Gleichgeschaltete Philologie: Anglistische Romantikforschung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland

• Tim Sommer

The impact of the National Socialists’ rise to power was felt in practically all areas of German public life, not least in the higher education sector. The university system was transformed through a series of restrictions on who could teach and what could be taught. If such regulations were mainly imposed from above, there was at the same time an individual tendency among those who remained unaffected by – or who actively benefitted from – these changes to bring their respective fields of research into line with party ideology. This article explores how such dynamics unfolded in one specific disciplinary environment, the academic study of English literature and culture. Soon after January 1933, scholars began to adopt the rhetoric of Nazism to make a case for the continuing relevance of their ‘foreign’ subject matter in the ‘new’ Germany. After the outbreak of World War II, the focus shifted to a politically charged critique of English writers and writing, with literary studies repositioned as a propaganda effort in support of the war against the Allied Powers. Revisiting the publications and career histories of selected scholars, the article demonstrates that it was the literature of British Romanticism, in particular, that served as a screen onto which such changing conceptions of Englishness were projected in German academia between 1933 and 1945.