Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Foundations of Nazi Cultural History
- Part II Blind to the Light
- Part III Modern Dilemmas
- Part IV “Holy” War and Weimar “Crisis”
- Part V Nazi “Solutions”
- 16 “Honor your German Masters”
- 17 The Nazi “Renaissance”
- 18 Kultur at War
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
16 - “Honor your German Masters”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Foundations of Nazi Cultural History
- Part II Blind to the Light
- Part III Modern Dilemmas
- Part IV “Holy” War and Weimar “Crisis”
- Part V Nazi “Solutions”
- 16 “Honor your German Masters”
- 17 The Nazi “Renaissance”
- 18 Kultur at War
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This book has shown how Nazi ideologues worked to demonstrate that their ideals were rooted in the Western cultural past. Establishing legitimacy based on tradition through invocation of the ideas and creations of historical “masters” was, as George Mosse argued, intended to make men “feel at home in this world by providing them with a reality other than that of daily life in an industrializing society” – with “a world where ‘everything was in its appointed place’; a world where one was ‘at home.’” In every form of artistic representation and with regard to every topic, Nazi culture addressed the “desire for permanence and fixed reference points in a changing world.”
Hitler was adamant about the need to preserve such reference points across every facet of his nationalized culture. From the earliest stages of his career, he had dedicated himself to applying whatever measures were required to prevent the further denigration by modern society of German cultural heritage:
The saddest thing about the state of our whole culture of the prewar period was . . . the hatred with which the memory of the greater past was besmirched and effaced. In nearly all fields of art, especially in the theater and literature, we began around the turn of the century to produce less that was new and significant, but to disparage the best of the old work and represent it as inferior and surpassed . . . And from this effort to remove the past from the eyes of the present, the evil intent of the apostles of the future could clearly and distinctly be seen.
Hitler thus sought to nullify the defining characteristics of modernism – its rejection of the received cultural hierarchies and traditions – by casting modernism and its apostles as an essentially destructive force that had utterly failed to produce work of any lasting value. The expression of such an impulse had no potential. The basis for a culture of the future must be grounded in a stable cultural tradition rather than in its denunciation. Hitler thus averred that “every true renaissance of humanity can start with an easy mind from the good achievements of past generations; in fact, can often make them truly appreciated for the first time.”
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- Chapter
- Information
- InhumanitiesNazi Interpretations of Western Culture, pp. 361 - 382Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012