Nazi discomfort with aesthetic modernism is a well-known characteristic of the party’s cultural history. Mein Kampf and other aspects of Hitler’s biography verify that disdain for cultural modernism was fundamental to his world view. “Such diseases could be seen in Germany in nearly every field of art and culture,” he complained, with artists passing off “all sorts of incomprehensible and obviously crazy stuff on their amazed fellow men as a so-called inner experience.” In his opinion, this trend had simply made it “permissible to dish up the hallucinations of lunatics or criminals to the healthy world.” Moreover, he clearly believed that it was the job of rulers to monitor and control the “crazy stuff” of modernism, as prevention against cultural Armageddon:

Direct attacks by NSDAP propaganda and policy on modernist tendencies were most evident in the staging of the “degenerate” art and music exhibitions of 1937 and 1938. But the vilification of “cultural bolshevism” that the party engaged in during the 1920s and 1930s was only the most immediate manifestation of the Nazi antimodernist outlook. Indeed, the Nazis’ antimodernist tack followed directly from a conservatism that had been concerned with non-traditional expression since the middle of the nineteenth century, perceiving it as evidence of the cultural and social decline that had been triggered by the French and Industrial revolutions. They did not, therefore, limit their criticism to contemporary forms of “degenerate” culture, but extended it backward to address art that, for them, represented the first, troubling deviations from classical and romantic aesthetics. Consequently, the Völkischer Beobachter was replete with assessments of nineteenth-century cultural movements and creators that emerged outside the neoclassical and steel romantic trends that its ideologues idealized. But, as was true for National Socialist cultural policy as a whole, the newspaper failed to formulate an unambiguous position against all modernist tendencies.