Michael H. Kater - Culture in Nazi Germany

CULTURE IN NAZI GERMANY

OTHER BOOKS BY MICHAEL H. KATER

Das Ahnenerbe der SS, 19351945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (1974)

Studentenschaft und Rechtsradikalismus in Deutschland, 19181933: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Studie zur Bildungskrise in der Weimarer Republik (1975)

The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 19191945 (1983)

Doctors under Hitler (1989)

Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (1992)

The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich (1997)

Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (2000)

Hitler Youth (2004)

Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 18881976 (2008)

Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present (2014)

Copyright 2019 Michael H. Kater

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967785

ISBN 978-0-300-21141-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Georgia

Contents

Illustrations

Abbreviations

Preface

Revolutions are never reduced to the purely political;

from there they affect all other functions of human existence.

Neither the economy or culture, nor the sciences

and the arts remain untouched by them.

Joseph Goebbels, November 1933

T HIS BOOK PRESENTS the story of culture in the Third Reich. In particular it examines how various branches of culture were utilized to control the masses and, after 1938, dedicated to the Nazi purpose of European if not world subjugation. But it also looks at how the workings of totalitarianism impacted the arts and artists themselves.

The relationship between culture and tyranny is complex and whether or not culture is even possible in a dictatorship remains a ripe question. If the aesthetic, formal, and ethical power of culture thrives on contradiction to prevailing social and political norms, or even the exposition of unresolved tensions, then it will arguably always fail under tyranny. The Nazis nipped aesthetic pluralism in the bud when Hitler came to power in early 1933. Nor did the arts and letters ever attain sovereign originality under the dictator. Nonetheless there was a concerted effort to create a National Socialist aesthetic an effort which links to the Nazis increasingly pervasive control over German life, and their war aims. So although we already know in broader terms that culture was pressed into totalitarian uses by Nazi agencies, led by the Propaganda Ministry, looking at how this was achieved in more detail, how a new Nazi culture was constructed (and what was eliminated), as well as how this all fitted into a wider agenda of annihilation of the Jews, other Nazi-nonconformist groups, and coveted territorial dominance, should reveal much about the nature and inner workings of the Third Reich. Such is this books undertaking.