ABSTRACT
There was a latent process of radicalisation in social and political life during the Weimar Republic that was experienced by liberal and left-wing intellectuals and writers as an increasing constraint on their political and literary liberties and room for manoeuvre. With the Nazi takeover on 30 January 1933 this previously latent process changed to overt fascism, taking many of its later victims by surprise. The implications of this process for intellectuals, writers and creative artists would have been realised by alert contemporaries by 1929 at the latest. This was when the Nazi Frick took over the Ministry of the Interior and National Education (Innen-und Volksbildungsministerium) in Thüringen, providing a foretaste of Nazi cultural policy in miniature.
