ABSTRACT
In a country such as Nazi Germany, coercively devoid of all liberal pre-requisites such as free speech and freedom of association, with no free or practising parliament, with no possibility of citizens expressing themselves through the ballot box, without even rudimentary opinion polls, how can we retrospectively interpret citizen support for the regime? Cultural indicators such as the names given to newborn boys offer a door to study the degree of support for totalitarian regimes, but also to go some way towards reconstructing the ambience in which names were invested with meaning. With the Nazis in power, the political opportunity structure of taste underwent a substantial change, as the regime formally and informally fostered the repository of male Germanic names. This trend was related to modernisation and its accompanying secularisation process, but the Nazis also encouraged traditional Germanic names. One such name, Horst, become very popular during the Third Reich.
Introduction
Names have, over time, become a matter of choice rather than tradition. Though the selection of possible names has remained fairly stable, their social attractiveness varies significantly. The name Horst enjoyed increasing popularity during a good part of the National Socialist dictatorship. An analysis of the proliferation and decline in the frequency of this name will allow us to look at how a totalitarian regime – a peculiar political opportunity structure that substantially restricted matters of personal choice – extended its influence to such apparently unlikely corners as taste, as reflected in the case of given names. Taken in conjunction with political and military events, this cultural indicator also allows us to examine how the legitimacy of the Nazi regime fared in the eyes of its citizens. The study of the evolution of the name Horst thus offers an entrance door to study and reconstruct aspects of mobilised support for the Third Reich. Leaving aside family tradition, naming sons Horst meant greater proximity to the regime than those naming theirs Gerhard or Johann.
Departing from already available though scattered information, I will merge analytical insights derived from the sociology of taste with historical evidence in order to attempt a better understanding of the evolution of German public opinion during the Third Reich. I will thus build on studies on newborns’ names in Germany that have been conducted from different perspectives, from linguistics through sociology, demography and history. All of them are either too broad or too narrow: too broad inasmuch as they highlight the evolution of children's names, both male and female, but neither focus on particular names nor on the historical period of interest here, National Socialism;1 or too narrow, since they tend to focus on case studies conducted in particular villages, cities or regions. 2 No study available so far is devoted exclusively to the evolution of a single given name during this period of German history. This is precisely my intention here: to show how the evolution of the use of the male name Horst was directly linked to political causes, and specifically to a favourable opportunity structure that empowered and propagated it in Nazi Germany. I will take this especially salient example of Nazi naming practices and explore in detail how the confluence of cultural and political factors made themselves felt. Moreover, the exploration of this particular name allows us qualitative insights into how it came to be used so often during the Third Reich. The regime glorified its martyr par excellence, Horst Wessel, provoking a fashion that would affect male names during and beyond the Nazi era. This article shows both an increase in the use of this name and allows us to understand more about how it might have been experienced that parents would want to give a boy the name Horst. But this process ended in a damnatio memoriae that led to the ‘castration’ of that name and others such as Adolf.
Since the fortunes of ‘Horst’ ran parallel to the popularity of the regime, changes in its frequency can potentially be understood as an indication (rather than a decisive proof) of popular adherence or disaffection towards National Socialism. An examination of the evolution of the name Horst serves as a valuable cultural indicator and opens a window to understanding the state of public opinion in an era of scarce freedom of expression and organisation. Its fate was closely linked to the fate of National Socialism. Changes in its frequency can be taken as an indicator of the popularity of the regime: its frequency increased in Nazi Germany up to the military defeat in Russia in 1942–1943, then decreased and, after World War II, became a kind of rarity only to be explained by family reasons or by loyalty to the Nazi cause.
Totalitarianism and the problem of access to public opinion
2 September 1941:
We count how many people in the shops say “Heil Hitler” and how many “Good afternoon”. The “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” is said to be increasing. At Zscheischler’s bakery five women said “Good afternoon”, two said “Heil Hitler”. Up. At Ölsner’s they all said “Heil Hitler”. Down (2006, vol. 1: 496).
Victor Klemperer’s diary provides us with a monumental record of the Nazi slide into disgrace and the progressive moral abdication that took place in the ‘country of thinkers and poets’.
Behind these observations by the German-Jewish linguist there is a concern to calibrate the nature and degree of popular support for a dictatorial regime. The arguments for its silencing of popular debate are immanent to totalitarian logic: those in power, under their charismatic, messianic and all-powerful leader, were convinced that they already knew and precisely represented the feelings of the citizens.3 Thus, there was no need to seek their opinion or (especially) to activate institutional mechanisms for legitimately translating public opinion into political will. They as leaders were uniquely qualified to be exegetes of the decision-making process, and as such managed to circumvent the entire citizenry and democratic procedures.4 At the historic moment of the Third Reich, externalising any critique of the regime, no matter how insignificant or veiled it might be, was extremely risky. The systematic persecution of ideological dissent (particularly by Communists and Social Democrats) extended to all citizens excluded from the sphere of moral obligation of the ‘national community’ due to their ethnic adscription or sexual orientation (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals … ) or because they had not been favoured in the ‘natural selection’ lottery.5
At this time survey studies were still in an embryonic phase, so they provided little helpful access to the popular will or to the feelings of Germans towards the regime that led them into war and a disaster that, generations later, continues to affect their present and future (Frei, 2009). The observations Klemperer scattered throughout his diary entries provide us with very valuable random x-rays of Dresden and its metropolitan area, where he lived, between 1933 and 1945. His testimony was not intended to have scientific scope and naturally lacks requirements of reliability, validation or representativeness. Klemperer’s diaries must be handled with great care when applied beyond their particular spatial–temporal coordinates. He, like all German citizens at the time, would have had limited access to information, which was filtered by censors. Under such circumstances, published public opinion would provide no access to the real climate of those years.
These cautionary issues lead us into a deep epistemological dilemma: in a public sphere coercively devoid of all liberal pre-requisites such as free speech and freedom of association, with no free or practising parliament, with no possibility of citizens expressing themselves through the ballot box, without even rudimentary opinion polls, how can we retrospectively measure and comprehend citizen support for the dictatorial Nazi regime? What means are available for discerning some sense of citizen opinion regarding their leaders and the project to eradicate freedom and culture from a people?
Within this totalitarian framework we must look for indications of voluntary, internalised conformity, that which is not directly influenced by repression or the threat of repression from the regime. Some historians clearly exaggerate when they state that 99% of the votes would have gone to the Nazi regime if there had been free elections in 1938 (Wehler, 2003, p. IV: 622), or that in the peacetime before 1939 the country lived under a ‘consensus dictatorship’ (Aly, 2003, p. 76), but there is no doubt that support exceeded the usual electoral base of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Many Germans went along with the regime out of conviction about its advantages and of the ‘positive’ sides of the dictatorship, as they saw them, such as assuring ‘law and order’ after the latent civil war towards the end of the Republic of Weimar; reinsuring national pride by rejecting the Treaty of Versailles or the referendum in the Saarland, thus restoring Germany’s ‘rightful’ place in the continent; or beating the Great Depression and curing massive unemployment.
This kind of analytical challenge calls for a more creative research approach, involving a search for indicators that allow us to estimate the state of public opinion under such adverse circumstances. In a pre-polling era, we can scarcely hope for ‘survey indicators’ to offer ‘a clue about the mindset and changes in mindset [of Germans] regarding ideologies and changes in ideologies’ (Wolffsohn & Brechenmacher, 1999, p. 211). But even if they are imperfect, distant from the information provided by electoral results, opinion polls or public opinion analyses by the media in free public spheres, there do exist indicators that are potentially more refined than the circumstantial and biased impressions recorded in diaries, in the correspondence of citizens and soldiers with their families and friends after the outbreak of the war, or in reports elaborated by both official documents and opposition organisations.6
One such indicator can be found in the newspaper obituaries published after the war began;7 another one is the names given to newborns, which constitute the focus of this study. In either case, their value should not be exaggerated. These are imprecise yet descriptive, intuitive and suggestive indicators of the degree of support for National Socialism. In other words, they may be regarded as thermometers that incorporate the diachronic variable into the study of the legitimacy of the regime. Such sources are obviously not precise measures of public opinion, but they do improve upon the selection of more or less contingent testimonies by Klemperer and others, which are weighed down by their immediacy, subjectivity and lack of access to reliable sources of information; moreover, they allow us to infer to some qualitative understanding of public attitudes too.
The social framework of taste: the case of given names
Naming children follows a common pattern with other fashion-directed phenomena: old-fashioned names fall out of use as the range of interesting names is updated. Even so, the name pool remains basically stable; but the social attractiveness of certain names experiences cyclical fluctuations. In other words, there is a series of social and political circumstances that explains changes in the aesthetic value given to a name. The preference for certain names is a socially constructed phenomenon that reflects processes of social change over time. Yet, in contrast with other expressions of taste and fashion in modern societies, such as food, clothing, hair styles, music, entertainment, architecture or literature, the names we choose for children appear to be relatively resistant to any influence from formal or informal sources such as designers, producers, marketing, artists and so on (Lieberson & Bell, 1992).
Maurice Halbwachs, himself a victim of National Socialism, inaugurated the study of the social conditioning of memory when he stated that ‘individuals usually acquire their memories in society. It is also in society where they evoke, recognize and locate their memories’ (1992, p. 38). By replacing the term ‘memory’ with the term ‘preference’ while retaining the vocation of delineating the social roots of individual behaviour in its final and most visible manifestation, we could say that each time and place presents different social frameworks of taste or, borrowing from the social movement literature, that each political regime has an influence on the political opportunity structure of taste.8 Ultimately the names in each new generation respond to social processes that influence the preferences at a certain point in time. These frameworks explain how the frequency of names evolves in the absence of any publicity campaign or imposed criteria aimed at influencing parents.
Western countries have experienced a similar evolution in naming tendencies: the speed of replacement of the most popular names reflected slow change until the end of the nineteenth century, then began to accelerate. This trend coincides with the process of modernisation, when individuals gained ground over tradition in the decisions that affected their lives. This offers the explanatory framework for the change in newborns’ names; no longer were names the result of inherited baggage but an expression of free choice, albeit a socially guided free choice.
Three groups of factors account for social transformations in name preferences (Lieberson, 2000). First, internal preference mechanisms when the external context remains constant (for example, imitation patterns that lower social strata exhibit with respect to the higher classes). Second, singular historical circumstances that catapult a certain name to popularity (a case in point is the name Jacqueline in the USA, after Jackie Kennedy). And third, social, political, cultural and/or economic events of great relevance. This last factor will be my interest in this article. More specifically, I will focus on the more or less diffuse influence of political regimes on parents at the moment of assigning a name to their offspring.
The German case is a particularly appropriate one for looking at this cultural indicator under a particular political regime. Wolffsohn and Brechenmacher (1999) have demonstrated a correlation between the frequency of a Christian or Germanic name and the nature of the regime (imperial, republican, dictatorial or democratic); and how together they reflect the degree of legitimacy and acceptance of the regime by the population. The object of this study is limited to describing the change in names of children born during the Third Reich. Along with the rise to power and consolidation of Nazism, there was a change in the patterns that guided the choice of names for newborns: the number of names derived from German history and tradition increased while names of Christian origin declined in number. This has allowed sociologists seeking to analyse and date the cultural modernisation process to test their theses regarding secularisation, understood as the process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres (State, economy and science) from the religious sphere, such that individuals rely less on belief in a transcendent reality to explain and understand their daily experiences.
To analyse the popularity of given names registered for newborns in Germany, we can access studies by sociologists, demographers and cultural historians. Though these studies are generally limited to a local sphere (region, city or village), they are representative samples that meet the criteria of scientific rigour. Nazi support varied according to religion (Protestant regions being more prone to embrace National Socialism) and the strength of the workers’ movement (Falter, Lindenberger & Schumann, 1986), but, beyond religious and socioeconomic specificities, results can be generalised to represent the rest of the country (Gerhards, 2003; Gerhards & Hackenbroch, 2000; Lorenz, 2006; Mahlburg, 1985; Wolffsohn & Brechenmacher, 1999).
During the Third Reich, Biblical and Christian martyr names drawn from the New Testament (those from the Old Testament were taboo under the Nazis) such as Johann, Mathias, Peter or Nicolaus for boys gave way to Germanic names, such as Kurt, Siegfried, Berthold, Armin, Dietrich, Erwin, Ulrich, Winfried or Waldemar. For girls, Ingrid, Helga, Ursula, Edeltraud, Uta, Ulrike, Ingeborg, Sieglinde, Gertrude and Erika replaced Christian names such as Anna, Maria, Magdalena or Elisabeth.9 The influence of Christianity appears to have been replaced by that of the Nazi political religion. Members of the ‘national community’ were considered worthy of Germanic names due to their supposed association with certain virtues. To the Nazis the most visible marker of a person’s ancestry was their name. Consequently they favoured Germanic names in order to make people fit into an alleged homogeneous national community. Walther Darré, Nazi Minister of Agriculture, reflected this view in 1934: ‘The German names we have inherited reflect, with marvellous clarity, the Nordic concept of life, our worldview and the consciousness of a peasant lineage. The male Nordic names speak of battle, victory, honour and glory’ (1934, p. 3). Darré’s list of allegedly German values are not surprising in so far as, from the point of view of their etymology, Germanic names speak of struggle, weapons, animals and, in a few cases, also of gods (Mahlburg, 1985, p. 242).10
The object of this political interest in names was summarised by Fahrenkrog, a Nazi author who – in the new spirit of the time – advocated for the national palingenesis through names.
Our children, born as Germans and in order to be educated as true Germans of the People’s community of the Great German Empire, should carry authentic German names that honor the dignity of their German blood. In our nature there is no right reason to provide them with a non-Germanic name, yes indeed many against. And all reasons support the claim: German names for German Children! (1942, p. 35).
The same author provides the rationale behind this trend: the ‘Germanic revolution’ aims at getting rid of all ‘alien features’ as a necessary condition for arriving at ‘the victory of the racial way of thinking’ (Fahrenkrog, 1942, p. 5; also Kurzmann, 1937, p. 4).11 Prominent figures in the regime adhered consistently to the informal rule of giving their offsprings Germanic names. Hermann Göring named his only daughter Edda; Heinrich Himmler named his Gudrun. The Minister of Propaganda and his wife Magda gave all their six children Germanic names: Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig and Heidrun (all starting with an ‘H’ as a homage to Hitler). The six children of Albert Speer, the Führer’s favourite architect and later Minister of Armament, were named Albert, Hilde, Margarete (not a Germanic name, it was the name of Speer’s wife), Arnold, Fritz and Ernst. Finally, all five daughters of Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, bore Germanic names: Isle, Ehrengard, Irmgard, Eva, Uta and Gerda.
It has been contended that in the German case male names are a more trustworthy indicator of support or disaffection towards the regime than female names because historically males have been the public figures of reference in the political and military spheres, and thus naming a girl was considered less important (Bruhn, Huschka, & Wagner, 2012; Gerhards, 2003; Gerhards & Hackenbroch, 2000; Lorenz, 2006). Women did not have access to those dimensions, and remained relegated to the domestic realm. This is the same logic that explains the absence of women in positions of political responsibility, in Nazi martyrdom and in many other areas.12
The increase in numbers of newborns with Germanic names, particularly in Protestant areas of the country, reflected Nazi anti-clericalism and the increasing influence of the Nazi political religion. However, the proliferation of names rooted in the Germanic tradition was not a Nazi invention, nor was it particular to Germany. It developed as a result of the increasing impact of modernisation in the Western world in the nineteenth century. What was particularly German was the use of Germanic names in relation to the political culture. Though not created by the Nazis, a fashion encouraging traditional Germanic names was fostered by totalitarianism between 1934 and 1942, from the Nazi rise to power until setbacks in the war eroded the popularity of the regime (Gerhards, 2003, p. 57, 73). With the Nazis in power, the political opportunity structure of taste experienced a substantial change, as the regime formally and informally fostered the repository of male Germanic names. The shift from a democratic to a totalitarian regime thus carried with it a new framework of taste, that is, a new political constellation that favoured naming children with Germanic names, for the name was to the Nazis an expression of the purity (or impurity, in the case of the Jews) of the race. A communiqué from the Ministry of the Interior dated 18 August 1938 on ‘criteria for applying given names’ could not be more explicit in this regard: ‘Children with German nationality should in principle receive only German names. When the choice of a given name returns to given names used in the past, this contributes to the development of a mentality of lineage.’13 Names of ‘non-German’ origin (that is, names of Christian origin such as Hans, Josef, Joachim, Julius, Maria, Sofie … ) that had been rooted in the country for centuries were allowed, since they were no longer perceived as ‘foreign’. Names that were neither Biblical nor Germanic were unacceptable to the Nazis for Aryans. The regime was also concerned that the gender of an individual be signified by the name. Aryan boys were to bear only masculine names, girls only feminine ones. The name Maria accompanying a male name, a common appellation in some Catholic areas, was now forbidden (Rennick, 1970, p. 70).
The influence of a Nazi martyr on the directory of birth names
Horst Wessel was a promising young National Socialist in the complex panorama of Berlin during the ‘years of struggle’, which is how the Nazis referred to the last years of the Weimar Republic, especially after 1929, when the NSDAP became a relevant political force. During this time a latent civil war was being fought, mainly between Nazis and Communists through their respective paramilitary organisations, the Assault Troops (SA) and the Red Front Fighters’ League. Paradoxically, Wessel’s life reached its full potential through his death. He was born into a bourgeois family on 9 October 1907 in Bielefeld, Westphalia. His father was a fervently patriotic Protestant pastor who had volunteered in World War I and was responsible for the leading Berlin parish of Saint Nicholas (Gailus, 2002). After participating in several ultra-nationalist organisations in the capital, Horst finally settled into the SA and the NSDAP in December of 1926. He became prominent in the Nazi movement in Berlin thanks to his organisational skills and charisma. His intense career within the movement ended on 14 January 1930 when he was attacked by a group of individuals linked to the Communist Party (KPD), some of whose members, including the murderer, came from the Berlin underworld.14 He died from his injuries on 23 February. Evidence of his prominence within Nazism and of their aspirations for him as a leader can be found in the list of those who attended his funeral in Berlin, including leaders such as Goebbels, Göring or von Pfeffer. At the last moment, Hitler decided not to attend; such an act might taint his image if street clashes took place with the Communists, as was expected and did occur.
From that moment the young leader immediately became the ‘martyr’ of the movement and was openly and continuously worshipped as a hero. He embodied the ‘new man’, the end-product of the anthropological revolution pursued by every totalitarian project. His name, like every other Germanic name, might bear witness to German virtues, summarised by Fahrenkrog as follows:
Affiliation to the nation and to the extended family, strength and willingness to fight, bravery, courage, perseverance, pride, honour, glory, freedom and male distinctiveness, happiness, joy, shine, gracefulness, beauty and discipline, wisdom, advice, calmness, in short: those values that, considered together, make one an aristocrat (1942, p. 23).15
After the Nazis took power in 1933, party worship of Wessel became State worship, expressed by the regime in a rich constellation of places of memory. Every year until the outbreak of the war, Goebbels faithfully visited the cemetery to present his respects to the martyr of the movement on the anniversary of his birth or death, or both. The acts of remembrance were mainly centred in Berlin, where Wessel had developed politically and been assassinated; but they also took place in other parts of the country and in Vienna, where he had stayed for a short time as a student. The press regularly published articles on these occasions, and between 1933 and 1941 the radio broadcast speeches by the head of the SA, thus expanding his stature and exhorting people to the imitatio heroica of him who had sacrificed his life for the cause.
In addition to calendar dates to evoke memory, during the Nazi period at least 30 biographies and other hagiographic works were published on Wessel; some were even directed at children (Casquete, 2009; Luckey, 2007). A film was also commissioned by Goebbels: Hans Westmar – Einer von Vielen16. The establishment of the regime included a revision of the names of numerous public places. Streets, squares, schools and public buildings helped to rapidly etch the name of Horst Wessel into the collective memory. Alongside innumerable busts, statues, portraits and monuments spread throughout the country, non-material places of memory also proliferated, such as poems and songs in his honour. Ignominiously enough, as early as 1933 a commemorative monolith was erected in the concentration camp of Dachau. A literary prize was awarded coinciding with the anniversary of his death. The neighbourhood of his activities, Friedrichshain, was renamed after him. Die Fahne hoch, a song whose lyrics were written by Wessel in 1929, became the NSDAP hymn after his death, known as the Horst-Wessel-Lied. It became institutionally customary to play this song immediately after the national anthem, the Deutschlandlied, with the right arm raised in salute. In the paramilitary and military spheres there were also efforts to engrave his name on the collective memory. The SA unit that Wessel had led in Berlin was re-named the Horst Wessel Assault Troop and during the war several SS combat divisions, airplane squadrons and ships were named after him.17
After Wessel’s death in 1930 and especially after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the name Horst functioned as a kind of Nazi popularity meter. The more support National Socialism found in the population, the more Germans decided to name their sons Horst; and vice versa. The name Horst became thus a lieu de mémoire embodied in all those people bearing the name.
Linguists contend that the roots of the name go back to ‘Horsa’, the name of an Anglo-Saxon leader who conquered England in the fifth century (Seibicke, 1996, p. II: 417). It was not unfashionable in the first part of the twentieth century, especially in the Protestant regions of the North (see Wolffsohn & Brechenmacher, 1999, p. 231). Between 1933 and 1945, Horst was always among the top 10 names in the country (Lorenz, 2006, p. 30). It remained well ahead of other ideologically significant Germanic names identified with the regime, such as Adolf or Hermann (for Göring, second in the Nazi chain of command).
All local studies available on naming trends during this period in Germany point in the same direction. A study of 43,000 male names listed in the Frankfurt am Main municipal census of those born between 1932 and 1945 confirms the popularity of Horst. Additional empirical evidence comes from a study of male and female names registered in the port city of Kiel, where the NSDAP had above-average support in the Reichstag elections before 1933 (See Table 1). In the Southern and Catholic city of Munich, Horst reached its apex in 1940, but remained under 3% (Wolffsohn & Brechenmacher, 1999, p. 208, 232). The Bavarian capital offers a superb example of the influence of the Nazi Blut-und-Boden ideology in the nomenclature and in the proliferation of Germanic names. During the Weimar Republic the majority of the 20 most popular names were drawn from the Christian tradition, headed by Christian ones such as Josef and Johann. However, during the Third Reich (1933–1945), 10 new names came in the top-20 list. Hans (a variation of Johann), Josef and Helmut now led the ranking. An interesting development and sign of the new times is the fact that out of the ten new appearances in the list, nine are of Germanic origin, one of them being Horst in 14th place, with an aggregated frequency of 1.99% for the whole period (Geisser, 1993, p. 73, 74), far behind Frankfurt or Kiel. The evolution of the name Josef in Munich is also very telling: in 29 out of the 30 first years of the century it ranked first. In 1932 6% of boys were named Josef; in 1943 only 1.8%. Immediately after WWII and until the beginning of the 1960s it enjoyed a renaissance (Geisser, 1993, p. 79).18
| . | Frankfurt . | Kiel . |
|---|---|---|
| 1933 | 5.05 | 5.38 |
| 1934 | 4.15 | 5.34 |
| 1935 | 4.47 | 5.34 |
| 1936 | 3.46 | 5.16 |
| 1937 | 3.51 | 5.20 |
| 1938 | 3.31 | 4.35 |
| 1939 | 3.37 | 4.43 |
| 1940 | 2.87 | 4.47 |
| 1941 | 2.80 | 4.60 |
| 1942 | 2.07 | 2.76 |
| 1943 | 1.98 | 2.53 |
| 1944 | 1.20 | 2.14 |
| 1945 | n.d. | 2.13 |
| 1946 | n.d. | 1.80 |
| . | Frankfurt . | Kiel . |
|---|---|---|
| 1933 | 5.05 | 5.38 |
| 1934 | 4.15 | 5.34 |
| 1935 | 4.47 | 5.34 |
| 1936 | 3.46 | 5.16 |
| 1937 | 3.51 | 5.20 |
| 1938 | 3.31 | 4.35 |
| 1939 | 3.37 | 4.43 |
| 1940 | 2.87 | 4.47 |
| 1941 | 2.80 | 4.60 |
| 1942 | 2.07 | 2.76 |
| 1943 | 1.98 | 2.53 |
| 1944 | 1.20 | 2.14 |
| 1945 | n.d. | 2.13 |
| 1946 | n.d. | 1.80 |
A similar trend regarding the name Horst is to be found in Essen-Werden, in the Ruhr area. In the years right before WWII there was a proliferation of the name Horst, especially in the lower and middle classes (Hesterkamp, 1965, p. 38). A survey conducted in nine towns in Saxony shows a similar pattern during Hitler’s dictatorship and then after the war: in 1924 Horst ranked 6th (4.72%); in 1934, 4th (5.38%); 10 years later, 24th (1.35%); in 1954, 22nd (1.6%), and in 1964 it was in place 52nd, with one case out of 2425 (Naumann, 1973, pp. 161–166).19 Finally, a survey of the names of schoolchildren in the small Rhenish cities of Bad Honnef and Wermelskirchen show that between 1900 and 1932 Horst does not appear among the most popular names. However, in the period 1933–1944, it was the most common name for boys in Bad Honnef and the second most common in Wermelskirchen (Link, 1966, p. 29, 50).
With National Socialism in power, the name Horst carried with it considerable political baggage and was a hidden indicator of outright adhesion to the Nazi totalitarian programme, or at least some degree of accommodation to the regime. The name did not emerge with the Nazis, but it did grow with them in power up to the German defeat on the Russian front. After World War II, use of the name Horst for newborns declined until virtually disappearing from the name list in the mid-1960s.20 It does not seem unreasonable to venture that many who carried that name became involuntary and innocent carriers of the Nazi politics of memory. Now, decades later, the association of the name Horst with National Socialism has been considerably erased.
Horst is not the only name that informs in this area; an even more unequivocal proof of compliance with to the National Socialist programme can be found in the name Adolf. However, the data indicate that this name had a considerably lower frequency than Horst; as a ‘national symbol’ (Wolffsohn & Brechenmacher, 1999, p. 227), the name Adolf was too ‘sacred’ to be copied. In the Frankfurt am Main study, the data indicate that during the period spanning 1932–1945 only in certain trimesters of 1932 and 1934 did the frequency of this name surpass 0.8%. By the end of the dictatorship in 1944, its frequency had declined to 0.13% (Lorenz, 2006, pp. 27–28 and pp. 200–201).21 Adolf followed Horst in indicating popular disaffection towards the regime as the war unravelled Germany. Quite a different case was the attempt to use the last name ‘Hitler’ as a given name, clearly meant to honour the Führer. Previously cases were known of children called Bismarck, Bebeline (after the socialist leader August Bebel), Hindenburga or Tannenberga.22 A Prussian decree of 3 July 1933 explains how to proceed whenever a parent wanted to register their child with the name ‘Hitler’ or any other variety:
If someone at the Civil Registry Office requests to use the name of the Chancellor of the Reich, be it under the femenine form of Hitlerine, Hitlerike or similar, the civil servant should recommend that the person requesting it choose another name, since it does not please the Chancellor of the Reich to accept the use of his name. If this request does not please the person seeking the name, it should be communicated to me [to the person in charge of the registry. Note: J.C.].23
After the Nazi demise, both Adolf and Horst suffered ‘symbolic contamination’ (Lieberson, 2000, pp. 131–137). Lieberson found that in 1932 Adolph was no longer listed among the 200 most popular names for white boys in Illinois (Lieberson, 2000, pp. 131–132). This coincided with Hitler’s rise to power. Wolffsohn and Brechenmacher show the virtual disappearance of Hitler’s first name inside Germany after the war (1992, p. 547). One such case of onomastic contamination caught Klemperer’s attention, underscoring the quasi-sacred character of Germanic names among the fervent believers in the National Socialist dogma. His diary entry for 4 March 1944 mentions a name plaque on a home in Dresden that read: ‘Baruch Strelzyn – Horst-Israel Strelzyn’ (2006, p. II: 349). The mere association of a Jewish last name like Strelzyn with a German first name was an intolerable desecration that had to be redressed by including the compulsory male Jewish appellative ‘Israel’. The most innocuous way of resolving this was ultimately to eliminate these and other plaques.
Klemperer’s observation makes full sense in the frame of the communiqué of the Ministry of Interior of August 1938, mentioned above.24 It mandated the compulsory obligation of Jews to complete their names with Israel or Sara when their original given names were not sufficiently expressive of their ethnic origin: for example Victor-Israel (which became Klemperer's full name) or Helga-Sara. Of the estimated half a million Jews in greater Germany in August 1938, most bore typically German names (Rennick, 1970, p. 76, note 29). The communiqué included an appendix of 185 male and 91 female names drawn from the Old Testament that could only be assigned to newborn Jews.25 In the case of the Jews, naming of children was not the product of free choice but of compulsion. According to the Nazi dichotomisation of the moral universe, true Aryans embodied the Good; their splendour was highlighted by stigmatising the Jews as Evil par excellence, and they were thus made to be the ‘radicalized image of the enemy’ (Koselleck, 2006, p. 279). The ‘shine’ of the name Horst contrasts with the ‘dirtiness’ of Jewish names. The 1938 legal provision served the purpose of identifying and singling ‘strangers’ out from members of the people’s community (Volksgenossen) with whom they shared language, lifestyles and nomenclature (Rennick, 1970, p. 68; Wagner-Kern, 2002, p. 336). This is the reason why no Jew could dream of being called Horst or, for that matter, any other Germanic or Christian name drawn from the New Testament.
Ever since the Kaiserreich, the concern of many state officials had been that Jews might hide their ‘true identity’ behind ‘German’ names (Bering, 1987), the name law of 1938 forcing Jews to bear ‘Jewish names’ being a particularly obscene implementation of the rule. The underlying intention in both cases was to prevent ‘non-Germans’ from bearing ‘German’ names. The case of the Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler (‘resettler’ and ‘late resettler’, meaning immigrants of ethnic German origin from Eastern Europe who arrived in Germany in the post-war decades) posed a new challenge: how to deal with people allegedly ‘German’ but often without ‘German’ names in their documents. In the face of this situation, the name-changing policies of West Germany underwent a process of ‘ethnicisation’ shaped by the associations of German expellees. Although there was no legal obligation to change a name from Vladimir to Waldemar (a real case of a late resettler into Germany in 1993), acquiring a German name seemed the sensible thing to do when wishing to blend in and become invisible in Germany ‘as a German’ (Panagiotidis, 2015).
Conclusion
There are significant epistemological barriers to deciphering the state of public opinion in totalitarian regimes. It is well established that the elites and leaders of such regimes take upon themselves the full representation of the people, thus avoiding any need for popular consultation or elections that would even remotely resemble a democratic process. We lack the snapshot of popular sentiment provided by such elections in these cases. The diaries and testimonies of citizens and travellers who suffered under totalitarian rule are an undeniably valuable means of access to the context it created. However, they are highly conditioned by the biographical and existential circumstances of each witness, which makes it problematic to project them to the rest of the population. In the German case, the experiences of a Jew subjected to National Socialist racial laws will be entirely different from those of a politically innocuous German who is not considered to have ‘tainted blood’. In other words, invaluable reflections from testimonial literature need to be complemented by other sources.
Public opinion in totalitarian regimes must be accessed in other ways. This study has opted to use cultural indicators as a loosely indicative intermediate path for determining the popularity of a totalitarian regime among its citizens. I have examined in particular one of these indicators: names given to newborn boys listed in civil registry offices in Germany during National Socialism. While the usefulness of obituaries is restricted to the war years, given names allow temporal series to be established more broadly so that enthusiasm trends can be determined and determined.
The study of a specific name that was particularly attractive during the Third Reich, Horst, has allowed us to identify modernisation and the accompanying process of secularisation as being part of the reasons for its popularity. What Germany had been experiencing since the nineteenth century in regard to names was consolidated during the Nazi era: names of Christian origin were replaced by names of Germanic origin. Although it was relatively widespread, especially in Protestant areas of the north, from the early 1930s on the frequency of the name Horst grew and became a favourite name choice among German parents. It became a symbol of national and ethnic adhesion. This was decisively influenced by Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. This event created a radically different political opportunity structure that translated into a social framework for preferences. During those years, giving children names that carried political connotations was a way to express loyalty and acquiescence. Germans could informally express affection for the regime by choosing an ideologically charged name for their male children, the name of the ultimate National Socialist martyr. This study of the evolution of the ‘Horst curve’ during the era of Nazi dominance is an attempt to access a phenomenon which is socially shared, taste, even though we do not claim it is shared equally among all the individuals in an entire population. Thus it provides a loose, if far from conclusive, indication of how the popularity of the regime was faring. Of course, this must be interpreted carefully, since there were some who carried the name Horst by family tradition and thus not due to any attempt to support the regime. The name was found to be undeniably popular in 1941–1942 and then suddenly declined in conjunction with war-weariness and especially with German defeats, first on the Soviet front and elsewhere thereafter. It does not seem unreasonable to venture that many who carried that name became involuntary and innocent carriers of the Nazi politics of memory.
Other totalitarian regimes contemporary to National Socialism, especially fascism and Stalinism, do not allow a similar examination of public opinion. Given names do not always travel well over political–cultural time and space. It is the task of historians and cultural sociologists specialised in each country to identify cultural indicators that would open the door to informed speculation as to the degree and nature of popular support for other totalitarian regimes in Europe between the World Wars. Their creative efforts would surely improve our understanding of public opinion under dictatorships.
Notes
Totalitarianism is an ideal-type referring to a form of political domination that laminates the plurality intrinsic to a society with the discretional use of violence or the perennial and plausible threat of resorting to it. Before the effective implementation of violence, totalitarians point out internal enemies (so-called ‘alien social elements’ in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Jews and Marxists under the Nazis), mobilize resentment and request blind conformity from their subjects.
Klemperer accurately describes the totalitarian imposition that took place in 1938: ‘Now more than ever, politics has become the secret game of a few who decide the destiny of millions, claiming that they incarnate the people’ (1995, vol. 1: 427. Underlined in the original. I cite the original German version; the English version, which is incomplete, does not include this quote). Political language corrupted by synecdoches is a common feature among all totalitarian projects. A constant element of all ultra-nationalist discourse is the pretence of representing an entire people – who have in fact not delegated their original power sine die to any political group or person.
This meant total or partial rejection of psychologically, physically or socially disabled persons from the ‘national body’, including alcoholics, prostitutes and criminals, by means of euthanasia or compulsory sterilisation programmes.
Among the official sources used to track down relations between the regime and the populace during the years of Nazi rule are the reports of district governors and provincial presidents compiled for the Ministry of the Interior between 1934 and 1936; the reports of functionaries at various levels in the Nazi party; the Gestapo reports; and the reports of the intelligence apparatus (Sicherheitsdienst, SD). From a totally different political perspective, the reports published between 1934 and 1940 by the German Socialist Party in exile (Sopade) should be highlighted (Bankier, 1992; Kershaw, 1983).
Klemperer inaugurated this imaginative and suggestive door to access the public opinion of that era: ‘A comfort to Jews in general are the death notices with a swastika. Everyone counts: How many? Everyone counts how many still die ‘for the Führer’ (2006, p. II: 31. Diary entry for 16 March 1942. Emphasis in the original). After the war, he made the following reflection:
When someone did not agree with National Socialism, when someone wanted to express freely their rejection or even hatred without being accused of acting in opposition, since courage did not extend that far, people would write “Our only son fell fighting for the Homeland”, leaving aside any mention of the Führer (2010, pp. 140–141).
According to Laversuch (2010, p. 223), of the 22 different most popular girls’ names between 1934 and 1938, exactly half fell into the ‘Germanic’ category.
The association of Germanic names with values such as courage, strength and bravery was not a Nazi invention. Ludwig Steub, a nineteenth-century writer, claimed once: ‘In them [these names. Note: J.C.] resonates the fearless spirit of the Volk that conquered Europe by sword and spear’. In: Kurzmann, 1937, p. 5.
In broader terms, this ‘revolution’ aimed at cleansing the language from foreign influences, naming practices being but a specification of this overall trend – an issue that also appeared in other nationalist contexts. I thank one of the reviewers of the paper for this insight.
Hitler set the tone on the Nazi view on women when he wrote: ‘In the education of the girl the final goal always to be kept in mind is that she is one day to be a mother’ (2016, Vol. 2, p. 1057). In 1936 during the Nuremberg Rally he remained loyal to a sharp division of tasks according to gender:
Do not get confused! In the life of every country there are two worlds: the female world and the male world. Nature has correctly decided to place man in charge of the family and has assigned him one more task: the defence of the country, of the whole. The world of the woman is, if she is lucky, the family, her husband, her children, home [ … ] Both worlds form a whole that makes possible a people to live and persist. We want to build this combined world, one in which its gender assumes the tasks that he alone can perform and, consequently, he alone shall perform (Hitler, 1936, pp. 45–46).
In: Zeitschrift für Standesamtswesen, 1938, p. 339.
For a similar set of values associated to Germanic names, see: Metzner (2012, p. 5).
The film was originally entitled ‘Horst Wessel: Ein deutsches Schicksal’, but was renamed by Goebbels prior to its release because he found the treatment of the Wessel legend unsatisfactory.
Wessel led the SA-Troop 34, thereafter the SA-Unit V in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The unit was re-named the ‘Horst Wessel Unit’ through an order by Hitler published on a symbolically loaded date, namely Hitler's anniversary on 20th April 1931. See: Hitler, 1992, p. (IV/1): 320–321.
In the elections of 6 November, 1932 he Nazi party obtained 33.1% of the national vote. In the electoral districts of the cities mentioned, the results were: 41.2% in Hessen (capital Frankfurt); 45.7% in Schleswig-Holstein (capital Kiel); 24.6% in Bavaria (capital Munich), 22.5% in Berlin and 36.63% in Saxony. There is thus a correlation between votes for the Nazis and a higher or lower frequency of the name Horst. Electoral results in Falter et al., (1986, p. 74).
See http://lexikon.beliebte-vornamen.de/horst.htm, accessed on 20 October 2015. In the mid-1960s most of the males that still held Nazi convictions were over 40, an age from which paternity rates decline significantly. It is likely that many of those who gave their sons this name until this time (other than by family reasons) did so to show adhesion to the Nazi ideology and its politics of death.
The study by Horst Naumann cited before shows the following results: 7 boys named Adolf in 1924 and 37 in 1934,. Even so, it remained well below Gunther (145), Manfred (128) or Wolfgang (124). Ten years later, not a single boy was registered as Adolf (1973, pp. 161–166). The name Adolf never appears among the 20 most popular names in the city of Kiel during the Third Reich (Mattlinger, 1996).
Bareuther Ritze, ‘Streifzüge in das deutsche Namensrecht und die Namenskunde’, in Zeitschrift für Standesbeamtwesen, Personenrecht, Eherecht und Familiengeschichte, 13 (1933), p. 267.
‘Wahl von Vornamen’, in Zeitschrift für Standesbeamtwesen, Personenrecht, Eherecht und Familiengeschichte, 13 (1933), p. 230. Similar decrees followed suit in other districts such as Thüringen, Sachsen, Anhalt or Oldenburg. See: Ibíd., pp. 253, 284, 314 and 392.
Hitler did not like girls named after him by his last name, but Stalin seemed not to have trouble with it. On the contrary, at the end of the 1920s, one of the most popular female names in the Soviet Union was Stalina (Alexijewitsch, 2015, p. 198).
See Note No. 13.
The list omitted those names which were traditionally popular among Gentiles, such as Maria, Anna, Eva, Joseph, David, Joachim or Jacob, because ‘in the popular mind’ they were no longer alien but had to be typically ‘German names’ in their own right. See: Rennick, 1970, p. 69, 77–79, including the list.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.