Hanns Johst

Hanns Johst was born in Seerhausen as the son of an elementary school teacher. He grew up in Oschatz and Leipzig. As a juvenile he planned to become a missionary. When he was 17 years old he worked as an auxiliary in a Bethel Institution. In 1910 he earned his Abitur in Leipzig and then started studying medicine and philosophy and—later—history of art. He volunteered for the army in 1914. In 1918 he settled down in Allmannshausen (part of Berg) at the Starnberger See.

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 National Socialist German Workers 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. The famous line "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun", often associated with Nazi leaders, derives from this play. The actual line in the play is, however, slightly different: "Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!" "When I hear 'Culture'... I release the safety catch on my Browning!" (Act 1, Scene 1). It is spoken by another character in conversation with the young Schlageter. In the scene Schlageter and his wartime comrade Friedrich Thiemann are studying for a college examination, but then start debating whether it is worthwhile doing so when the nation is not free. Thiemann argues that he would prefer to fight rather than study.

SCHLAGETER: Good old Fritz! (Laughing.) No paradise will entice you out of your barbed wire entanglement!

THIEMANN: That's for damned sure! Barbed wire is barbed wire! I know what I'm up against.... No rose without a thorn!... And the last thing I'll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from '18 ..., fraternity, equality, ..., freedom ..., beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook 'em. And then, you're right in the middle of a parley and they say: Hands up! You're disarmed..., you republican voting swine!—No, let 'em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish ... I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture ..., I release the safety on my Browning!"

SCHLAGETER: What a thing to say!

THIEMANN: It hits the mark! You can be sure of that.

SCHLAGETER: You've got a hair trigger.

— Hanns Johst's Nazi Drama Schlageter. Translated with an introduction by Ford B. Parkes-Perret. Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, Stuttgart, 1984.

The line is frequently misattributed, sometimes to Hermann Göring and sometimes to Heinrich Himmler. In December 2007, historian David Starkey misattributed it to Joseph Goebbels in comments criticizing Queen Elizabeth II for being "poorly educated and philistine".[1] It has also been adapted by, for example Stephen Hawking as "When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol" and by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in his 1963 film Le Mépris, when a producer says to Fritz Lang: "Whenever I hear the word culture, I bring out my checkbook." Lang evokes the original line when he answers "Some years ago—some horrible years ago—the Nazis used to take out a pistol instead of a checkbook." Songwriter Clint Conley of Mission of Burma titled a song he wrote in 1981 "That's When I Reach for My Revolver".

Johst receives a literary prize from Alfred Rosenberg

In 1933, Johst signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, a declaration of loyalty to Hitler by pro-Nazi writers.[2] Succeeding Hans-Friedrich Blunck in 1935, Johst became the President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (writer's union) and of the Deutsche Akademie für Dichtung (poetry academy), powerful organisations for German writers. In the same year the last prominent Jewish writers, e.g. Martin Buber, were expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer. By this time these organisations restricted membership to writers whose work was either explicitly pro-Nazi or at least approved of by the Nazis as non-degenerate. Johst achieved other positions of importance within the Nazi state, and he was named in the Gottbegnadeten list of September 1944 as one of the Reich's most important artists. During the war he held various positions within the SS, which Thomas Mann stated was the reason that several charges of pedophilia and abuse of children were dropped against Johst in the winter of 1944.[2]

God the Father Himself did weave the splendor
with starry light and rays of the sun.
They however pushed the wreath of thorns
down into His hair and head and blood.
I weave for the child
only meadow herbs and larkspur.
Please, God, spare it the cross and thorns!
(in the anthology "Mother")[3]

The harder this war is becoming and the longer it takes, the more do we experience the clear certainty of the true value of culture. The intellectual and spiritual forces reveal their solace, their splendor, and their grace. The outward life is constantly getting simpler and harder, burdened with the sacrifice of our time, but the inner life gets new, young and rich confirmation. Nothing can endanger this inner richness, on the contrary the more cruelly the outward world attacks spirit and soul, the more redeeming does the marvel of art prove to be."[4] (June 1943, in a speech about Robert Schumann)

After the war, Johst was interned by the Allies. In 1949, he was tried for his activities and imprisoned for three and a half years. On his release he was unable to re-establish his career as a writer, being banned from writing for ten years. He was only able to publish poems, under the pseudonym "Odemar Oderich", for Die kluge Hausfrau, the magazine of the German supermarket chain Edeka.[5]

• Works by or about Hanns Johst at Internet Archive
• German text of Schlageter Schauspiel
• Newspaper clippings about Hanns Johst in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW