The reader, the popular novel, and the imperative to participate

This chapter interrogates the relationship between the everyday and official during the Third Reich, revisiting the contributions of social historians and the impact of the 1986 Historikerstreit debacle. Drawing attention to the porous boundaries between the experience of citizens and official culture, Rabinbach argues that the Nazis claimed to make a sharp distinction between the public and the private, but in fact their handling of this divide was far more complicated. This argument is illuminated through the case study of reading, particularly reader’s motivations, which are elucidated in the chapter through anecdotal accounts and reader surveys conducted by librarians. In closely considering one novel, Josefa Berens-Totenohl’s völkisch epic Der Femhof (1934), Rabinbach demonstrates how National Socialism linked the private, local, and familial to “German” values, and framed cosmopolitanism and democracy as the products of the regime’s “enemies.”