January 30, 1933, in the Nazi Historical Imaginary
Christian Goeschel
January 30, 1933, in the Nazi Historical Imaginary - Volume 56 Issue 3
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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.Footnote 1

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.Footnote 2 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.Footnote 3

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.Footnote 4

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.Footnote 5 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.Footnote 6 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.”Footnote 7

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.Footnote 8

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.Footnote 9 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.Footnote 10