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:

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.”