Reliving Hitler's Rise

The faces peer out from across four decades: a baleful Hitler brooding over his destiny, a grinning Goebbels with his new bride, slinky Fraeulein in satin smirking over drinks in a Munich nightclub. There are samples of humor: anti-Jewish jokes along with bitter comments on the regime ("In Germany teeth are being pulled through the nose because no one can open his mouth any more"). Excerpts from William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary give an American's impression of the scene. The period photographs and cartoons of Nazism aborning, the vivid paintings of rouged whores and marcelled flappers doing the Charleston evoke the era's political menace and cabaret decadence.

These are the ingredients of a unique new German bimonthly, Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich). Its technique is that of a newsmagazine covering contemporary events. Its stated purpose: to give Germans, particularly younger people, a vivid account of their nation's bleakest years.

Reich's debut this month is a political as well as a publishing event in West Germany. As the first home-grown editorial effort to re-create the mood and experiences that led to Hitler's power-grab, Reich has unsettled Germans of all political persuasions. Its editor, Christian Zentner, says that over the next two years the magazine will attempt to explain how "the nation of poets and philosophers" could become "a nation of murderers and criminals." But many Germans apparently still care less about that question than about keeping the skeleton of the Nazi era closeted.

In fact, Reich in its first 48-page issue unsparingly documents the truth that Nazism, while seeded in the depths of Germany's post-World War I economic depression, bloomed in the resurgence of nationalistic pride created by Hitler and his henchmen. Symbols of that pride dominate photographs illustrating actual news dispatches of the day or adorning a 1932-33 chronicle of Germany's cultural and sporting life: Boxer Max Schmeling fighting America's Jack Sharkey for the world's heavyweight title; Marlene Dietrich posing in a scene from one of her early film triumphs.

Serious Issue. The new magazine's detractors fear that such nostalgia could ignite latent neo-fascism today. The liberal weekly Die Zeit attacked it as a slickly packaged Making of Der Fuehrer. Conservative readers are already complaining that Reich maligns and distorts Nazism's objectives. The magazine's advance promotional blitz was particularly upsetting. It featured decorative political posters of the '30s, tiny swastika flags, and throwaway recordings of Nazi party speeches. That tactic, charged a West Berlin court prosecutor, tended to glorify the era, suggesting that Hitler's Reich was fun. After a Berlin court agreed, police raided newsstands throughout the country and confiscated the gewgaws. West German television stations barred Reich commercials when they appeared to stress the frivolous side of Nazism's adolescence. Reich's Hamburg publisher, John Jahr Co., then agreed to include "negative" scenes in the TV spots depicting Nazism's Goetterdaemmerung.

The uproar has continued, though Reich's maiden issue carries no advertising, and on balance is serious rather than sensational. The restricted promotional campaign hampered Reich's debut. Even so, the magazine's appealing pop-documentary style helped produce respectable first-week sales of nearly 100,000 copies at a newsstand price of $1.10. Reich's creator, Lawyer-Publisher Alexander Jahr, 33, aims for an eventual circulation of 500,000, but his special hope is to make Reich a teaching aid in West German schools. "It's an open secret that this subject gets treated very superficially in the schools, or not at all," says Jahr, a scion of West Germany's second largest publishing empire, which owns the picture magazine Stern. "People have kept silent and tabooed this subject long enough."

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