Rachel Maxwell

CMPST 640R

29 November 2014

Dr. Roger MacFarlane

The Nazis and Aeschylus

In early August of 1936, the Berlin based stage director Lothar

Müthel produced Aeschylus’s The Oresteia (production title Orestie)

in the Staatliche Schauspielhaus in the Gendermenmarkt of the

German capital, then at the height of the National Socialist

regime. Researchers covering this production almost universally

agree that Müthel’s Orestie was highly pro-Nazi, and was a

performance directed largely at an international audience in

conjunction with the Summer Olympics that year, but few scholars

in either the English or the German languages have done further

study than this. The Orestes myth and other elements of antiquity

were already of interest to the German culture even before

Hitler’s rise to power, but the Nazis utilized it in a propaganda

campaign. The performance of Orestie was not incidental to the

Olympics, but was planned as part of it. The Nazis’ aim during

the Olympics, from Müthel’s production to Leni Riefenstahl’s film

Olympia, was to draw a parallel or a connection between German

culture in the modern age and Greek culture in the period of

antiquity. Doing so suggested that Nazi Germany was destined to

be the ancestor and founder of a new cultural age, a new period

of civilization; in effect, to be to the future Europe what

Greco-Roman antiquity is to the Western World today. Because the

performance had propagandistic purposes, it is important to first

outline the context of its production during the 1936 Olympics,

as well as the fundamental ideologies of National Socialism; it

was not the content, but the context, that made Müthel’s Orestie

pro-Nazi.

The Nazi use of Greek theater for propaganda may strike some

historians as unexpected; the National Socialist emphasis on

German-ness naturally bled over into their control over the arts.

In a speech on November 15th, 1933, only a few months after

Hitler’s rise to power, the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels

remarked,

We intend to be the patron saints of German art and culture.The hunger which has gripped the German people does not onlyextend as far as their stomachs. It is just as much a hungerof their souls: this too needs to be sated. Like everygenuine revolution, ours too aims for a radical

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transformation of our cultural life and spiritualcreativity. […] The new national art of Germany will onlyenjoy respect in the world and bear witness beyond thefrontiers of our country to the intense cultural dynamism ofthe new Germany if it is firmly and iradicably rooted in themother earth of the natural culture [Volkstum] whichproduced it. The world must discover anew what is German andgenuine.1

The National Socialists ruled on a platform of radical

nationalism, racism, and autarky, and to turn to foreign

antiquity doesn’t seem consistent on their part; it is therefore

surprising that less than a year after he made this speech,

Goebbels’ Organizing Committee eagerly undertook the task of

organizing the Olympics. Hitler struggled with the idea of

hosting the Olympic Games at all, but the International Olympic

Committee had made the decision to hold the Games in Berlin years

before Hitler’s election as Chancellor in 1933. However, as the

historian Richard J. Evans describes in The Third Reich in Power,

political pressure eventually won over Hitler’s skepticism:

“Sport for its own sake had no appeal to Nazi ideology, and he

found the internationalism of the event highly suspect. But when

1 Joseph Goebbels. “The Total Revolution of National Socialism.” Oxford Readers: Fascism. ed. Roger Griffin. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 134.

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a boycott campaign was mounted, particularly in the United

States, over the Third Reich’s treatment of the Jews, he realized

that the transfer of the Games elsewhere would be extremely

damaging, and that staging the Games in Germany would provide an

unmissable opportunity to influence world opinion in favor of the

Third Reich.”2

There was already precedent for this. By 1936, in a time

when Hitler was both actively and subliminally preparing his

people for war, the Nazis were already engaged in an

internationally directed campaign proclaiming a peaceful message.

In March the previous year, they released acclaimed director Leni

Riefenstahl’s notorious film Triumph of the Will, a 114-minute

documentation of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies, which conveys an

oddly mixed message of both militarism and peace. The film

contains excerpts of speeches from most of Hitler’s inner circle,

and many speeches from Hitler himself, but these speeches all

convey a positive image of Nazism, words appealing to the dream

of world peace. It is interesting to note that not once in the

film do the Nazis discuss their anti-Semitic platform, except for2 Richard J. Evans. The Third Reich in Power. (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 570.

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a veiled comment by Julius Streicher concerning the preservation

of racial purity; but at the same time there are multiple images

hinting of militarism, especially an outdoor rally of the

Reichsarbeitsdienst (Labor Service) showing hundreds of men doing

pseudo-military drills with spades rather than rifles. Because of

her use of revolutionary filming techniques, Riefenstahl won

multiple awards both within Germany and without.

During the Olympics, Riefenstahl was also engaged in a

project documenting the games in a film called Olympia, the first

ten minutes of which overtly draw the connection between Germany

and the Greco-Roman world. The title sequence features stone

tablets carved with the words “OLYMPIA: DER FILM VON DEN XI

OLYMPISCHEN SPIELEN BERLIN 1936” in the style of Roman writing. A

sequence showing images of Greek and Roman ruins directly

follows, including the Parthenon in Athens. The scene then

changes to images of Greek statues, settling on a discobolus,

which then fades out, revealing a live, mostly nude German

athlete in the exact same position, who then throws a disc. From

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this point follows a sequence of similar athletes throwing the

shot put and the javelin.3

Additional details of the 1936 Olympics further illustrate

this message, including the traditional torch relay, which first

was performed at this particular event, an idea which someone in

Goebbels’ Organizing Committee first proposed in 1934.4

Müthel’s production of Orestie likewise was part of this.

However, the scholarship on the performance, in spite of the

interest in Nazism and Nazi ideology, is strangely lacking. In

the English language only an article by Erika Fischer-Lichte, a

professor at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft in Berlin,

delves into greater detail than a couple of sentences. While

“Resurrecting Greece in Nazi Germany” details the performance

itself and some relevant contextual details about the Olympics

and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, it does not give great detail

involving the Nazis themselves, and their ideological and

political aims in the context of the Olympics. The lack of

scholarship in English-speaking academia may be due to the fact3 Leni Riefenstahl. Olympia. Venice, CA: (Pathfinder Home Entertainment, 2006), 2 videodiscs, 204 min. 4 Christopher Hilton. Hitler’s Olympics. (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2006), 20.

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that from a distance the performance of Orestie is problematic to

analyze, because there is no recording of the performance, few

photographs, and limited access to the script, which is available

only in the archives of the Frei Universität Berlin. Most

information about the production therefore comes from commentary,

and from speculative analysis of the translation by Ulrich von

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, which Müthel used in the performance.

In German language scholarship, mentions of the production

are more frequent, but while they generally give more detail than

English-speaking scholars, there is also a lack of comprehensive

focus on the performance; most mentions come from books on Nazi

theater. Theater im «Dritten Reich» (co-authors Thomas Eicher, Barbara

Panse, et al.) offers a few brief details such as the dates of

the performance (3, 4, and 7 August 1936), the translation used,

and a note on an important review by contemporary critic Karl

Heinz Ruppel; while Hellmut Flashar provides a chapter on the

performance in his book Inszenierung der Antike.

Much of the commentary from Müthel’s contemporaries,

consistent with the Nazis’ aims, conveys the opinion that there

was an intrinsic link between the spirit of ancient Greece and

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the spirit of modern Germany. The classical world has been of

interest to Germans at least since the 18th century, oddly in

connection with the rise of Romanticism. Notable instances of

interest particularly in the house of Atreus include Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (original edition 1779),

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and Richard Strauss’s subsequent

operatic adaptation (1903 and 1909 respectively), and Karl

Vollmöller’s production of The Oresteia in 1919, considered one of

the most important German theatrical events of the Weimar period.

Commentary on Müthel’s production, both from newspaper reviews,

from critics, and from Nazi officials, seem to reflect the

remarks of Goebbels, whose diary entry on the performance states,

“A truly classical evening. How near to us are the Greeks.”5 It

is noteworthy that Goebbels earned his Ph.D. from Heidelberg

University with a thesis on Romantic literature, and it would not

have been difficult for him to follow this interest, given that

the Romantics, including Goethe, took interest in the Greeks as

an early attempt to draw parallels between Greek culture and the

spirit of German Kultur. 5 Joseph Goebbels. “4 August 1936.” Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. ed. Elke Fröhlich. (München: K.G. Saur Verlag GmbH, 2001), 148.

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Inszenierung der Antike and “Resurrecting Greece in Nazi Germany”

both provide good descriptions of the performance, compiled from

reviews in newspapers. According to the latter, the set designer,

Traugott Müller, did not try to copy the conditions of a Greek

amphitheater, largely due to the design of the Schauspielhaus; so

for Agamemnon he created the front steps of a grand palace,

while The Libation Bearers featured the huge funeral monument of

Agamemnon. For The Eumenides, Müller constructed a two-story

columned structure, with a gigantic statue of Athena in the

center. This monumental design was consistent with the image of a

glorious nation state, which the Nazis promoted with the frequent

use of neoclassical art and architecture (an image that goes as

far back as Napoleon Bonaparte). Meanwhile, Müthel used an

adaptation of Wilamowitz’s translation, a choice that Fischer-

Lichte found very interesting:

It seems rather strange that he used Wilamowitz’stranslation. For, as one can gather from the reviews, hisstaging of the first two parts of The Oresteia conveyed theimage of an archaic, savage, much more in line withNietzsche’s vision. He made only slight changes to thetranslation by removing many of the Christian terms andother expressions which sounded too outdated or too slanted.It seems, then, that the most important reason for usingWilamowitz’s translation grew from the need to construe a

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certain kind of continuity between the pre-war German Empireand the ‘Third Reich.’ However, the changes and cuts made byMüthel do not suggest any ideological or politicalstatement. In this sense, the critics seem to be right whenpraising the production as ‘true to the text.’6

These “cuts and changes” to which Fischer-Lichte refers are

handwritten edits which are visible on the script in the Freie

Universität Berlin; Ruppel also provides more detail on these

changes, which seem rather minor. Müthel only changed overtly

religious terms, such as “God in heaven,” “hell,” or “sin,” or

other expressions that sounded out of place.7

The need for continuity between the German Empire and the

Third Reich wasn’t limited to international propaganda. Ian

Kershaw’s book The Hitler Myth details the personality cult which

Hitler created, a move which secured his position so successfully

that it inspired Joseph Stalin to do the same in the Soviet

Union; Kershaw argues that responding to an early Romantic ideal

of a ‘heroic’ leader, the people of Germany saw in Hitler a

national savior in the light of the humiliation of World War I6 Erika Fischer-Lichte. “Resurrecting Greece in Nazi Germany.” Performance, Iconography, Reception. ed. Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 489. 7 K.H. Ruppel. “Das Ende der Heroenzeit.” Großes Berliner Theater. (Velber bei Hannover: Erhard Friedrich Verlag, 1962), 10.

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and the failure of the Weimar Republic: “The trauma of 1918 for

the right… transformed the previously more latent than active

notions of authoritarian ‘heroic’ leadership into a broad

counterrevolutionary force, if at first a vague and divided one,

posing an alternative vision to that of the Weimar party-

political system.”8 In this context, though none of the

contemporary critics overtly say as much, it is not difficult to

draw a parallel between Agamemnon’s leadership, his murder, and

eventual avenging by Orestes, and the previous “Second Reich,”

its collapse and usurpation by “the hated Social Democrats,”9 and

its resurrection at Hitler’s hands.

To the German mind of 1936, the opening scene of Agamemnon,

with the watchman looking out for the news of victory over the

Trojans, might echo their own memories of waiting for victory

during World War I: “Auch heute späh’ ich nach dem leuchtenden

Signal, der Flamme, die von Troia Kunde bringen soll und

Siegesbotschaft.”10 At the beginning of the Great War, the German8 Ian Kershaw. The Hitler Myth. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 18.9 Ibid. 10 Aischylos. “Agamemnon.” Griechische Tragoedien. Zweiter Band. trans. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1901), 51, line 8. The word victory, in German “Sieg”

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newspapers and army bulletins gave the German people a very

positive outlook of the two fronts, as German citizen Raimund

Pretzel (under the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner) reflects in his

memoir Defying Hitler, in which he offers a good perspective of what

was happening in Germany, in the eyes of ordinary people, in the

period between 1914 and 1938. Concerning the Great War, he

writes,

I could not imagine a day without the army bulletins. Such aday would have been without its chief attraction. … Lifegained its thrill, the day its color, from the currentmilitary events. If a great offensive was on, with thenumber of prisoners running to five figures, fortificationscaptured, and “immeasurable gains of war material,” it feltlike a holiday season. There was an endless supply of foodfor the imagination, and life was grand;… I no longer hadany clear conception of peace, though I had some idea of the“Final Victory.” The Final Victory—the grand total thatwould one day be the inevitable result of all the manypartial victories mentioned in the military bulletins—wasfor me what the Last Day and the Resurrection are for apious Christian, or the coming of the Messiah for areligious Jew. It was the stupendous climax of all thosetriumphant bulletins in which the number of prisoners, sizeof territory gained, and quantity of booty outdid oneanother. What would follow was beyond imagining. I waitedfor the final Victory with eager but timorous trepidation.That it would come was inevitable.11

would have appealed to a Nazi audience, as they frequently used it in their propaganda.11 Sebastian Haffner. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. trans. Oliver Pretzel. (New York: Picador, 2000), 20.

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Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will illustrates visually that

early on in the Nazi regime, Hitler was preparing the Germans for

war. On March 7th, 1936, a few months before the Olympics, Hitler

had already violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles by

sending troops to occupy the Rhineland, which, though German

territory, previously had been under French control. At the same

time, the youth of Germany, were all recruited into programs such

as the Jungvolk and the Hitler Youth, which, according to German

citizen Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, entailed premilitary training:

participation in mock battles, singing patriotic songs, learning

to shoot rifles, swearing oaths and wearing uniforms.12 In his

short story “An diesem Dienstag,” former soldier Wolfgang

Borchert illustrates the Nazis’ warlike rhetoric a scene with

schoolgirls practicing letters by writing the sentence, “Im Krieg

sind alle Väter Soldat.”13 The first part of Agamemnon, in which

the chorus describes the Trojan War and the sacrifice of

12 Karl-Heinz Schnibbe. When Truth Was Treason: German Youth against Hitler. trans. Blaire R. Holmes and Alan F. Keele. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 18.13 Wolfgang Borchert. “An diesem Dienstag.” Draußen vor der Tür, und ausgewählte Erzählungen. (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), 58.

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Iphegenia, thus might also hold some appeal to this rhetoric of

putting the nation and the war before one’s own family, such as

the line, “Da fand [Agamemnon] der Mut seine Tochter zu

schlachten, Gelingen zu schaffen dem Krieg um ein Weib, der

Flotte den Segen zu geben.”14 To a Nazi mindset, the tragedy of

Agamemnon would not have been the doom that this action had

brought upon him, but the inability of Clytemnestra to understand

sacrifice; had she been a proper woman, not only would

Clytemnestra have understood and accepted the necessity of

Iphigenia’s death, she would have strapped Iphigenia to the

alter. To the Nazis, fanaticism was a virtue; and Joseph

Goebbels’ wife Magda demonstrated this fanaticism when, at the

end of the war, she murdered her own children rather than allow

them to live in a world without National Socialism.15

Unlike the watchman in Agamemnon, the German people waited

for news of victory that never came. On the morning of the

Armistice and the day following, Pretzel recalls, the usual army

14 Aischylos. “Agamemnon.” Griechische Tragoedien. Zweiter Band. trans. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1901), 59, line 225. 15 Richard J. Evans. The Third Reich at War. (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009), 727,

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bulletins appeared on the police notice boards with the same

kinds of news, but the next day he, and many other Germans, were

unnerved to find nothing on the notice boards. Pretzel first

learned about the Armistice at a newsagent’s shop, rather than at

the police station: “How shall I describe my feelings—the

feelings of an eleven-year-old boy whose entire inner world has

collapsed? … The terms no longer spoke the careful language of

the army bulletins. They spoke the merciless language of defeat;

as merciless as the bulletins had been, when they spoke of enemy

defeats. The fact that such a thing could happen to ‘us’ not as

an isolated incident but as the final result of victory upon

victory, just would not fit into my head.”16

Pretzel’s shock, of course, wasn’t unique to him; the

expectation of optimistic news, only for the government to admit

defeat, stunned the entire German nation. The subsequent Treaty

of Versailles, signed in 1919, only offered further humiliation.

The Social Democratic Party of Germany took charge of the

government, and the Kaiser abdicated, living the rest of his life

in exile. The transition of Germany from absolute monarchy to16 Sebastian Haffner. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. trans. Oliver Pretzel. (New York: Picador, 2000), 26.

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democracy turned German life upside down, and it was a transition

marked with the threat of communism. For early twentieth-century

Germans, communism was hardly a distant danger; at that time,

Germany’s easternmost border was less than two hundred miles from

the Soviet Union, and in the year following the armistice, Rosa

Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the leaders of the communist

Spartakists, made an unsuccessful attempt at Marxist revolution

that transformed Berlin into a battleground. The Social

Democratic government, unable to function in Berlin, was forced

to relocate to Weimar, hence the name Weimar Republic. For

conservative Germans, the entire debacle represented the end of

the nation they believed in, and the chaos and anarchy that

democracy entailed. Unable to accept the reality of the Great

War, they widely attributed the armistice in 1918, and the

subsequent defeat of the German Empire in 1919, to the actions of

the perceived internal enemies such as Social Democrats,

republicans, Jews, communists, or any form of left-wing

revolutionary.17 This myth came to be called the

Dolchstoßlegende, the “stab-in-the-back” myth, and it served as a17 Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich. (New York: Penguine Books, 2005.), 61.

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fundamental tool for Nazi propaganda. In Mein Kampf, Hitler

described the Armistice as “the greatest villainy of the

century.”18

Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, and Aegisthus’s

subsequent usurpation of power, would bear remarkable similarity

to the Dolchstoßlegende in the eyes of a German audience at that

time. Her dramatic entry, bringing the freshly murdered bodies of

Agamemnon and Cassandra, demonstrates the decadence she has

fallen into, not only because of her deed but because of the joy

and pleasure she takes from it: “Freuen könnt ihr euch, wenn ihr

daran euch freuen mögt. Ich jauchze drob!”19 From her first

appearance in the play up through Agamemnon’s return to Argos,

Clytemnestra does very little to indicate what she’s planning,

and so neither Agamemnon nor the chorus of elders suspect

anything, but the prophetess Cassandra indicates otherwise:

Kassandra:Ha, was sinnt sie?ein neues Verbrechen?Ein neues, entsetzliches sinnt sie.

18 Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. trans. (Ralph Manheim. Boston: HoughtonMifflin Company, 1999), 202. 19 Aischylos. “Agamemnon.” Griechische Tragoedien. Zweiter Band. trans. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1901), 102, line 1394.

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Kein Arzt heilt diese Wunde, wenn der Streichgelingt.Und niemand wehrt ihm, ferne säumt der FreundeSchutz. …20

Ich sage, schauen wirst du Agamemnons Mord. 21 …

Da steht sie, diese Löwin, die dem Wolfe sichgesellte, weil der edle Löwe ferne war. ...Sie prahlt, da für den Gatten sie das Messer wetzt, sein Blut bezahle, dass er mich hierher geführt.22

The word Verbrechen, meaning “crime”, used in the above

speech, would likely have struck a chord with a Nazi audience,

especially in light of the Dolchstoßlegende, whose proponents

described the signers of the 1918 Armistice as Novemberverbrecher

(“November criminals”).23 Hitler himself used the term in Mein

Kampf: “Did all this [the war and Germany’s defeat] happen so

that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the

fatherland? … Miserable and degenerate criminals!”24 The use of

the term “Verbrechen” in the Wilamowitz translation is distinct

20 Aischylos. “Agamemnon.” Griechische Tragoedien. Zweiter Band. trans. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1901), 89. Line 1100.21 Ibid, 96. Line 1246.22 Ibid. line 125823 Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich. (New York: Penguine Books, 2005.), 75. 24 Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. trans. (Ralph Manheim. Boston: HoughtonMifflin Company, 1999), 205.

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from other translations such as Ludwig Wolde’s (used in a later

production in 1942), which uses the word “Unheil” (disaster)

instead.25 The word Messer, (knife) in the above speech also

conveys the image of the “Dolchstoß” which literally means

“dagger-thrust.” This along with the images of victory (“Sieg”)

and sacrifice (that of Iphigenia) might have held a very strong

appeal to Nazi rhetoric. Thus the presence of these particular

words may suggest another reason Müthel chose to use the

Wilamowitz translation; they are all terms that the Nazis

regularly used in propaganda.

In Nazi propaganda, where Germany’s enemies have dishonored

and desecrated the fatherland, a hero to save the fatherland

naturally follows. In Agamemnon, Cassandra also prophesied that

the murdered king would be avenged: “Und doch, nicht ganz von

Gott verlassen scheid’ ich hin.26 Es kommt und nimmt Vergeltung

auf für meinen Tod den Vater rächend muttermörderisch der

Sohn.”27 At the end of Agamemnon, after Clytemnestra and Aegisthus25 Aischylos. “Orestie.” Tragödien. trans. Ludwig Wolde. (München: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1957), 131. 26 The word “Gott” found here probably was one of the terms Müthel changed for the performance, as Fischer-Lichte describes. 27 Aischylos. “Agamemnon.” Griechische Tragoedien. Zweiter Band. trans. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. (Berlin: Wiedmannsche

19

boast of the murder and their reasons for it, the chorus also

takes up this prophecy, declaring that Aegisthus has brought

desecration upon the land, and speaking of Orestes, warn the

usurpers: “Sei ihm [Orestes] die Gottheit gnädig, kehr’ er

einstmals heim und nehme blutig an euch beiden sich das Recht!”28

To the Nazis, the idea of an “Orestes” restoring the honor of

Argos strongly appeals to the Hitler personality cult.

Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, in this context, sound like an

allegory for what the Nazis viewed as the decadent, foreign-born

seduction of democracy that corrupted Germany during the Weimar

era, the “miserable, degenerate criminals” that Hitler described.

The redemption and renewal of a nation by completely

exterminating the corrupting elements was an idea common to all

fascist ideologies, which do not speak of reform, but of

revolution. Thus, in the fascist sense, the only way for Orestes

to restore honor to Argos and to the house of Atreus is to kill

his mother and her lover. This is a strange correlation to the

German ideal of the “heroic leader,” which Kershaw describes, and

Buchhandlung, 1901), 97. Line 128028 Ibid, 112. Line 1647.

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Hitler put himself forward as that heroic leader at least as

early as his first attempt to take power in 1923.

If the Nazis intended to forge a connection between the

Führer and Orestes, then it would have been a move directed more

at the German audience than at the international audience; but

this would have been consistent with the image of Germany as an

heir to ancient Greece; even before the Olympics started, some of

the Nazi officials spoke of the Third Reich as a “savior of the

West,” the enemy force being Communism. To the Germans, whose

borders were uncomfortably close to the Soviet Union’s, the

threat of communism seemed very real during both the Weimar era

and the Third Reich. In 1934, Hermann Göring, founder of the

Gestapo and President of the Reichstag, remarked, “Germany’s

Führer will be the foremost safeguard of European peace… Germany

is and remains the heart of Europe, and Europe can only live in

health and in freedom if the heart is healthy and intact.”29

While actual statements concerning parallels in the Orestes myth

are lacking, the story of Agamemnon’s murder and Orestes’ revenge

29 Hermann Göring. “The Third Reich as Savior of the West.” Oxford Readers: Fascism. ed. Roger Griffin. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 133.

21

bears a remarkably close correlation with the story Hitler

propagated of Germany’s restoration to the honor and greatness of

the “Second Reich,” which possibly is why Goebbels remarked, “Wie

nahe uns die Griechen stehen.” The production of Orestie, along

with the show of the 1936 Olympics, is best understood in this

context. It was politically charged and ideologically motivated,

as were most German arts and literatures produced during the Nazi

era.

Bibliography

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22

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