Honoring, Reinventing, and Creating German Masters

David B. Dennis has written a compelling study of articles published in the cultural section of the most widely read newspaper in Nazi Germany, the Völkischer Beobachter (Folkish Observer). His source, much of it assessed for the first time in English, runs to 1,600 articles from the VB on literature, painting, music, and philosophy. Dennis, a history professor at Loyola University Chicago, whose previous publications include Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (1996), approaches the VB’s cultural pages with interdisciplinary élan. He skillfully focuses on the sophistry employed by a single newspaper in reshaping Germans’ understanding of Western cultural history. Its contributors created a pantheon of German masters by selectively showcasing, and editing, particular artists’ careers and works to illuminate, as they saw it, Western culture’s culmination in National Socialism.

Forty-one percent of the cultural section’s authors (the largest part of identified contributors) were academics, most of them musicologists and music historians, together with specialists in literature, history, art history, and philosophy. These authors rarely betrayed their readers with fabricated scholarship. To the contrary criticism revolved around a process of “selection and omission,” “of emphasis and diminution.” It was important, too, that the articles were clearly written (“obvious, proven, and historically substantiated”). Furthermore Dennis points out that the titles of many articles—e.g., “Goethe’s Ideal of the Führer,” “Heinrich Heine as Communist Agitator,” “Richard Wagner’s Fight for the Volkish Idea”—were probably sufficiently communicable to most readers without their needing to read farther. The VB had the virtue of being academically legitimate while being appropriately völkisch.

Thus, under the editorship of Alfred Rosenberg, Nazism’s chief philosopher, the VB’s critical program was not wholly propagandistic. Certainly it was complicit in denigrating democratic and parliamentary values, but its manipulation of the arts also legitimized the Nazi movement culturally and intellectually. By setting German Kultur in opposition to the crude superficial forces of Zivilisation (embodied by the aesthetics of the Weimar Republic), the VB played a critical role in the formulation of the Nazi Weltanschauung: “It is apparent that those who provided these interpretations of Western culture did not conceive them as just ‘reflective’ of Nazi ideology or instrumental tools of Nazi politics, but as core components of Nazi thought.” Dennis adopts an interpretive framework akin to George L. Mosse’s canonical The Nationalization of the Masses (1975) which showed how Nazi culture was forged through repetition (“propagandizing with a hammer”) and invoked and practiced liturgically, making it resistant to rationalization or intellectualism.

Nazi culture as depicted in the VB, like Nazi ideology in general, was fluid and revolved around a canon of masters and their masterworks. Depending on the circumstances, their works and existing information about their lives were magnified or diminished. German masters were funneled into a matrix of racial Germanness, Volkstümlichkeit (folkishness), nationalism, and anti-Semitism. In the first case art was biologized: Mozart’s “blood heritage” (his parents’ mixed regional bloodlines—“heavy” Swabian, “vivacious” Allemannisch, and so on) explained his musical personality—seriousness mixed with rococo playfulness. While “great men of the Nordic west” were ushered into the pantheon, simultaneously they had to remain völkisch, accessible, and rough-hewn. The northern Renaissance painter Albrecht Altdorfer’s “naïve and elementary” art represented the “purest embodiment of Bavarian folk style.” The composer Anton Bruckner, praised for his folksiness as a south German Catholic and a heavy drinker, became a romantic pendant to Altdorfer. Shakespeare was reduced to a Szenenerschütterer (“great scene-shaker”); the political struggles in the germanized bard’s tragedies convey “a chain of apparently aimless crimes and bloody tests of strength” signifying “the fate and struggle of the Volk.” Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles was presented as a scholastic antecedent to the Nuremberg laws, because the saint discouraged Jews’ holding administrative positions in civil or religious society.

Persistent decontextualization and simplification were the engines of such legerdemain. Nietzsche’s rich poetic and aphoristic corpus was reduced to antidemocratic grumbling; his tendency toward...