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

Richard A. Etlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Maryland. He is the author of five books, most recently In Defense of Humanism: Value in the Arts and Letters and Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

List of Illustrations

Editor's Acknowledgments

Editor's Note

Introduction: The Perverse Logic of Nazi Thought

Richard A. Etlin

I. Weltanschauung

1. The Target of Racial Purity: The "Degenerate Music" Exhibition in Dusseldorf, 1938

Albrecht Dumling

2. The National Socialist Garden and Landscape Ideal: Bodenstandigkeit (Rootedness in the Soil)

Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Groning

3. Bearers of Culture, Harbingers of Destruction: The Mythos of the Germans in the East

Robert Jan van Pelt

II. Propaganda

4. The Impact of Anti-Semitic Film Propaganda on German Audiences: Jew Suss and The Wandering Jew (1940)

David Culbert

5. The Celluloid War: Packaging War for Sale in Nazi Home-Front Films

Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien

6. The Drama of Illumination: Visions of Community from Wilhelmine to Nazi Germany

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

III. Empire-Building

7. From Seduction to Denial: Arno Breker's Engagement with National Socialism

Jonathan Petropoulos

8. Heinrich Himmler and the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds: The Interest of the SS in the German Building Economy

Paul B. Jaskot

9. Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

IV. Appeasement

10. The Bauhaus, 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1938

Karen Koehler

11. In Hitler's Salon: The German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale

Karen A. Fiss

12. The Exiled Artists from Nazi Germany and Their Art

Keith Holz

List of Contributors

Index