Marie Adelheid, Prinzessin Reuß-zur Lippe was a rebellious young woman and aspiring writer from an ancient princely family who became a fervent Nazi. Heinrich Vogeler was a well-regarded Jugendstil artist who was to join the German Communist Party and later emigrate to the Soviet Union. Ludwig Roselius was a successful Bremen businessman who had made a fortune from his invention of decaffeinated coffee.

What was it about the revolutionary climate following Germany's defeat in World War I that induced three such different personalities to collaborate in the production of a slim volume of poetry - entitled Gott in mir - about the indwelling of the divine within the human?

Part I of Gossman's study situates the poem in the ideological context that made the collaboration possible - pantheism, Darwinism, disillusionment with traditional liberal values, theosophy and völkisch religions, and Lebensreform.

In part II Gossman outlines the subsequent life of the Princess who, until her death in 1993, continued to support and celebrate the ideals and heroes of National Socialism.

The aim of Gossman's study is to gain insight into the sources and character of the "Nazi Conscience." As such it is invaluable reading for anybody interested in understanding German society during the inter-war and Nazi periods.

Read Online: Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the "Nazi Conscience"

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Hardcover: 216 pages
Author: Lionel Gossman
Publisher: Open Book Publishers (April 20, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1906924074
ISBN-13: 978-1906924072

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lionel Gossman is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages emeritus at Princeton University. Most of his work has been on 17th and 18th century French literature, 19th century European cultural history, and the theory and practice of historiography.

His publications include Men and Masks: A Study of Molière; Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment; French Society and Culture: Background for 18th Century Literature; The Empire Unpossess’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”; Between History and Literature; Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas; The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s “Italia und Germania”; and several edited volumes: The Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium on Semiotics and the Arts; Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United States (with Mihai Spariosu); Geneva-Zurich-Basel: History, Culture, and National Identity, and Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt (with Andreas Cesana).

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