Winfried Seibert - The girl that could not be named Esther

Children of Germans should basically receive only German names. However, not all Nordic names can be included as German names; insofar as concerns non-German names (e. g., Bjoern, Knut, Sven, Ragnhild, etc.), they are no more desirable than are other non-German names. On the other hand, names have been used in Germany for centuries that are originally of foreign origin but that are no longer regarded as foreign in the minds of the people and are indeed completely Germanized; these can continue to be used unreservedly (e. g., Hans, Johann, Peter, Julius, Elisabeth, Maria, Sophie, Charlotte, etc.). It serves the development of clan thinking to rely on previously used clan names . Very often, these will be Germanized names, which in the future will still indicate the origin of the clan in a specific German territory (e. g., Dierk, Meinert, Uwe, Wiebke, etc.).

Should basically receive only German names is a phrase that permits exceptions. There was no legal basis for this ministerial recommendation, and a recommendation is all it was. Even the current Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior, referring to his own directive, wrote a good six months later:

Special regulations regarding given names still do not exist. It has simply been determined that given names of German citizens are in principle to be entered in the German language in the civil registry, and that indecent, senseless, or ridiculous given names may not be used. 48 › Reference

Everything seemed so open and above-board. To our astonishment, we find in the middle of 1938 clear and disturbing references in the press to developments on the name front – the military expression seems quite appropriate here. The name question had taken on another dimension since the end of 1937. The echoes in the press served partly as a trial balloon for what was to come, and may have been meant as a warning to be read between the lines about this new development. It was especially Germany‘s most famous newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, that conspicuously followed the story of the naming question, and in the summer of 1938 published reports whose journalistic significance is hard to grasp for the modern reader.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had assigned this newspaper to the bourgeois democratic Jew papers, to the so-called intelligentsia press, which, as he expressed it, wrote for our intellectual demimonde. 49 › ReferenceBy 1938, the Frankfurter Zeitung had long been without Jewish owners. In honor of the Fuehrer’s birthday the following year, ownership shares were to go as a present to the Eher Publishing House in Munich. 50 › ReferenceIt should not be forgotten that this newspaper, which Hitler and Goebbels repeatedly wanted to finish off, was important for the foreign policy image of the Third Reich because a certain distance was perceived between the regime and the paper.

How far the editorial board could stand apart from the Nazis is not a question that can be answered here. In point of fact, there was no single editorial opinion.

Be that as it may, during this period the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on three occasions about our topic, one that was probably only of remote interest to the average reader. Two of these cases were quite important and were reported on in a manner that was unusual and striking for that period. We should consider it possible that this constituted an effort to warn the alert reader at home and abroad of hidden signals indicating an otherwise little-known development. Such signals could warn people, but they could change nothing.

In the Saturday edition of July 1, 1938, a short article entitled Restriction to Two Given Names ended with this sentence: Names of German origin are to be preferred. This was hardly anything more than the kind of signal mentioned above. The report itself was generally scanty. It was based on an article published in the Journal of Registry Office Affairs, by a Dr. Stoelzel, professor at the University of Marburg, 51 › Referencean article which could itself, however, be considered explosive. Stoelzel‘s relentless proposals went much further than the bureaucrats and even than the Reich Ministry of the Interior had dared.

Stoelzel, also a frequent contributor to this journal, and its expert on questions of marital status, complained primarily that the new marital affairs law of 1937 had allowed an unlimited number of given names, and he took a stand for a limit of at the most two given names. He painted a dire picture of what misuse could be made of an unlimited set of names, and he then switched over to the question of which names conscientious registrars should allow, which names should be denied, and what attitude they should take regarding the current demand to encourage the choice of given names of Germanic origin. 52 › Reference

Stoelzel’s concluding recommendation went much further: he advised for the sake of simplicity to allow parents no choice at all or at the most a very limited one. German parents should have a choice only among names on two lists. Any names not found on either of these lists would henceforth not be considered for German children – that is, banned. These points remained hidden from the readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, although this radical solution should have had greater publicity. After all, after about half a century of following this suggestion, German given names would have been reduced to a rudimentary inventory of scarcely more than a hundred, and for the rest of the Thousand Year Reich people would have had to resort to numbering their children instead!

On Sunday, August 7, and the following Thursday, August 11, 1938, the Frankfurter Zeitung published two items under the title German and Jewish Given Names. The sources for these articles couldn’t have been more different. One came from a legal decision on names from the Prussian Supreme Court on Civil Matters of July 1, 1938; the other, from an article drawn from the magazine The New Folk, a publication of the Office for Racial Policy of the Nazi Party.

In the August issue of this family-oriented illustrated magazine, heavy on pictures, Rolf L. Fahrenkrog demanded German names for German children. This was the article featured in the Frankfurter Zeitung on August 11, 1938, the day Esther Luncke was born. In an unusually subdued report, it cited a few passages without comment, then turned with the words In conclusion, the author writes to a rather amusing episode, which gives the impression that the whole article was similarly light-hearted:

A party comrade insisted to me that we must avoid un-German, and especially Jewish, given names. He proudly stated that his boys had beautiful German names, Georg and Paul. I had to disappoint him. Georg comes from the Greek and has the beautiful and proud meaning of farmer. Paulus is an old Christian name of Latin origin, meaning small, modest. This name developed like Johannes. They were ‘Germanified,’ so to speak. From Georg we have forms sounding like old German, like Joerg, Joern, Juern, or Juergen, but that doesn‘t alter the fact that its origin is not German.

The original doesn’t sound so easy-going; there the author ended with the following appeal:

We desire to and should stand fast on this point — Our children, who are born German and are educated in the Folk Society of the Third Reich as pure German people, should bear truly German names that correspond to the true value of our German blood. There are no justifiable grounds to give them un-German names; in fact, there are many reasons not to. Everything supports the demand of GERMAN NAMES FOR GERMAN CHILDREN! 53 › Reference

Completely lacking in the Frankfurter Zeitung article were the vehement anti-Semitic outbursts with which Fahrenkrog punctuated his article, aside from various incorrect or at least questionable etymological derivations.