We have seen in the newspaper’s cultural coverage of the dynamic forces of rationalism and classicism its “Nordic” spins on the Renaissance and its emphasis on the “Germanic” tradition of the Reformation era. As Völkischer Beobachter treatment moved from Late Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, little more was said about the intervening periods. However, when its coverage, perceived chronologically, reached the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is not surprising that Nazi critics belittled enlightened thought and emphasized ostensible origins of romantic culture. Criticism was directed against Spinoza’s “Jewish ethics,” Newton as the father of modern materialism, Lessing’s philo-Semitic Nathan the Wise, and Moses Mendelssohn as an originator of the shadowy “Jewish conspiracy.” Supposedly in opposition to this, Kant’s rationalization for anti-Semitism was “rediscovered.” Subsequently, the Völkischer Beobachter analyzed the French Revolution as primarily a racial conflict between Latin underclasses and the “Germanic” French nobility. In this context, Schiller appeared in the Nazi newspaper as a great German (not “international”) humanist and counterrevolutionary. Goethe was claimed as “ours” by underplaying his neoclassical tastes and highlighting his elitism and patriotism. Likewise, the Völkischer Beobachter’s reception of Beethoven centered on the composer’s reactions to the Revolution in an effort to refute assertions that he experienced a case of “revolutionary fever.” Finally, the Nazi newspaper extolled Prussian reformers and early nationalists like Fichte and Herder as “Prophets of National Socialism.”

Naturally, the Völkischer Beobachter rejected the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) out of hand. “Certain Christian precepts were foreign to the Jew,” the paper said; in Spinoza, “one could observe profound differences between Aryan and Semitic spiritual foundations.” Apparently ignoring the status ordinarily accorded to Spinoza’s major work on the topic, the paper concluded that ethics – the “touchstone and goal of all philosophical observations” in German thinking – was nothing more than a “handmaiden” in the philosophical system of the Jew, who was “tortured by arbitrarily speculative thinking.” Indeed, to the paper, Spinoza was one of the “greatest Jewish thinkers,” though, of course, this was not a compliment in Nazi discourse. It did, on the other hand, describe Spinoza’s German contemporary, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), as a “genius of bold and outstanding spirit whose ideas found rich fulfillment.” But uneasiness ran through all Völkischer Beobachter discussion of the early modern rationalist tradition.