Hanns Johst

Personal

Vocation

German poet and playwright, directly aligned with Nazi philosophy, as a member of the officially approved writers’ organisations in the Third Reich. The statement “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”, variously misattributed to Himmler, Goebbels and Göring, was in fact a corrupted version of a line in his play Schlageter. His early work is influenced by Expressionism. Examples include Der Anfang [The Beginning] (1917) and Der König [The King] (1920). Later, he turned to a naturalist philosophy in plays such as Wechsler und Händler [Money changers and Traders] (1923) and Thomas Paine (1927). Bertolt Brecht's first play Baal was written in response to Johst's play Der Einsame [The Lonely], a dramatization of the life of playwright Christian Dietrich Grabbe. In 1928 Johst joined Alfred Rosenberg's Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture) designed to combat "Jewish" influence in German culture. In 1932 he joined the Nazi party, explaining his agreement with Hitler's ideology in the essay "Standpunkt und Fortschritt" [Standpoint and Progress] in 1933. When the Nazis achieved power in 1933, Johst wrote the play Schlageter, an expression of Nazi ideology which was performed on Hitler's 44th birthday, 20 April 1933, to celebrate his victory. It was a heroic biography of the proto-Nazi martyr Albert Leo Schlageter. After the war Johst was interned by the Allies. In 1949 he was tried for his activities, and was imprisoned for three and a half years. On his release he was unable to reestablish his career as a writer. Johst was sentenced with a ten-year writing ban. He died on 23 November 1978, aged 88, in Ruhpolding, Bavaria. Link to Wikipedia biography