In rising to its vociferous “defense of Bayreuth,” the Völkischer Beobachter strongly communicated Nazi enmity toward Weimar culture and politics via critiques of what it saw as the Republic’s inability to fully understand or properly honor the greats of German tradition. But in its role as a “combat paper” in the culture wars between modernists and antimodernists that raged in Germany in 1918, it also devoted plenty of space and energy to directly attacking leading figures of “Weimar culture.” As Alan Steinweis articulated:

Creativity derided as “degenerate” was vilified as an antipode to the idealized Kultur that could provide a sense of order to the German present and future.

Primary targets of Nazi aggression were the writers it dismissed as “asphalt literati,” including Stefan Zweig, Max Brod, Maximilian Harden, Alfred Döblin, and Bertoldt Brecht. Zweig (1881–1942) presented an easy target, since he was Jewish and had not served at the front during the First World War. For those who “suffered endlessly in the field,” the paper contended, it was enough to know that Zweig spent the war in Switzerland; this fact alone invalidated any morals offered by “the Jew Zweig” because “the great humanitarian lesson of the World War was that of standing at the sides of German brothers under storms of steel.” The paper also went after “the Prague Jew” Max Brod (1884–1968), not for his involvement with Franz Kafka, but rather for his own novel, Stefan Rott or The Decisive Year (1931), complaining that the book’s publisher had touted it as “a Bildungsroman in the finest style, filled with passion, longing and insight,” and that the Center Party “handed laurels” to the “Jew Brod.” The Völkischer Beobachter countered that the novel was nothing but “a base Jewish gibe at the German race and at German decency,” and wondered why no one had called for its censorship under laws against smut and filth.