Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich explores the ways in which the Nazis used art and media to portray their country as the champion of Kultur and civilization. Rather than focusing strictly on the role of the arts in state-supported propaganda, this volume contributes to Holocaust studies by revealing how multiple domains of cultural activity served to conceptually dehumanize Jews and other groups. Contributors address nearly every facet of the arts and mass media under the Third Reich—efforts to define degenerate music and art; the promotion of race hatred through film and public assemblies; views of the racially ideal garden and landscape; race as portrayed in popular literature; the reception of art and culture abroad; the treatment of exiled artists; and issues of territory, conquest, and appeasement. Familiar subjects such as the Munich Accord, Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, and Lebensraum (Living Space) are considered from a new perspective. Anyone studying the history of Nazi Germany or the role of the arts in nationalist projects will benefit from this book. Contributors: Ruth Ben-Ghiat David Culbert Albrecht Dümling Richard A. Etlin Karen A. Fiss Keith Holz Kathleen James-Chakraborty Paul B. Jaskot Karen Koehler Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien Jonathan Petropoulos Robert Jan van Pelt Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Gröning

A ground-breaking study that gets us closer to solving the mystery of why so many Germans embraced the Nazi regime so enthusiastically and identified so closely with it.

George L. Mosse's extensive analysis of Nazi culture - ground-breaking upon its original publication in 1966 - is now offered to readers of a new generation. Selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public pronouncements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors describe National Socialism in practice and explore what it meant for the average German.

“A much-needed study of the aesthetics and cultural mores of the Third Reich . . . rich in detail and documentation.” (Kirkus Reviews) Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler’s enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany’s military campaigns. Michael H. Kater’s engaging and deeply researched account of artistic culture within Nazi Germany considers how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed when the Nazis came to power. With a broad purview that ranges widely across music, literature, film, theater, the press, and visual arts, Kater details the struggle between creative autonomy and political control as he looks at what became of German artists and their work both during and subsequent to Nazi rule. “Absorbing, chilling study of German artistic life under Hitler” —The Sunday Times “There is no greater authority on the culture of the Nazi period than Michael Kater, and his latest, most ambitious work gives a comprehensive overview of a dismally complex history, astonishing in its breadth of knowledge and acute in its critical perceptions.” —Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise Listed on Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles List for 2019 Winner of the Jewish Literary Award in Scholarship

Nearly 50 years after the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich, the officially sanctioned art of his National Socialist regime remains largely unknown. Many were destroyed or stored away in inaccessible locations. Now a documentary film producer offers a thoroughly researched, engrossing examination of the art of National Socialist Germany. 324 illustrations, 33 in full color.

The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'être of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself.

The political elite of Nazi Germany perceived itself as a cultural elite as well. In Art as Politics in the Third Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the elite's cultural aspirations by examining both the formulation of a national aesthetic policy

"Culture and the arts played a central role in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism from the early years of the movement until the last months of the Third Reich in 1945 ... This volume's essays explore these and other aspects of the arts and cultural life under National Socialism ..."--Cover.

'Artists Under Hitler' closely examines cases of artists who failed in their attempts to find accommodation in the Nazi regime as well as others whose desire for official acceptance was realised. They illuminate the complex cultural history of this period and provide haunting portraits of people facing excruciating choices and grave moral questions.

From 1933 to 1945, the Reich Chamber of Culture exercised a profound influence over hundreds of thousands of German artists and entertainers. Alan Steinweis focuses on the fields of music, theater, and the visual arts in this first major study of Nazi cultural administration, examining a complex pattern of interaction among leading Nazi figures, German cultural functionaries, ordinary artists, and consumers of culture. Steinweis gives special attention to Nazi efforts to purge the arts of Jews and other so-called undesirables. Steinweis describes the political, professional, and economic environment in which German artists were compelled to function and explains the structure of decision making, thus showing in whose interest cultural policies were formulated. He discusses such issues as insurance, minimum wage statutes, and certification guidelines, all of which were matters of high priority to the art professions before 1933 as well as after the Nazi seizure of power. By elucidating the economic and professional context of cultural life, Steinweis helps to explain the widespread acquiescence of German artists to artistic censorship and racial 'purification.' His work also sheds new light on the purge of Jews from German cultural life.