The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change (Vermont Studies on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust)
Language: English
Pages: 236
ISBN: 184545359X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Culture and the arts played a central role in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism from the early years of the movement until the last months of the Third Reich in 1945. Hitler and his followers believed that art and culture were expressions of race, and that "Aryans" alone were capable of creating true art and preserving true German culture. This volume's essays explore these and other aspects of the arts and cultural life under National Socialism, and are authored by some of the most respected authorities in the field: Alan Steinweis, Michael Kater, Eric Rentschler, Pamela Potter, Frank Trommler, and Jonathan Petropoulos. The result is a volume that offers students and interested readers a brief but focused introduction to this important aspect of the history of Nazi Germany.
component. Jews constituted the largest segment of those who were purged from German cultural life on ideological grounds. But it should be emphasized that they were not the only ones. The Nazi “purification” of the arts also involved the exclusion of communists, homosexuals, “Gypsies” (i.e., Roma and Sinti), and others who did not conform to the Nazi vision of a true Germanic culture by virtue of their race, their political affiliation, or their personal behavior. About 8,000 Jews were purged
picture of a German artistic and cultural establishment coerced into conforming to a totalitarian regime determined to mobilize the arts in the pursuit of its ideological ends.5 They have thus situated artistic and other endeavors within the confines of totalitarian political culture such as that defined by Antonio Gramsci: “A totalitarian policy is aimed precisely: 1. at ensuring that the members of a particular party find in that party all the satisfactions that they formerly found in a
long after the end of World War II. Aware of these continuities, critics of the 1968 protest generation blasted the ideological components of this literature in terms of fascism and antifascism, illuminating important aspects of aesthetic and cultural production in the 1930s and 1940s, although they were less interested in the literary texts themselves.2 The textual interest resurfaced in the 1990s, leading to a new kind of interpretive study that combines the experience of writing and reading
nach Scapa Flow Here, too, more books are sought out and borrowed than earlier, and here, too, it has become obvious during the war that light reading is no longer in such demand. Overnight, the good book has been discovered. Questionnaire In a bookstore on Friedrichstrasse a questionnaire was displayed for several hours; the answers provided much that is of interest. Questions included whether the buyer was a man or a woman, and whether the book was purchased for the buyer as a gift for
Schenzinger, Metall Winschuh, Manner, Traditionen, Signale Kluge, Der Herr Kortüm Knittel, Therese Etienne Varé, Der lachende Diplomat Prien, Mein Weg nach Scapa Flow Source: Das Reich, 15 December 1940. Translated by David Scrase, University of Vermont. CONTRIBUTORS Jonathan Huener is Associate Professor of History at the University of Vermont. He is author of Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Ohio University Press, 2003), and coeditor with Francis R.