2025/06/20 by Andreas Hübner, Mieke Roscher · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies #German History and Society #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
paper · doi:10.1525/ah.2025.2701491
openalex publication_date 2025/06/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Animal stories were part of the ideological narrative of the Nazi regime, as much as they illustrated everyday life under National Socialism. Animals were portrayed as battle-ready soldiers or industrious workers for the Volksgemeinschaft, or they embodied ideals of a mythologized past. This contribution dissects how themes of racial nationalism and anti-Semitism run through Nazi children’s and youth literature, reveals the ideological overlaps within the narrative literature(s), and discusses Nazi children’s and youth literature as a specific medium for negotiating human-animal relationships. Our focus is on themes of origins and belonging, authority and submission, camaraderie and loyalty, as well as nature and civilization. This allows us to draw conclusions that recast the significance of media representations of human-animal relationships in Nazi children’s and youth books and examine how media and human-animal relationships were intertwined in the Nazi state.