Seaside Encounters: Culture, Politics, and Comradeship at the German-Nordic Writers' House, 1934-1939

This dissertation explores the history of the German-Nordic Writers’ House, an institution that brought young, male writers from the Nordic countries and Germany together for leisurely and “comradely” togetherness and travels through the Third Reich each summer from 1934 to 1939. By exploring the Writers’ House in relation to recent research on culture and transnational relations in National Socialist Germany, the dissertation engages with the Writers’ House’s institutional history, the nature of its cultural relations work, and its place as a node in a transnational space for literary and cultural exchange that traversed the geographical and ideological borders between the Third Reich and the Nordic countries. Utilizing a wide-ranging archival source base, including a large volume of hitherto unexplored sources, the dissertation closes a tangible research gap by prodiving an institutional history of the Writers’ House. Moreover, it situates the Writers’ House in its transnationally constituted political, ideological, intellectual, and cultural contexts, thereby addressing questions increasingly being posed within various strands of historiography on fascism and the Third Reich.
The dissertation addresses those questions by perceiving the Writers’ House as an example of National Socialist cultural diplomacy. Its introduction outlines the existing literature on the Writers’ House as well as the historiographical strands informing the dissertation and offers theoretical reflections on the relationship between culture and politics and different approaches to cultural relations. The dissertation’s first part follows the Writers’ House’s institutional and ideational prehistory up until and including the inauguration of the House. It does so in two chapters, the first of which discusses German cultural diplomatic efforts in the German-Nordic space during the Weimar years, in turn introducing three cultural diplomatic actors who would become essential to the founding of the Writers’ House: the Nordic Society, Fred J. Domes, and Hans Friedrich Blunck. How those preconditions materialized into a National Socialist cultural relations institution is discussed in the following chapter, which takes the festivities marking the inauguration of the institution as its point of departure. Moreover, by discussing the speeches of two representatives of Nordic writers’ associations at those festivities, it explores the historically and economically conditioned motivations for Nordic writers to participate in the new institution.
The dissertation’s second part consists of three chapters, each of which examines various aspects of the Writers’ House’s existence as a cultural diplomatic actor. The first addresses the relationships between the Writers’ House and the Nordic writers’ associations and the controversies stemming from those relationships. It demonstrates that the Writers’ House became part of contemporary debates in the transnational Nordic literary field on how to react to the rise of the Third Reich. The dissertation’s fourth chapter explores the organizers’ relationship with the cultural political landscape of the polycratic National Socialist state, showing how their space for maneuvering shrank as former visitors acted contrary to the diplomatic interests of the Third Reich. Together, the two chapters argue that the organizers were caught in a central dilemma of cultural diplomacy in the Third Reich, where the need for cultural institutions to appear as autonomous from politics abroad was at odds with the interests of the National Socialist state as interpreted by ministry officials. As such, they highlight a tension in the relationship between culture and politics that pervades the history of the Writers’ House. In assessing the cultural relations efforts facilitated at the institution in conceptual and practical terms, the dissertation’s last chapter takes the organizers’ frequent invocations of notions of friendship, community, and comradeship at the House at face value, seeing them as operational concepts for the conduct of cultural exchange at and beyond the Writers’ House. In analyzing the concepts, spatiality, and practices of friendship, comradeship, and community, the chapter argues that they bridged the divide between the need to appear non-political for cultural relations purposes and making those cultural relations serve the interests of the Third Reich and its image abroad.