.): Lübeckische Geschichte . 4th improved and supplemented edition, Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 2008, p. 726
  19. ^ Alken Bruns: Art. "Nordic Society". In: Antjekathrin Graßmann (ed.): The new Lübeck Lexicon. The Hanseatic City from A to Z. Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 2011, p. 295