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 19331
THIS 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 book’s undertaking.
The book’s first contention is that in order for a new Nazi type of culture to take hold, the preceding forms first had to be wiped out. This mainly affected the artistic and intellectual achievements most hated by the Nazis, those of the Weimar Republic, whose aesthetic and political hallmark was Modernism. The police controls Hitler used to carry out purges in political and social contexts were also used against Modernist art forms and their creators. We shall see the various other mechanisms the Nazis used to stamp out Modernism and what they put in its place. We shall also see how far the Modernists were able to withstand this assault and when, if at all, they had to concede defeat.
Chapter 2 will look at how, once a new Nazi type of culture was in place, it fitted into a totalitarian pattern of governance in the pre-war years. The cultural forms of music, film, radio, the press, the visual arts and architecture, live theater and literature, supplied the content that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, above all others of Hitler’s cronies, needed in order to intimidate or encourage the masses, and ultimately control them under his and Hitler’s tyrannical regime. Goebbels ingeniously organized these art forms in a conveniently pliable system of, eventually, six culture chambers as early as the fall of 1933, which he personally oversaw and could manipulate. How these different elements of culture were utilized politically and socially will be examined, as well as how effectively such control was exercised and what happened to the cultural media and their creators in the process.
Chapters 3 and 4 will look at Jews in the Nazi cultural establishment, and how the uses of culture shifted when Germany was at war. We know today that at the dawn of World War II one of Hitler’s main aims had already been well realized: the exclusion of the Jews from the German völkisch community. What we know less about, however, is the significance of the Jews in the formation of Weimar culture, and how those Jews were dealt with after January 1933. It will be shown to what extent Nazi culture, such as it was, was used to move forward the total elimination of the Jews. As should become clearer in this book, anti-Semitism was expressed through the Nazi arts, and the historian today can point to many human tragedies in the retracing of that course. The war itself further defined the arts in Germany, new and of older vintage, squarely in terms of service to the recently constructed totalitarian polity, with a dedicated martial purpose after 1938. We shall see what specific qualities in the arts were employed to render culture serviceable in this fashion, and how this affected the artists themselves. We shall also see how far the wartime uses of culture had a bearing on the final outcome of the conflict for the regime’s leadership and its subjects.
It is already well known that after 1933, part of German culture, traditionalist and Modernist, was carried on in countries other than Germany, where anti-Nazi émigrés attempted to take root. Chapter 5 will look at these efforts as well as the lines of continuity that existed from German-defined art to émigré art, with the outbreak of World War II as a possible caesura. Many refugees have described how the lives and work of artists and men and women of letters changed in emigration substantially. The unusual case of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, who continued with his work as an émigré in almost exactly the same manner as he had done before his exodus, therefore deserves special attention. It remains to be seen why, if Mann had withstood the trauma of exile and continued to write so prolifically, he was not welcomed back to Germany after the war, as well as why he himself did not wish to return to a society that had once included him as its member.
Chapter 6 will consider the ways in which the creative class after 1945 attempted to revive true culture in a Germany emancipating itself from the Nazi past. It will be shown how such a resurrection was hampered and delayed by surviving functionaries of the Nazi cultural establishment, who tried to sabotage fresh initiatives embedded in a new democracy, and by political turncoats who usually were more of a hindrance than a help.
This book is not only the story of culture in Nazi Germany, however incomplete it may necessarily have to be, but also a new history of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945, told from the vantage point of culture, its protagonists and detractors. It builds on earlier studies of culture in Germany I have published in the past, some with an emphasis on music. A strong catalyst for writing this book was my participation in the pioneering Miller Symposium on the arts in the Third Reich, organized by Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener at the University of Vermont in the spring of 2004.2 Those scholars must be commended even now for having asked fresh questions and encouraging the symposium’s participants to look further and perhaps find some answers.
A prior, single-volume history of culture under the Nazis does not exist bar a few exceptions.3 An early milestone in the field is Joseph Wulf’s five volumes, each of which looks at a different aspect of culture in the Third Reich. But Wulf’s work consists of edited selections of printed primary sources, mostly newspaper and journal pieces, rather than overarching analysis. There are also other important, sometimes even pioneering, partial studies. Outstanding interpretations of film in the Third Reich have been contributed by Eric Rentschler, David Hull, and David Welch, lately also by Bill Niven, and of the press by Bernd Sösemann; literature has been expertly analyzed by Ralf Schnell and music by Fred K. Prieberg, Erik Levi, and Pamela M. Potter.4 In the visual arts, the writings of Jonathan Petropoulos have long been pace-setting, and both he and Potter have in more recent times provided important monographs that come close to a more global treatment of the arts under Hitler, each in its own fashion.5
Some of the work for this book goes back to a time when I began enjoying the active support (as I still do now) of York University’s research funding connected to my research chair, as well as the support of four major granting agencies. First was a Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1970s. Next to the rescue came the Canada Council Killam Foundation (Ottawa), which granted me a Senior Killam Fellowship twice, to relieve me of teaching for a total of four years. Third, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in Ottawa supported me many times over the decades, financing research in the field, and finally the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Bonn awarded me a Konrad-Adenauer Research Prize for field work in the 1990s and beyond. To all these institutions, without whose help this book could not have been written, I once again extend my heartfelt thanks. The most recent research in Canada was enabled by the inter-library-loan offices of York University, where I had the good fortune of being assisted by four skilled librarians, Gladys Fung, Mary Lehane, Samantha McWilliams, and Sandra Snell. As they have done before, they helped me again not only in their capacity as librarians, but as research assistants who secured and processed sources for me even when I thought they could never be obtained.
Friends like William E. Seidelman, Herman Schornstein, and Kevin Cook, as well as, especially, my wife Barbara and I, had countless discussions about problem areas and confrontational situations that may have paralleled some in our present day, as global politics seems to be moving in the direction of authoritarianism once again – a political climate in which violations against what should always be autonomous, inviolable, culture, with all its manifestations, occur all too easily. Not least with these thoughts in mind, parts of my manuscript received a careful screening by sage colleagues, Peter Loewenberg, Hans R. Vaget, and Claudio Duran, who read one chapter each with constructive feedback, for which they deserve my gratitude. Alex Ross read the whole manuscript, and his subsequent constructive suggestions are much appreciated. Much credit finally must go to Heather McCallum, Marika Lysandrou, Rachael Lonsdale, and Clarissa Sutherland of Yale University Press. Heather was always at my side offering generous but firm guidelines, and Marika, Rachael, and Clarissa expertly helped turn the manuscript into print. Should there be any mistakes in this book, I alone am accountable for them.