PART 2 OF 2
THE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD
The Tasks of Women, by ADOLF HITLER... So long as we possess a healthy manly race -- and we National Socialists will attend to that -- we will form no female mortar battalions and no female sharpshooter corps. For that is not equality of rights, but a diminution of the rights of woman....
An unlimited range of work opportunities exists for women. For us the woman has always been man's most loyal comrade in work and in life. I am often told: You want to drive women out of the professions. Not at all. I wish only to create the broadest measure of possibility for her to co-found her own family and to be able to have children, because by so doing she most benefits our Volk! ...
If today a female jurist accomplishes ever so much and next door there lives a mother with five, six, seven children, who are all healthy and well-brought-up, then I would like to say: From the standpoint of the eternal value of our people the woman who has given birth to children and raised them and who thereby has given back our people life for the future has accomplished more and does more!
From a speech to the National Socialist women's organization (Die Frauenschaft), published in the Volkischer Beobachter, Sept. 13, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.
The so-called granting of equal rights to women, which Marxism demands, in reality does not grant equal rights but constitutes a deprivation of rights, since it draws the woman into an area in which she will necessarily be inferior. It places the woman in situations that cannot strengthen her position -- vis- a-vis both man and society -- but only weaken it....
I would be ashamed to be a German man if in the event of a war even only one woman had to go to the front. The woman has her own battlefield. With every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family.
From a speech to the National Socialist Women's Congress, published in the Volkischer Beobachter, Sept. 15, 1935. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
Emancipation from the Emancipation Movement, by ALFRED ROSENBERGEmancipation of woman from the women's emancipation movement is the first demand of a generation of women which would like to save the Volk and the race, the Eternal-Unconscious, the foundation of all culture, from decline and fall.
The age of Victorianism and the "dreamy romantic girl's life" are naturally finished once and for all. The woman belongs deeply to the total life of the people. All educational opportunities must remain open to her. Through rhythmics, gymnastics, and sport the same care must be given to her physical training as is the case with men. Nor should any difficulties be created for her in the vocational world under present-day social conditions (whereby the Law for the Protection of Mothers should be more strongly implemented). Doubtless, however, the efforts of those who would renew our Volkdom, after breaking up the Volk-alien democratic-Marxist system, must prepare the way for a social order which no longer forces young women (as is today the case) to stream in droves to the labor markets of life which use up the most important feminine energies. Hence all possibilities for the development of a woman's energies should remain open to her. But there must be clarity on one point: only man must be and remain a judge, soldier, and ruler of the state.
From Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1930), p. 512. (This extract has been taken from the 1938 edition.)
Domestic Diligence from Blood and SoilIt might seem amazing that women and girls should return to work at spinning wheels and weaving looms. But this is wholly natural. It was something that could have been foreseen. This work must be taken up again by the women and girls of the Third Reich.
From the Volkischer Beobachter, Feb. 2, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
The Female Bird, by JOSEPH GOEBBELSThe mission of woman is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world. This is not at all as rude and unmodern as it sounds. The female bird pretties herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him. In exchange, the mate takes care of gathering the food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy.
From Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1929), p. 41. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.) (This extract has been taken from the 1934 edition.)
Women That We Can LoveAfter a performance by an a cappella choir, the Fuhrer's deputy, Reich Minister Hess, took the floor and was jubilantly greeted by those present.
The Fuhrer's deputy began his speech with the remark that in Germany the honorable place held by woman as mother, as comrade of her husband, and as an equal member of the Volk community is taken as a matter of course. Then he briefly contested the views of German women that have been spread abroad, and compared the foreign concepts of woman with the type of woman which the new Germany aims to produce: "We want women in whose life and work the characteristically feminine is preserved -- women that we can love!
"We grant the rest of the world the ideal type of woman that it wishes for itself, but the rest of the world should kindly grant us the woman which is most suitable to us. Not that 'Gretchen type' which foreigners imagine as being a somewhat limited, indeed unintellectual creature, but a woman who is capable of intellectually standing at her husband's side in his interests, in his struggle for existence, who makes the world more beautiful and richer in content for him. This is the ideal woman of the German man of today. She is a woman who, above all, is also able to be a mother.
"And it is one of the greatest achievements of National Socialism," continued the Fuhrer's deputy, "that it made it possible for more women in Germany today to become mothers than ever before. They become mothers not merely because the state wants it so or because their husbands want it so. Rather, they become mothers because they themselves are proud to bring healthy children into the world, to bring them up for the nation, and in this way to do their part in the preservation of the life of their Volk."
From an account of a mass meeting of the Berlin National Socialist women's organization (Die Frauenschaft) and the Frauenwerk (Women's Social Welfare) in the Deutschland-Hall, published in the Volkischer Beobachter, May 27, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
Frau Goebbels on German WomenA woman reporter of the London Daily Mail came to Heiligendamm to visit Frau Magda Goebbels, whom she had called "the ideal woman of Germany." She wanted to learn more details about the new status of women in Germany. Frau Goebbels told her visitor that the accounts printed in England about the expulsion of women from their jobs are highly exaggerated. The German woman has been excluded from only three professions: the military (as is the case all over the world), government, and the practice of law.
If the German girl is faced with a choice of marriage or a career, she will always be encouraged to marry, since this undoubtedly is best for a woman. According to the report of the English woman journalist, Frau Goebbels said: "I am trying to make the German woman more beautiful."
From the Vossische Zeitung, July 6, 1933. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
The Blond CrazeBrunswick, May 31. -- SS Chief Group Leader Jeckeln attacked the "blond craze" at a meeting of the NSDAP. Blond hair and blue eyes by themselves, he said, were not convincing proof that one belongs to the Nordic race. A girl who wants to marry an SS man today must be above reproach in every respect. Therefore she is required to possess the Reich sports medal. Many people, perhaps even today, could not understand the reason for this requirement. Germany does not need women who can dance beautifully at five o'clock teas, but women who have given proof of their health through accomplishments in the field of sport. "The javelin and the springboard are more useful than lipstick in promoting health."
From the Frankfurter Zeitung, June 1, 1937. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
A Shiny Nose and the German NationRecently we read the following in an article on girls' Labor Service camps. It set us to thinking:
The physical facilities of the camp must never go beyond a certain simplicity, for the girl must be trained along Spartan lines in the Labor Service -- by habituation to the pallet of straw, to early risings in the morning-cold, to the simplest washing facilities, to the renunciation of all beauty aids and treatments, to the simplest clothing, which is to be as uniform as possible.
But what is too much, is too much. Even we consider early rising one of the virtues of woman. But to habituate "to early risings in the morning-cold"? Wouldn't it be all right also without the morning-cold? And as far as the "simplest washing facilities" are concerned, this can mean either magic or a country water pump. We don't know whether the author is married or not. In the last analysis this is his private affair. But anyone who writes for life must not sit at his writing desk and dream of a "tough" race and of the old Spartans, who, as is known, knew how to distinguish between the education of men and women on the basis of well-considered reasons. We want German women and not tough-eggs as our comrades along life's path. There is no woman who renounces "all beauty aids and treatments,'" which we must not confuse with the fabrication of masks in the style of the Kurfurstendamm. [1]
We would still like to meet an acceptable woman who for hygienic reasons will give up, say, powder when her little nose shines ... and anyone who demands this categorically must, to be consistent, say with Orpheus the Second:
Only when your countenance shines like bacon,
Do you fulfill the purpose of the German nation!
Why must we always have such gross exaggerations anyway?
From Der Angriff, Jan. 16, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection. )
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Notes:1. The Kurfurstendamm was a main street of Berlin where the most fashionable shops and restaurants were located. To the Nazis it was synonymous with decadent "Jewish" culture, and before 1933 they staged many disturbances there.
Faith and BeautyJutta Rudiger, the Reich reporter of the Bund Deutscher Madel, has on several occasions discussed the tasks of the BDM project "Faith and Beauty," such as at a convention of Hitler Youth leaders in Hammersbach on February 9 and in the Reich Youth Press Service.
According to her reports, the BDM program "Faith and Beauty" is not a radical departure for the BDM, but marks a logical step forward in the development of this girls' organization. Hence the usual uniform of the BDM will be maintained and participants in the program will be distinguished only by a special badge. It is planned to set up work communities for gymnastics, handicrafts, folklore, foreign affairs, games and music, health service, and the like. The groups meet weekly, and once a month the meetings take the form of evenings-at-home which are devoted to discussions of cultural life and the structuring and guidance of one's personal life.
From Das Archiv: Nachschlagewerk fur Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur, No. 47, Feb. 1938 (Berlin: Verlagsanstalt D. Stollberg, 1938), p. 1393.
Right ConductThe district plant department of the NSBO [1] in Unterfranken published a regulation in which it is stated that lately a great number of women had been accepted. This is a privilege of which women can be proud, and therefore it is also their duty to conduct themselves in a true National Socialist manner. It was therefore announced that painted and powdered women will be forbidden entry to all NSBO gatherings. Women who smoke in public -- in hotels, in cafes, on the street, and so forth -- will be expelled from the NSBO. Local officials are instructed to adopt similar rules.
From the Frankfurter Zeitung, Aug. 11, 1933. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
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Notes:1. National Sozialistischer Betriebs Obman (see page 21),
The Honor Cross of the German Mother"The prolific German mother is to be accorded the same place of honor in the German Volk community as the combat soldier, since she risks her body and her life for the people and the Fatherland as much as the combat soldier does in the roar and thunder of battle." With these words, Reich Physician Leader Dr. Wagner, head of the People's Health Section in the Reich leadership of the party, at the behest of the Fuhrer, announced the creation of a Medal of Honor for prolific German mothers at the Party Day of Labor.
Three million German mothers, on the German Mother's Day in 1939, for the first time will be solemnly awarded the new badge of honor by the leaders of the party. These celebrations are to be held every year on Mother's Day and on the Awarding of Medals Day for prolific mothers.
The youth above all must be brought up with a reverence for the mothers of the people. Thus the honoring of German mothers with many children is not to be limited only to Mother's Day and to the Awarding of Medals Day. In the future the prolific mother will occupy the place that is due her in public life. The young National Socialist will show his respect for her through the obligatory salute of all members of the youth formations of the party. In addition, the wearers of the Honor Cross of the German Mother will henceforth enjoy all those privileges which are already possessed as a matter of course by meritorious racial comrades, disabled war veterans, and the martyrs of the National Socialist revolution -- such privileges as honorary seats at party and government-sponsored gatherings, special treatment in government offices, and preferred seats assigned by conductors in rail coaches and trolley cars. Further, they are to be provided with old-age care and be given priority for acceptance in homes for the aged or in special sections of such homes already in existence.
For this honoring of the prolific mother and especially of the German aged mother by the Fuhrer is not only an expression of thanks, but at the same time expresses the trust that the Fuhrer, and with him the whole German people, has in all German mothers, that they will continue to help to pave the way for our people, and that they will make us a gift of that youth which, after perilous times, will crown the rise of our Volk....
From the Volkischer Beobachter, Dec. 25, 1938. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
The Woman Student"Woman student, what do you want in the Third Reich?" "After all, your place is at the cooking pot!" "The Fuhrer does not want you to study." "Intellectual work is harmful to women!" After the seizure of power, we National Socialist women students repeatedly heard such statements. In fact, we still hear them once in a while.
How can it be, we asked ourselves, that anyone would want a National Socialist university without German women?
The National Socialist woman student places her whole life and achievement in the service of the German people. The tasks that are hers to fulfill clearly grow out of this attitude.
From the Volkischer Beobachter, Dec. 11, 1935. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
Against the Political Woman, ENGELBERT HUBERThere is no place for the political woman in the ideological world of National Socialism....
The intellectual attitude of the movement on this score is opposed to the political woman. It refers the woman back to her nature-given sphere of the family and to her tasks as wife and mother. The postwar phenomenon of the political woman, who rarely cuts a good figure in parliamentary debates, signifies robbing woman of her dignity.
The German resurrection is a male event.
From Engelbert Huber, Das ist Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1933), pp. 121-122.
THE SOCIAL REALITY
Does the Five O'Clock Tea Suit Our Time?The German people and all cultural-minded people in other countries are still feeling the impact of the Fuhrer's speech at the Munich art festival. This speech is undoubtedly the most important cultural-political document of modern times. [1] And it did not take long to make itself felt in a practical way. The custodians of all government and private museums and art collections are busy removing the most hideous creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of "artists" and in this way are helping to bring recognition to a true art imbued with a German spirit. This cleaning out of all works that bear this same Western Asiatic stamp has been set in motion in the field of literature as well, having begun with the symbolic burning of the most evil products of Jewish scribblers shortly after the seizure of power. On the other hand, the fact that a racially alien spirit, in conjunction with artistic impotence here and there, still produces swamp weeds in one of the most important fields of artistic creation, namely music, that even today it still asserts itself in the pages of a gutter journal of a disreputable tradition which doesn't seem to understand what coordination in music means, that it still disseminates an artistic interpretation and gives expression to the glorifiers of Negro music, is betrayed by a feuilleton [2] (this word alone is a fitting designation of this mental attitude) of a Berlin afternoon newspaper of August 19 of this year under the heading "Tea and Dancing." Either the author of this effusion has been living on the moon these past four years, or the dog days are responsible for this remarkable product of his Dada brain.
Tea and dancing: this is not only an excellent alliteration [3] but also an amalgamation of two concepts which, in content and in consonance with each other, are intimately and naturally connected, like the terms of such other alliterations as house and home, [4] bag and baggage. [5] Therefore, we must deal with them together, as a unit, in order to recognize and overcome the inner hollowness and the danger to the Volk posed by these forms of international civilized life.
One may think what one pleases about the custom of afternoon tea. No one can prescribe what beverages are most suitable for drinking, although the good old German coffee hour for family and good-fellowship has a tradition at least as glorious as the custom of the tea hour taken over from northern countries. After all, this is a question of taste, perhaps even of temperament. Fundamentally, however, we should reject the custom of the five o'clock tea which came to us from England, where it is already a degenerate social form. We Germans have never known a five o'clock tea. First it was the modern way of life, shaped by the Jewish spirit, which, through the adoption of alien customs, has in all fields tried to hide the fact that it has no values and cultural forms of its own. Properly understood, it is not a question of the kind of beverage, much less the time of day which one devotes to this pleasure, since the author of the above-mentioned article recommends that in Berlin the tea hour be changed from five to four o'clock and, indeed, that one should not drink tea at all but "preferably coffee." Rather it is much more a question of a wholly distinct form of social life bearing the mark of an alien spirit.
By five o'clock tea, if it takes place in a private circle, one understands a chattering, sandwich-eating, tea-drinking, cigarette-puffing group of people circulating about a rubber-wheeled tea wagon which sets down the expensive cups now here and now there, wherever one pauses momentarily in one's wandering, only to pick them up again immediately thereafter. Five o'clock tea: that is to say, a social gathering in which one cultivates not conversation but gossip. In particular, it is thought that through this abominable American custom (namely, eating and drinking standing up) an especially agreeable and spontaneous conversation can develop, whereas actually only chatter is achieved, not conversation, if one walks up and down in a room with his hat, gloves and cookies in his hand, so that a clumsy waiter can knock over the full cup held with two fingers into the hat which floats from the third finger. One is not supposed to rest in this society, not even in his chair. This, however, is not the German "custom of the house," but Jewish vagabondage which has been transplanted to the salon. These are not community-conscious, sociable German men, but "stray international gypsies on a parquet floor."
Five o'clock tea: according to the writer of the article in the 12-Uhr-Blatt, [6] this is the domain of the young man in his busy "public life." Here he takes his new suit for a stroll. Here he practices the difficult art of "conquering the fair sex." And the conversation! Let no one faint at these flashes of wit: "Do you often come here, my dear?"; "The orchestra plays very nicely indeed, but did I hear one in St. Moritz! ..."; "At the moment I'm still working in the office, but in six months at the latest I'm going into films"; and such other platitudes as are further wrenched from these lame brains.
Five o'clock tea: this means above all, however, the "third" and most important "prerequisite": "There's dancing!" And what kind of dancing! One dances swing -- one hears all the latest hits and learns to recognize all the famous dance orchestras. Actually all this would be no more than a harmless waste of time for the "nice young man" if, a few lines further down, this choppy, noisy, meaningless squeaking were not described as "good music." We most decisively reject the possibility that, in the Third Reich, a newspaper can still exist and serve as the advocate of the Jewish impulse which has been done with once and for all, that a spirit against which the Fuhrer, and with him the whole healthy-minded German people, has declared a war to the death, can again be allowed to worm its way into the field of music.
Let it be clearly understood that we have nothing against light music. Indeed we demand such music and are convinced that composers will find rewarding tasks in this field. We consider it one of the most deplorable losses in the field of music that a specializing, intellectual consideration of art has led German artists to regard light music as commonplace, stale, and second-rate, as an accommodation of the lowest tastes of the people, and that the artist must offer not something simple but something extreme and lofty, in a complicated form with a great display of elaborate technique.
This elaborate technique is in keeping with an intensified experience, whereas simple structure and an ordinary experience supposedly have lesser artistic value. It is not the ordinary general human sensibility, but the effect, the rarefied feeling, that sets the work of art in motion. With respect to his conception we see in light (but nevertheless content-rich) music a conceivably lofty artistic task which our greatest composers have willingly undertaken. It suffices to recall Bruckner, who, unaffected by the international trends in art, dedicated himself to simple, unpretentious musical composition. This was not a concession to a fashion in popular taste, or a mirroring in musical form of a current tasteless literature, or a display of clever contrivances and technique. Rather, his compositions attested to the bond of a creative artist to his Volk, which in the monumentality of their form inevitably drew closer to the simplicity of Volkish song and dance types.
Thus we, too, believe that light music is neither a primitive art expression nor cheap sentimentality, but an interplay of folk-song and folk-dance rhythmics. Behind them stands neither the thinker, nor the world-denying ascetic, nor the dubious genius, but an original, joyously sensual, world-asserting musician who lets the energies of life with its multiple forms flow into his art, smoothly and simply into a structure of meaning and beauty. This music is not a borrowing from alien sources, but an ideal which the artist shapes into significant form.
His relation to light music is not limited to taking over national and Volkish melody types; it also includes finding and developing new forms and melodies in the genre of the folk song and the folk dance. The German people urgently need this light music. One cannot listen to Beethoven, Bach, or Handel every hour of the day. For that one goes to the concert hall, not to the coffeehouse. After all, there is an enormous difference between digestible light music and a din of drums, washboards, guitars, cowbells, rattlers, and other noise-makers, the same difference as exists, say, between the intoxicating spirit of the German waltz and the rhumba or swing, or between a good newspaper supplement and the feuilleton-scribbling of the 12-Uhr-Blatt.
We gladly leave Kestenberger, Schonberg, and Stravinsky to the civilized and pretentious art circles abroad. We, the young German generation, are in any case aware of the fact that the legacy of a great past in the field of music places a special obligation on us. We, the people of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Handel, cannot and will not any longer allow one of the noblest blooms of cultural life to fall increasingly victim to degeneration and to ultimate degradation to satisfy the demands of big-city night clubs and international bordellos.
For this it is necessary that we destroy once and for all the deeper ideological roots of this monstrous degeneration. The issue here is wholly different from the struggle for a new musical style, for the "ideal" of a new formal linear structure independent of harmonics, for the burgeoning powers of a new tonal sensibility, or however the philosophical ornaments of these confusions may be called. Rather, this music quite simply represents the outbreak of the nihilism of the postwar period, and accordingly is no longer expression, revelation, but a shriek, an unbridled discharge of its raw material. "Contemporary music" quite clearly presents both types of every phenomenon of decay.
One of these works almost entirely on the intellect, the other on the nerves. The former can be called paper music, the latter nerve music. Here too the usual dichotomy between soul and body emerges, which is the mark of the Western Asiatic racial and cultural expression. Both types are out of contact with the emotional life and try to make a virtue out of this shortcoming: in the place of intuitively grasped ideas they set rationally constructed work.
The first type comes from mechanistically ill-structured brains. A noisy, meaningless music is its means of expression. The second type is the product of jaded, diseased nerves. The effect achieved constitutes its principal means of expression: complicated cacophony resembling noise and choppy rhythm. It loves to simulate temperament, but in reality it is nothing but impulse. Both types are one-sided, and as a result their effect is weakened. What is more obvious now than the attempt to amalgamate both tendencies, which bear in themselves the germ of quick decay, in order to prolong their short life! But in vain! An amalgamation proved itself to be impossible.
The result was a combination of over-stimulated intellect and pathological impulse. Technique was the only element that held them together. But even technique can only couple; it cannot unite, for it is nothing but an external emergency measure. Besides, "contemporary music" itself leads to absurdity. It has gone beyond itself; it is no longer the expression of feeling but corresponds to the pleasure which the intellect takes in forming combinations and to the craving of the nerves for sensations. No doubt this music is difficult to master, but one can recognize it. It is no longer a rare novelty; it has lost its uniqueness. But it wanted above all to be unique, and rarefied! Thus the level of this music gradually sank lower and lower. It became a kind of night plant living under electric lights in an atmosphere of bad air, cheap perfume, and sticky tobacco smoke, even if it was produced in a setting of "high" society.
Alongside this ideological and general human degeneration there emerged the doctrine of the so-called international character of art and its independence from the Volk spirit and temporal events. The organic relationship between the creative artist and the people was denied. Denied also was the fact that Volk and race constitute the roots of every artistic creation, that, above all, music also is subject to the conditions and uniformities of biological data, that the energies of the people contribute to creativity, just as in a tree the sap rises from the root to the blossom. In this way the artist became incapable of shaping the elements of art, and thus the primordial symbol of his people, into significant form. He borrowed the art forms of alien peoples and races....
From Der SA-Mann, Sept. 18, 1937. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
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Notes:1. For this speech, see p. 11.
2. Referring, to the cultural section of the press. Ever since this had developed in the nineteenth century, its style was highly subjective, introverted, and critical of all aspects of life. The Nazis put an end to it.
3. In German: Tee und Tanz.
4. Haus und Hof.
5. Kind und Kegel.
6. A Berlin daily newspaper which featured articles on sports and the theater, light and amusingly written.
Fairytale Scenes on Peacock IslandOn the eve of the festival days, when the great Olympic Games came to an end, the Reich Minister for the People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, in the name of the German Reich Government, invited the honored guests of the contests to a summer festival on romantic Peacock Island.
Under the command of Major Henke, army engineers on Saturday night dismantled the pontoon bridges leading to the platforms that had been built on the water at Grunau and then put them up again between the shore of Nikolskoe and the island. The flags of many nations fluttered in the breeze from the masts which were fastened to the pontoons. The lights of hundreds of sailboats and canoes were reflected in the dark waters of the Havel, and when the guests arrived at the scene they were encircled by a picture of magical beauty. A chain of pages dressed in white led the way to the great meadow. Numerous lanterns cast a resplendent, hundredfold light; melodies played by the state orchestra of the [NSDAP] district of Berlin, under the direction of conductors Spiess and Wicke, rang out on the air. Loudspeakers carried the music to the remotest corners of the island. A magic light radiated from hedges and bushes, filtering through the lush green of the leaves. Giant night moths glowed in the centuries-old linden and oak trees. The special setting of the festival was created under the general direction of chief government councillor Gutterer and of Reich stage designer Benno von Arent, who was responsible for the decorative scheme and who masterfully transformed the beauties of the romantic island in the Havel into a fairyland. The evening sky of a mild summer night stood over the scene of joy and splendor.
The summer festival of the German Reich Government was especially enhanced by the artistic presentations. Famous soloists and the entire ensemble of the German Opera House of Berlin, under the direction of ballet master Rudolf Kolling, were part of the colorful program, which began with a dance of the Olympic Games to the tunes of the old maestro Johann Strauss.
Love gods from the eighteenth century, with various robes and colorful wings, which had been modeled after figurines from the age of Frederick the Great, fluttered like porcelain figures on the tables as gifts for the ladies. The enormous dancing area, set amid the majestic groves of trees, filled up with couples who danced to the music of bandleader Oskar Joost of the "Femina," Eugen Wolff of the "Eden," and Emanuel Rambourn of the "Kaiserhof."
Late at night a splendid fireworks display won the special applause and admiration of the many guests.
From Der Angriff, Aug. 18, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
Beautiful Gowns at the Annual Press BallOne of the most beautiful gowns consisted of pale-blue, delicately threaded mat crepe set off by a short, saddlelike ruffle in the front and a very deep One in the back made of pearl-studded circular figures of the same color.... A similar effect was created by a snow-white tulle gown which was not so theatrically insubstantial that it threatened to fly off in a draft of air. ... No doubt the tulle ruffles, despite their unreal delicacy, had surprisingly great body thanks to an invisible stiffening of their base with horsehair tulle strips.... One saw heavily embroidered silver edges combined with blue velvet which formed a contrast to fine-meshed, very thinly woven edges. ... Half of a heavily ruffled, strongly shaped side was made of strawberry-colored satin silk and the other half of black velvet as a seam end for a freely 'swinging frock.... Wine-red and blue-gray scintillating taffeta with the front part delicately tucked in.... Smoothness and dignity were also the leitmotifs of the dancing gowns.
From Die Neue WeItbuhne, Vol. I, No.7 (1934), p. 215. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
Wanted: CroupiersSeveral croupier candidates, 25 to 35 years of age, wanted for a training course. Knowledge of languages and skill in dealing with figures required as well as no previous criminal record. Written applications only, to be sent to the management of the Casino, Personnel Division, Baden-Baden.
From Der Fuhrer, May 4, 1940. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)