Nadine Rossol,Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany: Sport,Spectacle and Political Symbolism,1926–1936

Reviewed by: Erik Jensen, Miami University, USA

In Performing the Nation, Nadine Rossol highlights continuities in German political representation that transcended the historical divide of 1933, and, in so doing, she challenges the notion that the Nazis invented the mass spectacle. Instead, Rossol insists, the Weimar Republic pioneered the use of elements that we associate with the Nazi period, such as moving bodies, innovative use of space, an emphasis on national community, and the inclusion of spectators in the performance. Rossol also suggests that the office of the Reichskunstwart, a new state position created in 1920 to coordinate the Weimar Republic’s self-representation, prefigured the Nazi regime’s propaganda ministry. Although the Reichskunstwart had far less power and far fewer resources at his disposal than the Nazi ministry later would, the creation of this office illustrates the efforts undertaken by the republic to win the hearts and minds of its citizens.

Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of Rossol’s study is its depiction of the gradual evolution in the scale and assertiveness of the Weimar Republic’s self-celebration. Political factionalism in the new republic prevented even the establishment of a national holiday, but commemorations to mark the signing of the constitution on 11 August 1919 had emerged by the mid-1920s as occasions on which to celebrate the post-war democracy. Initially dependent entirely on the private initiative and funding of local mayors and the Reichsbanner veterans groups, these early ceremonies consisted of an ad hoc array of parades and gatherings. Not until 1929 did the state organize an event to mark Constitution Day and to foster an emotional attachment between its citizens and itself, but this ceremony anticipated many elements of later Nazi festivities, including the organization of thousands of individuals into a living flag. The state continued this aesthetic practice in the following year’s ceremony, which highlighted the withdrawal of the last foreign troops from the Rhineland and similarly featured thousands of individuals, this time representing various German rivers, who called in the climactic scene on ‘father Rhine’ to join them in celebrating its liberation.

The Nazi regime simply built upon the performative foundation that the Weimar Republic had already laid, and Rossol argues that even the Nuremberg Rallies displayed only ‘limited’ aesthetic originality (103). Thingspiele, which combined ostensibly ancient Germanic traditions with political rituals, movement, and choral singing, proved more innovative, but they were also apparently short-lived, having reached their apex in the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic Games and quickly fading from official favour thereafter.

Rossol’s study provides another important example of the continuities that linked the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime, and she incorporates a great deal of material in this book that will be of value to cultural historians of the period. Her emphasis on 1936 as marking a decisive turn in German festive practices seems puzzling, though. Rossol argues that post-1936 festivities were more ‘traditional’ in their approach, but her descriptions of the 1938 Breslau sports festival and the 1939 premiere performances at the Loreley Thingspiel arena seem thoroughly in line with earlier productions, and she notes that the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg actually grew in size between 1934 and 1938.

More importantly, Rossol does not show how or if the spectacles between 1926 and 1936 actually influenced feelings of attachment to the two political systems. In fairness, Rossol states in the introduction that she will look only at the intended messages of the various celebrations, rather than at how spectators read those messages. However, some of her own documentary evidence points to the ineffectiveness of these mass gatherings, and she should have explored this all-important issue further. Goebbels withdrew support for Thingspiele, for instance, in part because they had shown, in Rossol’s words, ‘unsatisfactory results’ (112). Rossol also notes that the 1939 performances filled only half of the available seats. This might have been simply ‘festivity fatigue’, something about which Goebbels worried, but even the very first spectacles that Rossol examines in her study – sports competitions in 1925 and 1926 – registered deficits because of low attendance. Moreover, Rossol argues that the Weimar and Nazi spectacles had no impact on the aesthetics or the themes of local and regional celebrations at all.

Rossol rightly notes in her conclusion that mass spectacles have fallen into disfavour in the post-war era, with the exception of certain totalitarian regimes and, interestingly enough, the opening ceremonies of Olympic Games. Perhaps, however, they were never in public favour in the first place, at least not among the majority of Germans living in the 1920s and 1930s. Did this decade of mass spectacles – which disappeared with few lasting traces other than some propaganda footage and some very deeply ingrained popular associations on the part of us latter-day observers of the Nazi regime – simply represent an attempt to engage the citizenry that never really caught on. Perhaps whatever popularity and legitimacy the two political systems did enjoy owed very little to the spectacles staged in their honour. It is a question worth addressing.