Belief in a Germanic spirit—defined as mystical, rural, moral, bearing ancient wisdom, noble in the face of a tragic destiny—existed long before the rise of the Nazis;
Richard Wagner celebrated such ideas in his work. Beginning before World War I the well-known German architect and painter
Paul Schultze-Naumburg's influential writings, which invoked racial theories in condemning modern art and architecture, supplied much of the basis for Adolf Hitler's belief that classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art. ,
The Great Torchbearer (1939). The sculpture stood, together with the sculpture
The Wehrmacht, in the courtyard of the
New Reich Chancellery in Berlin until 1945, and is now owned by the Breker Museum. It was intended to represent the spirit of Nazi Germany. Among the well-known artists endorsed by the Nazis were the sculptors
Josef Thorak and
Arno Breker, and painters
Werner Peiner,
Arthur Kampf,
Adolf Wissel, and
Conrad Hommel. In July 1937, four years after it came to power, the Nazi Party put on two art exhibitions in
Munich. The Great German Art Exhibition was designed to showcase works Hitler approved, depicting statuesque blonde nudes, idealized soldiers, and landscapes. The second exhibition, just down the road, showed the other side of
German art: modern, abstract, non-representational—or as the Nazis saw it, "degenerate". According to Klaus Fischer, "Nazi art, in short, was colossal, impersonal, and stereotypical. People were shorn of all individuality and became mere emblems expressive of assumed eternal truths. In looking at Nazi architecture, art, or painting, one quickly gains the feeling that the faces, shapes, and colors all serve a propagandistic purpose; they are all the same stylized statements of Nazi virtues—power, strength, solidity, Nordic beauty."
Painting (listed in the
God-gifted list) The art of Nazi Germany was characterized by a
Romantic realism style based on
classical models. While banning modern styles as
degenerate, the Nazis promoted paintings that were narrowly traditional in manner, and that exalted the "
blood and soil" values of
racial purity,
militarism, and
obedience. Other popular themes for Nazi art were the
Volk at work in the fields, a return to the simple virtues of
Heimat (love of homeland), the manly virtues of the National Socialist struggle, and the lauding of the female activities of child bearing and raising symbolized by the phrase
Kinder, Küche, Kirche ("children, kitchen, church"). In general, painting—once purged of "degenerate art"—was based on traditional
genre painting. Titles were purposeful: "Fruitful Land", "Liberated Land", "Standing Guard", "Through Wind and Weather", "Blessing of Earth", and the like. Hitler's favorite painter was
Adolf Ziegler and Hitler owned a number of his works.
Landscape painting featured prominently in the Great German Art exhibition. While drawing on
German Romanticism traditions, it was to be firmly based on real landscape, the Germans'
Lebensraum, without religious moods. Peasants were also popular images, reflecting a simple life in harmony with nature. This art showed no sign of the mechanization of farm work. The farmer labored by hand, with effort and struggle. Not a single painting in the first exhibition showed urban or industrialized life, and only two in the exhibition in 1938. Nazi theory explicitly rejected "materialism", and therefore, despite the realistic treatment of images, "realism" was a seldom-used term. A painter was to create an ideal picture, for eternity. The images of men, and still more of women, were heavily stereotyped, with physical perfection required for the nude paintings. This may be why there were very few anti-Semitic paintings; while such works as
Um Haus and Hof, depicting a Jewish speculator dispossessing an elderly peasant couple exist, they are few, perhaps because the art was supposed to be on a higher plane. Explicitly political paintings were more common but still very rare. With the advent of war,
war paintings became far more common. The images were romanticized, depicting heroic sacrifice and victory. Still, landscapes predominated, and among the painters exempted from war service, all were noted for landscapes or other pacific subjects. Even Hitler and Goebbels found the new paintings disappointing, although Goebbels tried to put a good face on it with the observation that they had cleared the field, and that these desperate times drew many talents into political life rather than cultural. In a speech at the
Great German Art Exhibition in Munich Hitler said in 1939: By 1938, nearly 16,000 works by German and non-German artists had been seized from German galleries and either sold abroad or destroyed.
Sculpture , the Reich armaments minister The monumental possibilities of sculpture offered greater material expression of the theories of
Nazism. The
Great German Art Exhibition promoted sculpture at the expense of painting. As such, the nude male was the most common representation of the ideal Aryan; the artistic skill of
Arno Breker elevated him to become the favourite sculptor of Adolf Hitler.
Josef Thorak was another official sculptor whose monumental style suited the image Nazi Germany wished to communicate to the world. Nude females were also common, though they tended to be less monumental. In both cases, the physical form of the ideal Nazi man and woman showed no imperfections. Germany's urban centers in the 1920s and '30s were buzzing with
jazz clubs,
cabaret houses, and
avant-garde music. In contrast, the Nazi regime made concentrated efforts to shun modern music (which was considered degenerate and Jewish in nature) and instead embraced classical
German music. Highly favored was music that alluded to a mythic, heroic German past, such as that of
Johann Sebastian Bach,
Ludwig van Beethoven, and
Richard Wagner.
Anton Bruckner was highly favored, as his music was regarded as an expression of the
zeitgeist of the German
volk. The music of
Arnold Schoenberg (and
atonal music along with it),
Gustav Mahler,
Felix Mendelssohn, and many others was banned because the composers were Jewish or of Jewish origin.
Paul Hindemith fled to Switzerland in 1938, rather than fit his music into Nazi ideology. Some operas of
Georg Friedrich Händel were either banned outright for themes sympathetic to Jews and Judaism or had new librettos written for them. German composers whose music was performed more often during the Nazi period included
Max Reger and
Hans Pfitzner.
Richard Strauss continued to be the most performed contemporary German composer, as he had been before the Nazi regime. However, even Strauss had his opera
The Silent Woman banned in 1935 due to his Jewish librettist
Stefan Zweig. Music by non-German composers was tolerated if it was classically inspired,
tonal, and not by a composer of Jewish origin or having ties to ideologies hostile to the Nazi regime. The Nazis recognized
Franz Liszt for having German origin and fabricated a genealogy that purported that
Frédéric Chopin was German. The Nazi
Governor-General of occupied Poland even had a "Chopin Museum" built in
Kraków. The music of the Russian
Peter Tchaikovsky could be performed in Nazi Germany even after
Operation Barbarossa. Operas by
Gioacchino Rossini,
Giuseppe Verdi and
Giacomo Puccini got frequent play. The most-performed modern non-German composers before the outbreak of war were
Claude Debussy,
Maurice Ravel,
Jean Sibelius and
Igor Stravinsky. who served as the first director of the Propaganda Ministry's music division, and
Carl Orff have been subject to extreme criticism and heated defense. Jews were quickly prohibited from performing or conducting classical music in Germany. Such conductors as
Otto Klemperer,
Bruno Walter,
Ignatz Waghalter,
Josef Krips, and
Kurt Sanderling fled Germany. Upon the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia, the conductor
Karel Ančerl was blacklisted as a Jew and was sent in turn to
Theresienstadt and
Auschwitz.
Musicologists of Nazi Germany As the Nazi regime accrued power in 1933, musicologists were directed to rewrite the history of German music to accommodate Nazi mythology and ideology.
Richard Wagner and
Hans Pfitzner were now seen as composers who envisioned a unified order (
Volksgemeinschaft) in which music served as an index of the German community. In a time of disintegration, Wagner and Pfitzner wanted to revitalize the country through music. In a book about Hans Pfitzner and Wagner, published in Regensburg in 1939, the author not only followed the birth of contemporary musical parties but also that of political parties in Germany. The Wagner-Pfitzner stance contrasted ideas of other notable artists, such as
Arnold Schoenberg and
Theodor W. Adorno, who wanted music to be autonomous from politics, Nazi control, and application. Although Wagner and Pfitzner predated Nazism, their sentiments and thoughts, Wagner's
Gesamtkunstwerk, were appropriated by Hitler and his propagandists—notably
Joseph Goebbels. According to Michael Meyer, "The very emphasis on rootedness and on traditional music underscored Nazi understanding of itself in dialectical terms: old gods were mobilized against the false values of the immediate past to offer legitimacy to the epiphany of Adolf Hitler and the musical representation of his realm." Composers, librettists, educators, critics, and especially musicologists, through their public statements, intellectual writings, and journals, contributed to the justification of a totalitarian blueprint to be implanted through Nazification. All music was then composed for Nazi pageants, rallies, and conventions. Composers dedicated so-called 'consecration fanfares,' inauguration fanfares, and flag songs to Hitler. When Hitler assumed power, the Nazi revolution was immediately expressed in musicological journalism. Certain progressive journalism on modern music was purged. Journals that had been sympathetic to the 'German viewpoint', entrenched in Wagnerian ideals, like the
Zeitschrift für Musik and
Die Musik, showed confidence in the new regime and affirmed the process of intertwining government policies with music. Joseph Goebbels used the
Völkischer Beobachter, a journal distributed to the general public as well as to elites and party officials, as an organ of Reich Culture. By the end of the 1930s, the
Mitteilungen der Reichsmusikkammer had become another prominent journal that reflected the music policy, organizational, and personnel changes within musical institutions. In the early years of Nazi rule, the musicologists and musicians redirected the orientation of music, defining what was "German Music" and what was not. Nazi ideology was applied to the evaluation of musicians for hero status; musicians defined in the new German musical era were given titles of prophets, while their accomplishments and deeds were seen as direct accomplishments of the Nazi regime. The contribution of German musicologists led to the justification of Nazi power and a new German music culture as a whole. The musicologists defined the greater German values that musicians would have to identify with, because their duty was to integrate music and Nazism in a way that made them look inseparable. Nazi myth-making and ideology were forced upon the new musical path of Germany rather than truly embedded in the rhetoric of German music.
Graphic design The poster became an important medium for propaganda during this period. Combining text and bold graphics,
posters were extensively deployed in both Germany and the occupied areas. Their
typography reflected the Nazis' official ideology. The use of
Fraktur was common in Germany until 1941, when
Martin Bormann denounced the typeface as "Judenlettern" and decreed that only
Roman type should be used. Modern
sans-serif typefaces were condemned as
cultural Bolshevism, although
Futura continued to be used owing to its practicality. Imagery frequently drew on
heroic realism. Nazi youth and the SS were depicted monumentally, with lighting posed to produce grandeur. The swastika was in existence long before Hitler came into power—serving purposes that were much more benign than the ones it [the swastika] is associated with today. Because of the stark, graphic lines used to create a swastika, it was a symbol that was very easy to remember. Literature was under the jurisdiction of Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment. According to Grunberger, "At the beginning of the war, this department supervised no less than 2,500 publishing houses, 23,000 bookshops, 3,000 authors, 50 national literary prizes, 20,000 new books issued annually, and a total of 1 million titles constituting the available book market." Germany was Europe's biggest producer of books—in terms both of total annual production and the number of individual new titles appearing each year. In 1937, at 650 million RM, the average sales value of the books produced took third place in the statistics on goods, after coal and wheat. The first Nazi literature commission set itself the goal of eradicating the literature of the 'System Period', as Weimar was contemptuously called, and of propagating volkisch-nationalist literature in the Nazis state. Literature was recognized early on as an essential political tool in Nazi Germany, as virtually 100 percent of the German population was literate. "The most widely-read-or displayed-book of the period was Hitler's
Mein Kampf, a collection (according to
Lion Feuchtwanger) of 164,000 offences against German grammar and syntax; by 1940, it was, with 6 million copies sold, the solitary front-runner in the German best-seller list, some 5 million copies ahead of
Rainer Maria Rilke and others." The Nazis permitted much foreign literature to be read, in part because they believed that the writings of authors such as
John Steinbeck and
Erskine Caldwell substantiated the Nazis' condemnation of Western society as corrupt. However, when the United States entered the war, all foreign authors were strictly censored. Themes in Nazi literature were defined as a range of "permissible literary expression" largely limited to four subjects: German war glorification,
Nazism and race,
blood and soil, and the
Nazi movement." Popular Nazi Germany authors included
Agnes Miegel,
Rudolf Binding,
Werner Beumelburg and
Börries von Münchhausen.
Fronterlebnis (War as a Spiritual Experience) This was one of the most popular themes during the interwar period. Writers celebrated the "heroics of front-line soldiers in [World War I], ... the thrill of combat and the sacredness of death when it is in the service of the fatherland." Prominent books include
Ernst Junger's
Storm of Steel (1920),
Struggle as Inner Experience (1922),
Storms (1933),
Fire and Blood (1925),
The Adventurous Heart (1929), and
Total Mobilization (1931).
Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) Novels in this theme often featured an instinctive, soil-bound peasant community that warded off alien outsiders seeking to destroy their way of life. "A once mediocre artist and aspiring architect, Hitler also pronounced upon the ‘decadence’ of modern art and pushed his planners to create monumental buildings in older
neoclassical or
Art Deco styles."
Theatre and cinema "The Reich Film Chamber (
Reichsfilmkammer) controlled the lively German film industry, while a Film Credit Bank (also under Goebbels' control) centralized the financial aspects of film production." Approximately 1,363 feature pictures were made during Nazi rule (208 of these were banned after World War II for containing Nazi Propaganda). Every film made in Nazi Germany (including features, shorts, newsreels, and documentaries) had to be passed by Joseph Goebbels himself before they could be shown in public. Mass culture was less stringently regulated than high culture, possibly because authorities feared the consequences of overly heavy-handed interference with popular entertainment. Thus, until the outbreak of the war, most Hollywood films could be screened, including
It Happened One Night,
San Francisco, and
Gone with the Wind. While the performance of atonal music was banned, the prohibition of jazz was less strictly enforced.
Benny Goodman and
Django Reinhardt were popular, and leading English and American jazz bands continued to perform in major cities until the war; thereafter, dance bands officially played "
swing" rather than the banned jazz. A film premiered in Berlin on November 28, 1940, which was clearly a tool used to promote Nazi Ideology. The release of the film
Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) was only two months before the announcement made by German officials of the establishment of the ghetto in
Łódź. The film was portrayed in the Nazi press as a documentary to emphasize the cinema as truth, when in reality it was nothing more than propaganda to raise hatred against the Jewish community among its viewers. The filmmaker,
Fritz Hippler, used numerous visual techniques to portray Jews as a filthy, degenerate, and disease-infested population. Purporting to provide the viewer with an in-depth look at the Jewish lifestyle, the film showed staged scenes of Łódź (soon to be ghetto) with the presence of flies and rats, to suggest a dangerous-to-life area of Europe, which, in turn, only perpetuated underlying superstition and fear in the viewer. To add to this staged and exaggerated scene of filth was a warning released by officials of The
Reich: an advisory that Łódź is an area of widespread infectious disease. The film director utilized racist cinema to bolster the illusion that Jews were parasites and corruptors of German culture. Hippler made use of
voice-overs to cite hate speeches or fictitious statistics of the Jewish population. He also borrowed numerous scenes from other films and presented them out of context. For example, a scene of a Jewish businessman in the United States hiding money was accompanied by a bogus claim that Jewish men get taxed more than non-Jews in the United States, which was used to insinuate that Jews withhold money from the government. Through the repetitive use of side angles of Jewish people, who were filmed (without knowledge) while looking over their shoulder at the camera,
Der ewige Jude created a visual suggesting a shifty and conspiring nature of Jews. Yet another propaganda technique was superposition. Hippler superimposed the
Star of David onto the tops of world capitals, insinuating an illusion of Jewish world domination.
Der ewige Jude is notorious for its anti-Semitism and its use of cinema in the fabrication of propaganda, to satisfy Hitler and to embrace the Germanic ideology that would fuel a nation in support of an obsessive leader. "On the lighter side, a Jewish actor named
Leo Reuss fled Germany to Vienna, where he dyed his hair and beard and became a specialist in 'Aryan' roles, which the Nazis greatly praised. Having had his fun, Reuss revealed he was a Jew, signed a contract with MGM, and departed for the United States". ==Führermuseum==