Culture in Nazi Germany

by Michael H. Kater

Overview

A fresh and insightful history of how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed under the Nazis

Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler’s enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany’s military campaigns.
 
Michael H. Kater’s engaging and deeply researched account of artistic culture within Nazi Germany considers how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed when the Nazis came to power. With a broad purview that ranges widely across music, literature, film, theater, the press, and visual arts, Kater details the struggle between creative autonomy and political control as he looks at what became of German artists and their work both during and subsequent to Nazi rule.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300211412
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Michael H. Kater is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of History at York University, Toronto, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His previous publications include Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present and Hitler Youth.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Abbreviations xi

Preface xiv

1 Deconstructing Modernism 1

A Purge of the Weimar Era

New Nazi Controls

The Quarrel over Expressionism

Exhibitions of Degenerate Art and Music

2 Pre-War Nazi Culture 54

The Propaganda Ministry and Culture

Literature

The Press and Radio

Film and Stage

Music

The Visual Arts and Architecture

An Interim Accounting

3 Jews in the Nazi Cultural Establishment 128

Anti-Jewish Measures

The Jewish Culture League

Anti-Semitism in the Nazi Arts

Human Tragedies

4 War and Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Culture 172

Movies for Guidance, Indoctrination, and Distraction

The Communication Arts: Radio, Press, and Newsreels

Music and Theater in the Service of War

Book and Sword

Art and Architecture

Culture to the Fronts

5 Artist Émigrés 248

Political, Economic, and Psychological Barriers

False Refugees?

The Case of Thomas Mann

6 Transfer Beyond Zero Hour, May 1945 299

The Demise of Culture

Beyond Zero Hour

Conjured Victimhood

The "Inner Emigrants"

Make-Believe Resisters

Conclusion: Culture in Three Tyrannies 330

Notes 341

Archival Sources 393

Bibliography 395

Index 433

Editorial Reviews

"There is no greater authority on the culture of the Nazi period than Michael Kater, and his latest, most ambitious work gives a comprehensive overview of a dismally complex history, astonishing in its breadth of knowledge and acute in its critical perceptions."—Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise

Alex Ross

★ 2019-04-14
A much-needed study of the aesthetics and cultural mores of the Third Reich, with often surprising turns.

Kater (Emeritus, History/York Univ.; Hitler Youth, 2006, etc.), a widely published scholar of the Nazi era, begins with the premise that "in order for a new Nazi type of culture to take hold, the preceding forms first had to be wiped out." These forms were those presumed to be "non-German" and, indeed, were largely Jewish or African: jazz, modernist art, anything smacking of the avant-garde-ism of the Weimar era. Joseph Goebbels was among many Nazi officials who took the lead in bringing music, film, architecture, and the like under the control of the regime. Though Hitler had a thorough cultural program in mind, his tastes were not always predictable or widely shared: He may have revered Wagner, but he wasn't much of a Beethoven fan even if, in 1934, Goebbels, always pressing for a "German" art, "cut down on the political crudities and embarked on a campaign of promoting serious music, beginning with a Beethoven cycle in February, followed by rich programs of music by Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Bruckner." Hitler, like so many readers of German fiction, was a fan of the pseudo-Westerns of Karl May, but he had no special interest in farming and so paid little attention to his regime's emphasis on "blood and soil" novels celebrating farming and the outdoor life. Nazi officials spared a few Jewish practitioners of the arts, but most suffered the same fate as Jews everywhere in the Reich. In a narrative rich in detail and documentation, Kater examines such matters as the plotlines of films in the wake of the defeat at Stalingrad, competition among various Reich figures and ministries to take the lead in cultural matters, the flight of German intellectuals such as Thomas Mann to the U.S., and the general mediocrity of Nazi art.

"The relation between culture and tyranny is a complex one," Kater concludes. Indeed, and his book does much to make it comprehensible.

Kirkus Reviews

Absorbing, chilling study of German artistic life under Hitler”—Max Hastings, The Sunday Times

“While providing a chronology for understanding the creeping totalitarianism, Kater shines most when discussing individual artists and their work, displaying a thoroughness and texture unrivalled by any other scholar.”—Jonathan Petropoulos, The Art Newspaper

 

“A much-needed study of the aesthetics and cultural mores of the Third Reich, with often surprising turns . . . in a narrative rich in detail and documentation. . . . ‘The relation between culture and tyranny is a complex one,’ Kater concludes. Indeed, and his book does much to make it comprehensible.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Kater’s work is strongest where it uncovers the suppressed histories of primary sources and archival material. There is a subtlety and sensitivity of scholarship here, which Kater presents with contemporary urgency. While the book is about the past, it prompts us to ask what the archival evidence of tomorrow will reveal about our actions today.”—Marlo Alexandra Burks, Literary Review of Canada

“Kater’s book is a grim but necessary chronicle of the 12-year Third Reich as seen through the culture it destroyed . . . and the culture it then produced to replace it. . . . A nation’s citizens are, collectively, the one and final bulwark against fascism. It’s worth thinking about all over again in 2019.”—Alan Bisbort, Waterbury Republican-American

"There is no greater authority on the culture of the Nazi period than Michael Kater, and his latest, most ambitious work gives a comprehensive overview of a dismally complex history, astonishing in its breadth of knowledge and acute in its critical perceptions."—Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise

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