Books: Blood-thinking

U. S. readers hear more about concentration camps than they do about literary life in Hitler's Naziland. Nazi publishing facts at first glance look startling indeed. The Third Reich publishes 25,000 books annually (U. S. total is 11,000; Britain's 16,000). Scores of new writers, unheard-of before Hitler, have popped into the best-seller class. U. S. Writers Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner are favorites of the Nazi Napoleons.

Nazis call their literary brand "steel romanticism" to distinguish it from the foggy fervors of the traditional German romantics. Pet bugbear of Nazi writers is "Jewish realism and intellectualism." Their pet ideal is an Aryan...