Germany’s Christmas offensive

David Crossland, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 18. 2009 10:49PM UAE / November 18. 2009 6:49PM GMT

A First World War card. Cologne Propaganda Exhibition

Berlin // A new historical exhibition displaying Christmas decorations in the shape of submarines, and cannons has shed light on how the festival was exploited for political propaganda in Germany for much of the 20th century.

The remarkable collection went on show this month in Cologne. It includes a Season’s Greetings card from the First World War bearing a 42cm artillery shell adorned with fir sprigs.

It also shows how Cold War propaganda influenced Christmas in East and West Germany. The communist authorities frowned on religion and religious symbols and the world-famous wooden Christmas angels hand-carved in the eastern region of Saxony were officially referred to as “winged year-end figures”.

The exhibition, called “Not Exactly a Holy Night”, was devised by Judith Breuer, 45, and her mother Rita Breuer, 71, authors of a book that has illuminated a subject until now ignored by historians.

“It started when my mother began collecting vintage decorations in the 1970s because my father had asked to celebrate an old-fashioned Christmas,” Ms Breuer said. “So we started looking around flea markets and were astonished at what we found.

“Christmas ornaments in the shape of bombs and hand grenades, delicately blown glass soldiers: it just didn’t fit into this nostalgic, sentimental picture we had of Christmas. It seemed unbelievable and perverse that such things were intended as tree decorations, so we took a closer look at the subject.

“From what we found, there was no such thing as a good old-fashioned Christmas.”

Mrs Breuer said she was particularly struck by a popular postcard from the First World War showing Father Christmas dressed as a German soldier bearing gifts in the form of marionette puppets that were caricatures of Russian, French and British soldiers.

The Christmas messages of peace on Earth and goodwill had no meaning during that all-consuming war in which millions of soldiers were dying, and the festival reflected the militarism that had pervaded society.

New military board games were devised, and boys were given toy soldiers that faithfully resembled German troops and their adversaries.

The gifts reinforced perceptions of national enemies that would stay in the children’s minds for decades. “The children of 1914-1918 would one day get their big chance to fight too, like their fathers,” Mrs Breuer said.

Of course, other nations also had their war toys and nationalistic postcards from the front.

But Mrs Breuer said she believes that German authorities drove the seasonal propaganda further, particularly during the Nazi era, when Hitler made an attempt to supplant Christmas with a non-religious festival in tune with his racist ideology. His vision was to eradicate religion itself and put National Socialism in its place.

Nazi officials claimed falsely that Christmas traditions were derived from ancient Germanic rituals surrounding the winter solstice, and they devised bizarre new ornaments based on Nordic symbols.

Christmas survived the ravages of the 20th century. But one tradition from the First World War remains widely entrenched to this day, Mrs Breuer said. Before the war, only aristocrats and the upper middle classes would decorate fir trees for Christmas.

That tradition spread across all levels of society during and after the war because soldiers on the front would celebrate Christmas by gathering around makeshift trees in their dugouts – far from home, and with death all around, those brief moments of comfort and peace made such a strong impression that the survivors took the tradition back to their families.

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