Hanns Johst (8 July 1890 – 23 November 1978) was a German poet and playwright, directly aligned with Nazi philosophy, as a member of the officially approved writers’ organisations in the Third Reich.

The statement “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”, variously misattributed to Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, was in fact a corrupted version of a line in his play Schlageter.

Hanns Johst was born in Seerhausen (now part of Stauchitz) in the Kingdom of Saxony as the son of an elementary school teacher.

Later, he turned to a naturalist philosophy in plays such as Wechsler und Händler (Money changers and Traders) (1923) and Thomas Paine (1927).

In 1932 he joined the Nazi party, explaining his agreement with Hitler's ideology in the essay "Standpunkt und Fortschritt" ("Standpoint and Progress") in 1933.

The famous line "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun", often associated with Nazi leaders, derives from this play.

In the scene Schlageter and his wartime comrade Friedrich Thiemann are studying for a college examination, but then start debating whether it is worthwhile doing so when the nation is not free.

In December 2007, historian David Starkey misattributed it to Joseph Goebbels in comments criticizing Queen Elizabeth II for being "poorly educated and philistine".

[2] In 1933, Johst signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, a declaration of loyalty to Hitler by pro-Nazi writers.

By this time these organisations restricted membership to writers whose work was either explicitly pro-Nazi or at least approved of by the Nazis as non-degenerate.

[2] During the war he held various positions within the SS, including on the personal staff of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, which Thomas Mann stated was the reason that several charges of pedophilia and abuse of children were dropped against Johst in the winter of 1944.

(in the anthology "Mother")[5] The harder this war is becoming and the longer it takes, the more do we experience the clear certainty of the true value of culture.

Nothing can endanger this inner richness, on the contrary the more cruelly the outward world attacks spirit and soul, the more redeeming does the marvel of art prove to be.

"[6] (June 1943, in a speech about Robert Schumann)After the war Johst was interned, and on 7 July 1949 a Munich denazification tribunal classified him as a "fellow traveler".

An appeal process ended in 1949 with his reclassification as a "main culprit" and a three-and-a-half-year labor camp sentence (the time Johst had already served).

[9] In the Federal Republic of Germany, Johst could no longer gain publication as a writer but, after 1952, he wrote poems under the pseudonym "Odemar Oderich" for the Edeka supermarkets customer magazine, "Die kluge Hausfrau".