Gone With The Wind In Nazi Germany And Eretz Yisrael

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

Gone With the Wind (1936), considered the second most widely read book by Americans of all time after the Bible, was the only novel that author Margaret Mitchell wrote. Set in Georgia during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), it tells the tale of the young and headstrong Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every possible means to survive following General Sherman’s devastating March to the Sea. The novel, which has become a beloved American cultural standard, generated immediate worldwide appeal due to its universal themes of war and death; love and romance; and class, gender, and racial conflict.

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GWTW sold one million copies in the first six months after its publication – at an unprecedented $3.00 a copy (over $60 in today’s dollars) and at a time when America was still emerging from the Great Depression – making it the best-selling novel in American history, and it has since sold over 30 million copies worldwide. The book, for which Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, was adapted into the 1939 film of the same name, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture (1940), among other Oscars, and is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

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Born in Atlanta, Mitchell (1900-1949) wrote feature articles for the Atlanta Journal at a time when Atlanta debutantes of her class did not work. She began writing GWTW, which ended up taking her ten years to complete, in 1926 to pass the time while recovering from a slow-healing injury from an auto crash. When Harold Latham, a Macmillan editor, read the manuscript, he quickly agreed to publish the novel and, after working for an additional six months to review the book’s historical references, Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh, a copy editor by trade, edited the final version.

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Literature in the Third Reich was an important part of the Nazi propaganda effort, with Nazi bureaucrats barring “subversive” publications and advancing National Socialist literature. Nonetheless, many Germans reacted to Nazi programming by seeking refuge in escapist literature, particularly romantic novels and, as such, the German translation of GWTW became extraordinarily popular and quickly rose to the top of the Third Reich bestseller lists. According to John Haag in Gone With the Wind in Nazi Germany, the novel had sixteen printings in the first four years after its German publication in September 1937 and it had been read by as many as a million Germans by the end of World War II. (Ironically, Mitchell said that she preferred to lose money rather than discovering that she had been “doing business with a Nazi even three times removed.”)

The first mention of GWTW in the German media in June 1937 (a few months before the novel became available for public purchase), included a prediction that no serious German reader would be interested in such frivolous trash, but the initial reviews after its publication were positive, even enthusiastic. An important review in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a widely read non-Nazi publication, characterized the novel as “compelling reading,” particularly due to its female protagonist.

Notably – and not surprising in Nazi Germany – the reviewer praised Mitchell’s description of the patriarchal character and racial and social hierarchy in the antebellum South. Other reviewers emphasized that the decline of the “established order” in America after the Civil War constitutes a stark warning for contemporary Germany and that, of course, Hitler and his National Socialists would prevent such precipitous decay. As such, Nazi officials generally took an unofficial “hands off” policy with respect to distributing or reading GWTW because, they believed, its unflattering portrayal of Americans as greedy racists fed into their propaganda about the depravity of American culture and the inevitable decay of the United States.

However, initial signs of Nazi displeasure with GWTW began to manifest when a review in the form of a letter to the editor in the official newspaper of the Nazi party was published in February 1938, which angrily noted that the novel lacked literary quality and that it reflected American interests inimical to National Socialism. The author took particular issue with the fact that the attention paid to this “mediocre foreign novel” came at the expense of excellent and important National Socialist literature.

One notable reviewer, Will Vesper – a notorious antisemite who had enthusiastically participated in the Nazi book burnings of 1933 – took particular umbrage at the flooding of Germany with a book by an American publisher that had welcomed traitorous Jewish writers who had emigrated from the Nazi Paradise. Characterizing GWTW as “a disgusting literary sham,” he argued that the German public needed to be reading literary works that properly reflected their racial ancestry and cultural heritage. The continuing popularity of the novel after the beginning of World War II was such that Nazi journals began to urge Germans not to buy or read it.

Finally, the Nazis banned the novel when they realized that, rather than advancing National Socialist purposes, GWTW was actually promoting individuality and giving succor to anti-Nazi resistance movements. Orders were issued to seize all copies and people were shot for mere possession.

Hitler, who was obsessed with movies, had particular affection for American films and, although the Nazis banned the GWTW film to the public in 1941, it remained one of his favorites. (Ironically, many of the key players in the film were Jewish, including producer David O. Selznick; George Cukor, the film’s first director; composer Max Steiner; Ben Hecht, who wrote the script; and actor Leslie Howard, who played Ashley Wilkes in the film, was an active anti-Nazi propagandist and is said to have been involved with Allied intelligence during WWII.)

It was also a favorite of Nazi leaders, who smuggled prints of the film in diplomatic pouches into Nazi-controlled territory and held clandestine screenings, which infuriated Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels. GWTW was also a favorite of Eva Braun’s; in a home film she took of Hitler, the Fuhrer tells her “I know that you didn’t like the movie last night. I know what you want: you want Gone With the Wind.”

Braun had a crush on Clark Gable and particularly savored seeing him in GWTW. Hitler, too, virtually worshipped Gable, until the actor, in the wake of the death of his wife, Carole Lombard, became a gunner in the U.S. Air Corps in August 1942 and went on to fly combat missions over Germany. Hitler was so furious that he put a price on Gable’s head and ordered that he be captured alive and brought to him.

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When requests from overseas publishers interested in translating the novel came pouring in, Mitchell spent much of the next thirteen years of her life dealing with publishers around the world, including particularly handling various piracy problems. The release of the GWTW movie not only increased the novel’s already astounding popularity, but it also increased the printing of unauthorized pirated copies. For example, the March 1944 Journal American reported that “The massive adventures of Scarlett and Rhett are now bootlegging for $60 a copy in France [almost $1,000 in today’s dollars], and for almost that figure in Holland, Norway and Belgium.” After the war, Mitchell filed several piracy lawsuits, including cases against Japan, China, and Greece.

Mitchell’s agent considered which publishers were Jewish or had Jewish spouses in determining their ability to pay royalties, and one of the few new contracts that Mitchell pursued for publishing rights post-World War II was with Mordecai Newman, a publisher and translator in Eretz Yisrael. She was proud of her personal collection of some 70 foreign editions, and she considered the Hebrew translation of her novel to be a highlight of her Gone With the Wind collection.

In this April 29, 1946, note, Mitchell writes to Newman from her Atlanta home:

Received from Mordecai Newman, publisher, of Tel-Aviv, Palestine (Elias Newman, attorney), the sum of Forty Dollars (U.S. $40.00) (representing Ten Pounds Palestinian currency). This represents payment in full on the first 2500 copies of “Gone With the Wind” in the Hebrew Language in Palestine.

(signed) Margaret Mitchell March

Mordechai Feibel Newman (1896-1980) was a pioneer Israeli publisher and activist perhaps best known for founding M. Newman Publishing in Eretz Yisrael. Born in Ludz, Poland, he studied in yeshiva and was an early activist in the Poalei Zion movement. He emigrated to the United States in 1912, where he settled in New York, worked in the textile industry, became active in the Jewish labor movement, and served as the representative of the Association of Textile Trading Clerks in the United Jewish Trade Unions.

Serving in the Jewish Legion of the British army during World War I, Newman saw action in Eretz Yisrael. After the war, he and two other Legion veterans founded Tarbut, a chain of bookstores in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, where it developed into a center for education and intellectuals and, in 1925, the three partners launched the Mizpa Publishing Company, the first private book publisher in Eretz Yisrael. Newman is credited with translating the works of leading international authors into Hebrew including, among others, Gone With the Wind, and he helped to launch the literary career of Shai Agnon, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1936, he founded and published Shnaton, the Yearbook of Biblical and Ancient near Eastern Studies, which annually published articles from all branches of scientific research related to the Bible and is considered one of the most important journals for the study of Bible in Hebrew.

In 1940, Newman founded Scopus, an English publishing house in New York that specialized in books on Zionism and the Yishuv but also published works by Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw and, a year later, he edited an anthology of Herzl’s diaries. After the Mitzpa partnership dissolved in 1945, Newman opened M. Newman Publishing, Ltd., in Jerusalem. Before the company closed in 1980, it published hundreds of titles, including literature, poetry, children’s books, reference books, textbooks, and dictionaries. In 1960, he organized a public committee to publish all the writings of the Hebrew and Yiddish modernist writer, poet, translator, journalist and editor David Frischmann.

Newman joined veterans of the Jewish Brigade in founding Moshav Haovedim Avichail in Emek Hefer and he served as chair of the Moshav Committee from 1934 to 1938. He also served as chair of the Israel Publisher’s Association; as a member of the World Hebrew Alliance Council; as chair of the Veteran’s Union, which he helped to organize; as treasurer of the Building Committee of the Tchernichovsky Writers’ House in Tel Aviv; and as chair of the Kupat Bank Ltd., and he was a colleague of Ben Gurion’s in the Poalei Zion Party.

Our correspondence identifies Newman’s lawyer as his brother, Elias Newman (1903-1999), who is best known for his landscape watercolors and for directing the construction of the Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York’s World’s Fair. After visiting his brother at Tarbut in Jerusalem in 1925, he became enamored with the landscapes of Eretz Yisrael and held a solo exhibition in Jerusalem a year later. He organized the Palestinian Artists and Sculptor’s Association; served as president of the Artists Equity Association; and is the author of Art in Palestine (1939), in which he showcases the biographies and works of the leading artists in Eretz Yisrael at the time.

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Sadly, Hitler was not the only one to ban Gone With the Wind.

GWTW has often been criticized for its stereotypical portrayal of African Americans in the 19^th century South, for its whitewashing of slavery, for its promotion of plantation values, and for its romanticization of white supremacy. Of course, the novel is racist, and its bigotry is far from incidental or subtle. However, it has become a whipping boy for the contemporary “woke” who push to ban it and, indeed, various school boards across the United States have banned the book. Most recently, HBO Max dropped the film as “part of the fight against bigotry and intolerance.” (It later returned GWTW to its film catalogue along with an introductory disclaimer discussing its “historical context.”)

However, it should be noted that the focus of GWTW was never on race but, rather, on the compelling characters and their interrelationships, which has driven its popularity for over 85 years. Though not always historically accurate, to a large degree GWTW was actually a reasonable representation of the spirit and ethos of a time and place.

Moreover, director David Selznick wrote to a critical Rabbi Barnett Brickner, “as a member of a race that is suffering very keenly from persecution these days, I am most sensitive to the feelings of minority people,” and he went to great lengths to avoid “an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times.” Mitchell, who some woke critics try to characterize as a racist, used much of her considerable GWTW earnings to support African American causes, including supporting black colleges, funding scholarships for black students, establishing and backing the first hospital for blacks in Atlanta, and financing the education of black doctors. Recall that this was a very dangerous time to be supporting civil rights, particularly in the American South.

While it is entirely proper to criticize GWTW for its horrific racism, and people may opt not to read the novel or see the film, banning it is inimical with the American ideal of free expression. Censoring great works of art and literature because they are deemed to be inconsistent with evolving contemporary mores and values is a dangerous path down a slippery slope, down which American society has unfortunately already begun to descend. Next on the horizon: the banning of The Merchant of Venice because of its depiction of Jews? Sadly, with American culture increasingly in the hands of leftist censors and politically correct bowdlerizers, it would appear that the future of free expression in American arts is, so to speak, gone with the wind.