Interesting article at io9 about early 20th century science fiction in Germany, mainly under Nazi rule. Some highlights:
In 1935, the government passed a strict preventative censorship law which required that all magazines be submitted to the government for approval before publication. The pulp publishers’ response was to try their trick of twenty years’ previous: change the names of the pulps but not the content of the pulps. The government’s censors were not fooled, and the government, angered, put much greater pressure on the publishers. And then the government proclaimed 1936 to be “the Year of the German Jungvolk,” with the aims that all of the German children and teenagers who were not already part of Hitler Youth would join it, and that all youth dissidence and all causes of youth dissidence would be eliminated.
and
Not every German pulp with fantastic content turned fascist. Up until their end, in 1939, both Tom Shark and John Kling remained as free as realistically possible of fascist content. (The lack of pro-Nazi ideology is what got Tom Shark cancelled, in fact–the German government ordered its cancellation on those grounds).
This is part one of an article, and the next one will look at the USSR.
