The Gleichschaltung of Culture- Memoir of left wing Nazi opponent.
Source : B. C. Sax & D. Kuntz, Inside Hitler's Germany , (Massachusetts, 1992), pp.144-145.
How right my friends were who had advised me to be on my guard - a warning I then, as well as years later, cast to the wind despite wiser insight at times - I only began to realise when one evening two very unfriendly civilians, who identified themselves as state police [Gestapo] officials, snooped through every last scrap of paper in my desk and closets. Their efforts, however, were fruitless, since my farsighted friends had already gotten everything they deemed dangerous out of harm's way. But what were these "dangerous items"? Did I possess highly treasonous documents? Had I taken part in political conspiracies? No! On the contrary, I had lived on the fringe of political reality. But just this - this inclination not to perceive oneself to be merely a cell within a great state organism, but rather to lead an individual existence responsible only to oneself - from now on was considered a crime, an individualism inimical to the community [gemeinschaftsfeindlich], as was proclaimed to us in speeches and demagogical newspaper articles.
Man no longer had claim to himself! The question of how the self prepares and deals with life and death, with God and the devil - the primal question which everyone who has come to consider the questionability and finiteness of his existence imposes on himself daily - because it was of an individualising, community-threatening nature, abruptly became classified in the category of subversive problem-posing. The great standardising and stamping-in machine of the state was in full swing. Through summary procedure it made ready-made citizens of those who outrageously believed that they had a right to their own lives - or crushed them underfoot as if they were only unusable waste. Yes, the machine raged! One heard its unwavering uniform rhythm in the farthest corners. We felt the floor beneath our feet gradually giving way. Friends wound up in jail. Others fled across borders. Others took their own lives. And through the streets "with calm and firm stride" marched the brown battalions. For quite some time I had been working for a newspaper that, because of its left-radical tendencies, the brown usurpers regarded as a stronghold of their foes. As was to be expected, one day brown mercenaries occupied the editor's office and printing shop. Through a power play that was later legalised, they took possession of the enterprise. The political editors were taken into custody and their positions were filled by illiterate revolver journalists from their own party press. The others were subjected to a painstaking examination of their political acceptability. It came to pass that I too was one day ordered to appear before one of these new arbiters of power. His head, puffed up by victory celebrations, sat like a tomato on top of his brown costume. A leather holster lay on the desk. This was the new editor in chief. He hissed at me: Have you written political articles?' On my answering that I had restricted my work to novellas and reporting on the arts, he shoved an article entitled "Cultural Autarchy" toward me. In it nationalist-racist cultural apologists were characterised as narrow-minded idiots. It was signed by me. You probably thought that we would not come to power? Otherwise you would not have written such things a few weeks before the revolution. I could now have you disposed of. But I want to give you a chance...' That is how I and several other editors were accepted. They needed us. At the time they monitored our every step. They waited for the day when they would be able to man our positions with people from their own ranks, reliable pen-pushers, who could artfully manipulate the vocabulary of their official propaganda. ...
