While the National Socialists made a concerted effort to harness the emigrant nation wherever its members might be, they had no more success outside their areas of conquest than had previous regimes. In some ways, they had less. Moreover, their efforts to replace an inclusive notion of German cultural community with a racially exclusive one ultimately undermined Germans’ positions in other countries even more than the events of World War I. Those efforts within Europe also exposed the degree to which Germanness continued to be defined by its aggregate character even under their auspices.Their notion of the Volksgemeinschaft was defined more by its exclusions than its inclusions. The striking ways in which that fell short outside of Europe underscore the varieties of ways in which Germanness continued to be defined and performed abroad during the period of the war and the degree to which Germans’ fates outside of Europe were contingent on the states in which they lived. Geopolitics played important roles in recasting notions of belonging during this period of crisis, much as it had during earlier ones.Nevertheless, older notions of belonging persisted during and after the war.

The policing of opinion transitioned from camps to courts during the first years of the Third Reich. The criminalization of criticism traced to the Reichstag Fire. Emergency decrees permitted arbitrary detention for suppressing a communist uprising and criminalized “disinformation.” Loose regulation quickly expanded enforcement from Marxist organizations and publicly supporting revolution to include private expressions of dissent by “chronic complainers and grumblers.” Mounting skepticism about this protracted state of emergency led to accusations of lawlessness from Hitler’s conservative partners by 1934. Policymakers responded by reining in protective custody and rewriting treason statutes to prosecute communist sedition through the courts. The disinformation decree was also rewritten to cover criticizing the regime. Stricter regulation brought the focus back to organized communist resistance, but the rewritten laws left the door open to policing private opinion in society at large. By 1935, the policing of criticism had settled into routine practices and formal processes under a newly expanded Law against Malicious Gossip governing the private conversations of Germans.

This chapter charts the ways in which the Nazi regime sought to reshape the musical environment in Germany in response to the turbulent political and economic situation in the early 1930s when unemployment amongst musicians was at an all time high and the future of various hallowed institutions such as the Berlin Philharmonic was very much in doubt. The Nazi promise to devise an administrative framework of guilds designed to regulate the activities of musicians deemed acceptable to the regime initially attracted support from politically unaffiliated leading musicians such as Richard Strauss, who seized the opportunity to promote long-cherished ideas that would enhance the performing rights and firm up copyright laws for composers. For its part, the Nazi regime scored a huge propaganda coup in persuading Strauss to become the first President of the Reichsmusikkammer in November 1933. But the relationship between composer and the authorities soon foundered after Strauss refused to subsume his creative autonomy to the current political demands that outlawed creative collaboration with Jews.