Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Foundations of Nazi Cultural History
- 1 The “Germanic” Origins of Western Culture
- 2 Vox Volkish
- 3 The Western Tradition as Political and Patriotic
- 4 The Western Tradition as anti-Semitic
- 5 The Archenemy Incarnate
- Part II Blind to the Light
- Part III Modern Dilemmas
- Part IV “Holy” War and Weimar “Crisis”
- Part V Nazi “Solutions”
- Notes
- Index
5 - The Archenemy Incarnate
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Foundations of Nazi Cultural History
- 1 The “Germanic” Origins of Western Culture
- 2 Vox Volkish
- 3 The Western Tradition as Political and Patriotic
- 4 The Western Tradition as anti-Semitic
- 5 The Archenemy Incarnate
- Part II Blind to the Light
- Part III Modern Dilemmas
- Part IV “Holy” War and Weimar “Crisis”
- Part V Nazi “Solutions”
- Notes
- Index
Summary
We have learned so far that the Völkischer Beobachter vigorously promoted the notion that great cultural figures in the Western tradition were of Germanic origins, politically engaged, grounded in the Volk, and, especially, anti-Semitic – going as far in this last respect as to claim that in their work and lives, these masters had indeed prefigured Hitler’s goals of seeking out and combating the Jew in all branches of cultural and artistic life. In this chapter, we will hear what the paper’s contributors said about significant cultural figures who were actually Jewish, and, as such, embodied the worst Nazi fears. To the Völkischer Beobachter, these creators represented the treacherous threat of Jews who had insinuated themselves into German culture and then worked to undermine it.
One problem Nazi cultural critics faced, of course, was that the presence and influence of Jewish artists, writers, and composers in the Western tradition was indisputable. In an effort to come to terms with this fact, Nazi cultural critics resorted to tactics of racial stereotyping that echoed many of the themes of cultural anti-Semitism that predecessors such as Richard Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain had percolated in the second half of the nineteenth century – as filtered through Hitler’s own interpretations. And among these themes, the most useful for its ability to explain away the fact that Jews had assimilated the German tradition of Bildung was the assertion that, lacking their own culture, Jewish artists functioned as little more than cynical, opportunistic imitators of their supposed superiors. As Hitler explained:
Since the Jew was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others . . . The Jewish people, despite all apparent intellectual qualities, is without any true culture, and especially without any culture of its own . . . The Jew takes over foreign culture, imitating or rather ruining it . . . Hence his intellect will never have a constructive effect, but will be destructive . . . Culturally he contaminates art, literature, the theater, makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature. Religion is ridiculed, ethics and morality represented as outmoded, until the last props of a nation in its struggle for existence in this world have fallen.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- InhumanitiesNazi Interpretations of Western Culture, pp. 106 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012