Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Author: Kay Schmücking

Kay Schmücking is a research assistant at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He is currently working on a PhD project on ‘Dying and Death as a Media Event: A Media History of Heroic Sacrificial Death, 1930–1950’. His research interests lie in the history of National Socialism, media history, and the culture of remembrance in the twentieth century.

Britain’s View of the German Cult of the Dead: A Media History Perspective

In September 1943, at a time when the Second World War was turning into a military debacle for the German Wehrmacht, the Leicester Evening Mail published an article entitled ‘The New German Valhalla: Nazis’ Pagan Cult of Death’. In it, the author analysed the current state of German wartime society and focused in particular on the central importance of the cult of death in German warfare:

Understand Germany’s morbid addiction to the Nibelungenlied, and you will understand also Germany’s official mood after Stalingrad, when for weeks the radio played funeral marches and newspapers, newsreels and Nazi speakers wallowed in a revolting orgy of death, morbidity and shameless self-pity . . . This sadistic longing for the ‘glorious’ and universal death is a dangerous element in the German make-up we must not forget, however much we may despise it . . . Everything that comes out of Germany these days reveals that the cult of death and immolation is spreading in the Reich . . . But perhaps, with bombs raining from the skies in ever-increasing volume . . . the Germans may yet learn that death is far from sweet and glorious even under a tyrant of their own making.1

Continue reading Britain’s View of the German Cult of the Dead: A Media History Perspective
  1. ‘The New German Valhalla: Nazis’ Pagan Cult of Death’, Leicester Evening Mail, 22 Sept. 1943, 3. [↩]