On January 30, 1933, when Hitler became Reich Chancellor, Nazi propagandists began to establish this day in the Nazi historical imaginary and in the regime's ritualistic practices as the end date of the Weimar “system” and the beginning of a new era that turned Germany back onto the track of what the Nazis saw as the natural, continuous flow of German history and the realization of the Volksgemeinschaft. Each year, from 1934 until its downfall in 1945, the Nazi regime organized commemorations of January 30, not only in Germany, but also in German communities abroad. The aim of these commemorations was to institutionalize this date as a historical turning point, in William Sewell Jr.'s conceptualization an event that marks the transformation of social and political structures. These commemorations, a particular form of political ceremonies centered on the past, emerged as a repetitive and essential element of official Nazi history politics. But they had a second function: Hitler's January 30 speeches became an important occasion for some of the regime's most catastrophic pronouncements about the future, above all his 1939 speech in which he threatened the extermination of Jews in the case of a world war.Footnote1
In contrast to the Nazis’ own populist event-based reading of history, the Nazi takeover of power was not a single event but a process in which Hitler's appointment was a crucial step, as Karl Dietrich Bracher demonstrated in a 1960 essay.Footnote2 Yet through a close study of the discourses surrounding January 30, 1933, and the orchestration of jubilee celebrations at home and abroad, Nazi conceptualizations of historical imaginaries become clearer. Inspired by the cultural turn that has highlighted the significance of semantics and rituals, this article argues that the main focus of the festivities was the realization of a racialized Volksgemeinschaft through social practices. The notion of the Volksgemeinschaft was directly linked in the Nazi imagination to an ageless entity that comprised all Germans, past, present, and future. For the Nazis, January 30 was a major stepping stone on the road to the completion of a Volksgemeinschaft through social and political rituals. Whether the Volksgemeinschaft was completed in the short twelve years of the Third Reich is perhaps a moot point. For many Germans living through the Nazi dictatorship, Volksgemeinschaft was not an analytical concept but a vision for the future, and it was this message that resonated in Nazi rituals and discourses surrounding January 30.Footnote3
The ambiguity of the Nazi coming to power, at the same time revolutionary and reactionary, was reflected in the way in which the Nazis commemorated January 30. Hitler's appointment by national-conservative political elites was not revolutionary. But the process that his appointment unleashed fundamentally transformed the everyday lives of Germans, although it remains doubtful whether the notion of a “revolution,” used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, is appropriate, given the almost exclusively destructive nature of Nazism. Footnote4
As scholarship on the Third Reich since the late 1980s and 1990s has increasingly focused on the racial dimension of the Nazi regime, 1933 no longer seems to be the major turning point in German history. Instead, 1941, the beginning of the Holocaust, appears as the central vanishing point of German history.Footnote5 But the jubilee of Hitler's appointment, officially known as “Memorial Day of National Elevation” (Tag der nationalen Erhebung), was of central importance to the regime's self-commemoration and resonated well beyond 1945 in German political culture. Reflecting the ambiguous message behind the event, January 30 never became a public holiday in Nazi Germany unlike, for instance, May 1, the “National Holiday of the German People” (Nationaler Feiertag des Deutsches Volkes), or November 9, the “Memorial Day for the Fallen of the Movement” (Gedenktag für die Gefallenen der Bewegung) on the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.Footnote6 The Nazis continuously highlighted the significance of the day, for instance in a 1939 guide for Nazi party branches on how to celebrate national festivals as the “birth of the Reich, [the] beginning of new völkisch reality, [the] beginning of a new order in our history.”Footnote7
Not least because of the Nazi institutionalization of the date as the crucial event on their road to domination, January 30, 1933, became, after 1945, the reference point of a powerful master narrative of what lessons could be learned from the abject failure of liberal democracy in Germany. Post-1945 interpretations of 1933 initially came from a top-down perspective; either through the Sonderweg paradigm, according to which democracy stood no chance in Germany because of structural failures that prevented a bourgeois liberal-democratic political culture from developing in the long nineteenth century or through short-term power maneuvers of political elites in the early 1930s.Footnote8
Apart from a short 2010 survey chapter by Bernd Sösemann, little systematic research has been done on how January 30 featured as a central memorial day in Nazi public culture, notwithstanding the rich literature on how the regime promoted heroic myths surrounding Hitler and Nazi “martyrs.” With the January 30 anniversary celebrations, the regime delivered its official version of history: Hitler's appointment as Chancellor was a natural development in the course of German history.Footnote9 Copious use of the mass media helped the regime amplify its audience and touch the senses of Germans. In the visual landscape of Nazism, the highly regulated reenactments of the stormtroopers’ torch-lit rally of January 30, 1933, became annual fixtures. And in Nazism's soundscape, the annual Hitler speech on January 30, broadcast on the radio, became a central event.Footnote10
Building on work on the politics of time by Peter Fritzsche, Christopher Clark, Fernando Esposito, and Sven Reichardt, this article probes the self-historicization of the Nazi regime, as a central part of its quest for authority and legitimacy. The Nazis’ view of their own history was connected to their assumptions about the present and the future. The January 30 anniversary celebrations reflected this perspective. This article deconstructs the types of historicity the Nazi regime made available to ordinary Germans and how they established those regimes of historicity.Footnote11
Nazi Discourses on January 30
Scenes such as the torch-lit Nazi rally through central Berlin on the night of January 30, 1933, reflected the ostensible communion between Hitler and the German Volksgemeinschaft that had finally found its legitimate leader after fourteen years of alleged decadence and decline.Footnote12 In Nazi temporal politics, January 30 was the beginning of the new regime that restored the natural flow of German history. This mantra was provocative, as it rendered January 30 as both restorative and revolutionary, reflecting the fine balance between restoration and revolution that was characteristic of Nazism. Also notable is that the event was being commemorated and historicized almost as soon as the regime was born. A bestselling 1933 album for collectors of cigarette pictures devoted ample coverage to the day when “the dawn arrived.”Footnote13 And in a popular 1933 history of National Socialism, written for school students, the Nazi propagandist Johann von Leers insisted that on January 30, 1933, the “German Reich arrived at a turning point of its political development.”Footnote14 Ein Volk steht auf, a popular 1933 book with photographs of the key events of the “national revolution” hit a similar chord about the supposedly world-historical turning point of January 30.Footnote15 How the German Volksgemeinschaft was renewed and saved from “one of the ghastliest epochs of its history” on January 30 was the main theme of a 1934 book edited by Gerd Rühle, a Nazi Reichstag member.Footnote16 At Freiburg University, Paul Schmitthenner, a Nazi State Minister in Baden, lectured the university community on January 30, 1935, on the place of January 30 in the flow of German history and concluded that it was the apotheosis of two millennia of German history. He insisted: “For at last, Germany is a unified völkisch body.”Footnote17
To underline the Third Reich's place in the natural flow of German history that had ended abruptly with the German surrender in 1918 and resumed on January 30, 1933, some Nazi intellectuals such as the racial scientist H. F. K. Günther described the years between 1918 and 1933 as an “in-between Reich” (Zwischenreich), a term also adopted in the 1937 edition of Meyers Lexikon, a leading German encylopedia.Footnote18
Because of Nazism's combination of the old and the new and the combination of violence with seemingly legal political activity, the message behind January 30 remained deliberately ambivalent. Therefore, the Nazis celebrated January 30 both as the completion of the “National Socialist revolution” and a new beginning. Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor was rendered as the inevitable development of German history. The German nation and the German Volk had become one and the same, as Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared in a lavishly illustrated book given to high-ranking Nazi officials on the tenth anniversary of January 30, 1933. The book's central refrain was the self-historicization of the Nazi party, which stood in the eternal flow of history.Footnote19
Nazi efforts to commemorate January 30, 1933, as a turning point in German history served as a powerful instrument to legitimize their rule and to locate it firmly with what they saw as the inevitable direction of the course of German history. In the Nazi historical imagination, recently examined by Christopher Clark, 1933 was the starting point of the Nazi project to reshape Germany into a racial dictatorship bent on conquering living space. Clark, inspired by scholarship on the historicity of time, including François Hartog's work, argues that Hitler and the Nazis were not interested in revolutionizing history which, in their crude worldview, was characterized by fixed racial hierarchies. Nevertheless, in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, museums of the “Nazi revolution” emerged from 1933, often following grassroots initiatives from within the Nazi movement. Memorials too sprang up across Germany soon after Hitler's appointment. For instance, in Dettendorf, a village in Upper Bavaria, the local Nazi party erected a swastika memorial, eight meters high, on a mountain top as a “symbol of German unity.”Footnote20
Nazism's use of a “revolutionary vocabulary” was ambiguous, if not vacuous, as Reinhart Koselleck and Hans Mommsen have highlighted. For the Nazis, the concept of revolution conjured up negative associations with the French, Bolshevik, and the November 1918 revolution in Germany, which is why the Nazis made little use of the term between the 1923 Beer Hall putsch and Hitler's appointment. After 1933, terms like “National Socialist revolution” or the “revolution of Adolf Hitler” became widely used in the Third Reich in a formulaic manner. Typical of this tendency was a study by Konrad Steinbrink, a young lawyer, who dedicated a short 1934 book to Hitler. In it, Steinbrink argued that Hitler's revolution had been completely legal (eine Revolution mit den Mitteln des Rechts). The Nazis reinforced the term through violent actions, but also through rituals, especially the anniversary celebrations of Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor.Footnote21 In this sense, January 30 became the key date of the “National Socialist revolution.”Footnote22
Reflecting the ambiguity of the “Nazi revolution,” some Nazis had used the term Machtergreifung, the “grabbing” of power, since the 1920s. After 1933, the term came to denote the epochal shift denoted by Hitler's arrival at the Reich Chancellery. Machtübernahme, the “taking” of power, became institutionalized in official language after 1933 to denote the day of Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor. Indeed, Hitler was handed power by national-conservative elites, but this would not have happened without electoral mass support for the Nazi party and their dispensation of political violence.Footnote23
How January 30, 1933, featured within the Nazi historical imaginary can shed new light on their mythmaking, which involved the top brass of the Nazi party, state and party officials, and ordinary people. Rituals, highly regulated events that require active participation, and symbolic performances for less-active audiences, were essential parts of the aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin identified as a central feature of fascism. Rituals and ceremonies gave meaning to January 30 as a historical turning point, bringing together the German “people” with Hitler and the Nazi party.Footnote24
Celebrating January 30
Nazi celebrations of the anniversary of January 30, 1933, went through three phases. In the first phase, from 1934 till 1935, the regime created the framework for the ceremonies and rituals, featuring torch-lit parades in commemoration of the massive January 30, 1933, rally, alongside speeches by Goebbels and Hitler. In the second phase, starting in 1936, as the Nazi regime had consolidated itself and enrolled the search for historical meaning and legitimacy in its preparations for war, celebrations of January 30 as a turning point in German history became more formalized. During the early years of the war, when a Nazi victory seemed likely, celebrations continued. The third phase, from 1943 till 1945, was marked by the conjuncture of the tenth anniversary of the Third Reich and a dire turn in the regime's fortunes in the war. A large volume of documents had survived on the planned 1943 celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the Third Reich. They were supposed to be glorious reassertions of the communion between Hitler and the German people, but the realities of the war were so dire that the celebrations had to be scaled down.
Within these propagandistic celebrations, despite Goebbels's efforts to bring propaganda under his complete control, Nazi institutions at various levels competed for attention and power with one another. But the broad message of January 30, 1933, as the birthday of the Third Reich, remained constant, demonstrating the increasing staleness of Nazi propaganda and its growing inability to appeal to popular opinion in the later stages of the war.Footnote25 There was an inherent ambiguity in the meaning inscribed in this date, which was at once a beginning and an end. The yearly repetition of a moment that could not settle on its orientation to time remained an ambiguous, undecided “moment.”
Because Germans abroad could not be as easily mobilized for the Volksgemeinschaft as Germans within the Reich, embassies, consulates, and the Nazi Auslandsorganisation organized events for German expatriates to commemorate Germany's alleged rebirth on January 30, 1933.
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