July 4, 1944
Introduction to the content
On the cover of this OWC edition, a male figure raises his hands in an imploring gesture and asks, When? The question of their liberation remains constantly on the minds of underground individuals like Curt Bloch. They exist “aside from the world” in confinement, darkness, and fear, they are “weary of eternal shackles.” For years, they have clung to the hope of the end of Nazi rule and a return to peace and freedom. In the final line of this poem, Bloch succinctly captures the deepest longing of the underground: “We want to be humans beings again!”
In his Revenge Comedy, Bloch outlines the three-stage pattern of German wartime propaganda: before the battle, their own troops are described as battle-hungry, more like “a horde of lions” than an army. After defeat, attention is diverted from heavy losses by celebrating their own retaliation weapons and the losses on the other side. In the end, everyone believes in a miracle again, but not for long, because “just as many times before,” Hitler proves to be a liar and “won’t achieve victory.”
As an example of “propaganda correction”, Curt Bloch compares two versions of a newspaper advertisement. In the first version, it calls for picking off the potatoskin instead of peeling them by knife, as the potato harvest was “scarcer than usual.” Peel losses were “wasted people’s food.” In later versions, there is no mention of the harvest and people’s food, and whether the stocks are sufficient is solely the responsibility of the consumers. The “Nazi masters” even spared the people the truth when it came to peeling potatoes, Bloch mocks.
It is going well! was the recent headline for the political weekly commentary by the National Socialist radio presenter Max Blokzijl. The underground Curt Bloch writes ironically that he would like to hear that because he is very interested in why things are “going well,” but unfortunately, his radio has been confiscated. So Bloch forms his own thoughts and recognizes Blokzijl’s optimistic statement as true – albeit in the opposite sense: It is indeed going well – but not for Blokzijl, because “Hitler’s downfall is approaching.”
In the poem The ‘Reichsschulen’, Curt Bloch once again marvels at the glaring contradictions between pretension and reality in the National Socialist leadership. Their desired candidates for the militarily oriented Reich’s schools conformed internally and externally to the “ideal type of the Germanic,” were not allowed to have anything “mean” about them, and above all, they were never to lie. Bloch applies this standard to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Göbbels: short, dark-haired, disabled, and a professional liar.
