Thread by @jessnevins

So, anyone still interested in the story of what happened to the German pulps when the Nazis took power?

Okay, so....

the thing to remember is that Germany, like several other European countries, has a long tradition of serialized fiction. In the 19th century the most popular form was the serialized novel sold by colporteurs, or wandering peddlers. 1/

Colporteur novels substantially outsold mainstream/trad. published novels. The most popular German novel of the 19th century was the colporteur novel THE HANGMAN OF BERLIN (1890-1892), which sold over a million copies. It's about as penny dreadful-esque as could be desired. 2/

But the colporteur novel was swept away in 1905 when the German publisher Alfred Eichler struck a deal with Street & Smith and issued German language editions of the dime novel BUFFALO BILL. The German interest in Westerns made the German BUFFALO BILL a runaway bestseller. 3/

After BUFFALO BILL came a German edition of NICK CARTER (detective hero), and after NICK CARTER came dozens of German dime novels. (I'm going to use "dime novel" and "pulp" rather than the German terms for those magazines).

The craze for German dime novels lasted for years. 4/

The demand was such that when the German publishers ran out of foreign editions, they began issuing new stories written by German (and Austrian, though that's another story) authors.

So from 1905-1914 the German dime novel industry is really healthy. But then comes WW1. 5/

(Most popular during these years were mysteries, adventures dime novels, and Westerns, with romances only a fraction of the overall output. This was the reverse of America, where romance dime novels dominated). 6/

From 1914-1917 the German dime novel publishers kept their lines intact despite paper shortages and governmental attempts at regulation and censorship. The German gvt wanted patriotic dime novels with German heroes. Unfortunately, many of the dime novel heroes weren't German. 7/

So what the dime novel publishers did was change the *titles* of the dime novels so that they sounded more Germanic. The publishers didn't change the stories' content, settings, or names or backgrounds of the heroes--just the dime novels' titles. 8/

This worked--the censors only looked at the dime novels' titles rather than the content of the stories. So German dime novels, 1914-1917 (very few published in 1918), had numerous foreign heroes, stories in foreign locales, etc., and for the most part ignored the war. 9/

In 1919, the German dime novel publishers continued on their merry way, using the old dime novel titles.

Over the next couple of years they transitioned to publishing magazines with pulp dimensions rather than dime novel dimensions, so by 1921/1922 it's a pulp industry.
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The early and mid 1920s are glory days--more pulps than ever, greater variety of heroes, greater variety of types of stories, many new writers (including women like Elisabeth von Aspern, the Ellery Queen of the German pulps) being published. Good times. But then came 1926. 11/

German mainstream discomfort with "schund und schmutz" (trash and smut) literature had always been a thing. Lots of condemnation of schund und schmutz literature in the 19th century, and as @corabuhlert noted some vicious attacks against the dime novels before and during WW1. 12/

@CoraBuhlert Leading the fight against schund & schmutz lit. were academics and educators--and before any of us Americans start to feel smug, these were the same groups who frothed at the mouth over dime novels and pulps in the US. (Librarians, too). 13/

@CoraBuhlert So in 1926 a law was passed allowing for the regulation and censorship of popular culture.

The effects were immediate: storylines and characters became more conservative, and authors of questionable politics and loyalties weren't given work. 14/

@CoraBuhlert Western pulps disappeared from the market for five years. Science fiction pulps mostly went the way of the Westerns. Overall, there were 42% fewer pulps published in 1927 than in 1926. (Not unlike the effect on comics of Wertham & the Senate hearings). 15/

@CoraBuhlert Despite the efforts of the pulp publishers to fall in line, every year after 1926 there were increasing amounts of external pressure placed on the publishers to make the pulps more respectable. The publishers went along, a bit, while still selling disreputable genres. 16/

@CoraBuhlert Then came 1933 and the elections which put the Nazis in power. The new government immediately began pressuring the publishers to make stories and character properly German. Some of the publishers stalled, some refused, and some acquiesced.
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@CoraBuhlert One of the most popular series heroes of the time--and, really, throughout the 1920s--was Walther Kabel's Harald Harst, an intellectual Berlin detective. I'm not sure there's a comparable figure in the American pulps--the Harst stories were more literate than US pulp stories. 18/

@CoraBuhlert The Harst stories are fun. You've got ambulatory murderous severed hands, Brains in Jars, a villain named Doctor Satan, mummies bent on revenge against those who removed them from their tombs, a Japanese mad scientist bent on wiping out the European colonial powers, 19/

@CoraBuhlert talking alien crystals, air pirates who bomb London with nerve gas, kaiju-sized foxes, and a mob boss who is pretty much the Kingpin fifty years early.

A lot of the German pulps were this colorful. (They are a hoot). Kabel was just a better writer than most of his peers. 20/

@CoraBuhlert Kabel was a pro's pro, and didn't take kindly to pressure to warp his stories to fit the new government's politics. He'd been a top author in the pulps for fifteen years, who was the government--or his publisher--to try to "fix" his stories? 21/

@CoraBuhlert Kabel fought with the government and his publisher.

Of course, he lost. The government banned him from writing altogether, and his publisher gave him about a week to write one last issue of the Harald Harst series.

Kabel went out with both middle fingers flying. 22/

@CoraBuhlert Kabel took a serious wound in the lungs in front-line fighting during WW1. He didn't lack for personal bravery, in other words.

In the final Harald Harst issue Harst kills off his long-running arch-enemy, the Kingpin figure, bringing a decade-long storyline to an end. 23/

@CoraBuhlert Harst drowned his arch-enemy, then disappears. At the end of the story his body washes ashore, and his best friend is forced to bury him.

The exception of Sherlock Holmes aside, these were the days when character deaths were permanent. No revolving door in Heaven.
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@CoraBuhlert So as his final act as the writer of Harald Harst Kabel prevented his publisher from publishing any further Harald Harst stories.

As I said, big middle fingers to the publisher on his way out door. 25/

@CoraBuhlert (Sidenote. Harst's death is ambiguously written, and the body that washed ashore is only assumed to be his, not proven to be his. I think Kabel left himself the possibility of bringing back Harst once the Nazis went away. Unfortunately, Kabel got pneumonia & died in 1935).

@CoraBuhlert In 1935 the Nazis passed a "preventative censorship" law, requiring that all magazines, pulp and otherwise, be submitted to the gvt censors for approval before publishing.

The pulp publishers tried the WW1 trick of changing the titles but not the content. It didn't work. 26/

@CoraBuhlert Some of the publishers made the heroes and heroines German, but did their best to keep the stories politically mainstream--no Jewish, Slavic, or Communist villains, etc. Most of the publishers went the other way, however, & their pulps became overtly pro-Nazi & anti-Semitic. 27/

@CoraBuhlert The post-1935 German pulps are nearly as imaginative as the pre-Nazi pulps, but the imaginative, colorful ideas are paired with the worst content imaginable. I've rarely had more disquieting reading experiences than reading the post-1935 German pulps. Imagine Trumpite Batman. 28/

@CoraBuhlert To give you an idea of what I mean, Paul Alfred Müller-Murnau's Sun Koh was the most popular German pulp of those years. He's essentially the Nazi Doc Savage. No, not even "essentially"--that's what he is.

The stories are more imaginative than the Doc Savage stories, but... 29/

@CoraBuhlert Well, you've got alien astronauts, Mayan prophecies, Atlantis rising from its grave in the Hollow Earth, and all the high-tech weaponry (including Martian anti-gravity material) and gadgets one could hope for.

Appearing in gleefully pro-eugenics stories. 30/

@CoraBuhlert As pro-eugenics as any Nazi could possibly want. Sun Koh even gets crucified (yes, really) by a bunch of Slavs to drive the point home about their inferiority and his messianic status.

In the sequel to SUN KOH the non-Aryans of the world are killed off by a new ice age. 31/

@CoraBuhlert (damn, I've got class in twenty minutes. Better wrap this up)

In 1939, when WW2 started, the Nazis ordered all the pulps to become ideologically "correct." Titles were changed, heroes were renamed so they now had German names, and the content became stridently pro-Nazi. 32/

@CoraBuhlert Harald Harst's main detective rival, Alfred Bienengraber's Holmesian detective John Kling, became a German sailor. The Westerns became stories about Nazi cowboys "civilizing" the American frontier.

That lasted until 1942, when the Germans cancelled almost all of the pulps. 33/

@CoraBuhlert Some general interest German pulps kept appearing throughout the war, though--nothing heroic or fantastic, very mainstream stuff. Right up through the end of the war, if you can believe it. Nazi-approved, of course.

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@CoraBuhlert There was a four-year lull after WW2 ended, and then the German pulp industry started up again, eventually outlasting the American pulp industry. But that's beyond my remit today.

Thanks for reading! Gotta dash--must prep for class.

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