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faul_sname comments on Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014 - Less Wrong
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...yes? I wouldn't want to write Nazi propaganda, but if I was a romance novel writer and my writing would not significantly affect, for example, the Nazi war effort, I don't see how being a writer in Nazi Germany would be any worse than being a writer anywhere else. In this context, "the lie" of Nazi Germany was not the mere existence of the society, it was specific things people within that society were doing. Romance novels, even very good romance novels, are not a part of that lie by reasonable definitions.
ETA: There are certainly better things a person in Nazi Germany could do than writing romance novels. If you accept the mindset that anything that isn't optimally good is bad, then yes, being a writer in Nazi Germany is probably bad. But in that event, moving to Sweden and continuing to write romance novels is no better.
The key word is "successful".
To become a successful romance writer in Nazi Germany would probably require you pay careful attention to certain things. For example, making sure no one who could be construed to be a Jew is ever a hero in your novels. Likely you will have to have a public position on the racial purity of marriages. Would a nice Aryan Fräulein ever be able to find happiness with a non-Aryan?
You can't become successful in a dirty society while staying spotlessly clean.
So? Who said my goal was to stay spotlessly clean? I think more highly of Bill Gates than of Richard Stallman, because as much as Gates was a ruthless and sometimes dishonest businessman, and as much as Stallman does stick to his principles, Gates, overall, has probably improved the human condition far more than Stallman.
The question was whether "being a writer in Nazi Germany would be any worse than being a writer anywhere else".
If you would be happy to wallow in mud, be my guest.
The question of how much morality could one maintain while being successful in an oppressive society is an old and very complex one. Ask Russian intelligentsia for details :-/
Lack of representation isn't the worst thing in the world.
if you could write romance novels in Nazi Gernany (did they have romance novels?) and the novels are about temporarily and engagingly frustrated love between Aryans with no nasty stereotypes of non-Aryans, I don't think it's especially awful.
What a great question! I went to wikipedia which paraphrased a great quote from NYT
which suggests that they are a recent development. Maybe there was a huge market for Georgette Heyer, but little production in Germany.
One thing that is great about wikipedia is the link to corresponding articles in other languages. "Romance Novel" in English links to an article entitled "Love- and Family-Novels." That suggests that the genres were different, at least at some point in time. That article mentions Hedwig Courths-Mahler as a prolific author who was a supporter of the SS and I think registered for censorship. But she rejected the specific censorship, so she published nothing after 1935 and her old books gradually fell out of print. But I'm not sure she really was a romance author, because of the discrepancy of genres.
What do your lovers find attractive about each other? It better be their Aryan traits.
Well, there is the inconvenient possibility of getting bombed flat in zero to twelve years, depending on what we're calling Nazi Germany.
Considering the example of Nazi Germany is being used as an analogy for the United States, a country not actually at way, taking allied bombing raids into account amounts to fighting the hypothetical.
Is it? I was mainly joking -- but there's an underlying point, and that's that economic and political instability tends to correlate with ethical failures. This isn't always going to manifest as winding up on the business end of a major strategic bombing campaign, of course, but perpetrating serious breaches of ethics usually implies that you feel you're dealing with issues serious enough to justify being a little unethical, or that someone's getting correspondingly hacked off at you for them, or both. Either way there are consequences.
It's a lot safer to abuse people inside your borders than to make a habit of invading other countries. The risk from ethical failure has a lot to do with whether you're hurting people who can fight back.