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'It's like being in a dream', commented Joseph Goebbels when he visited Nazi-occupied Paris in the summer of 1940. Dream and reality did indeed intermingle in the culture of the Third Reich, racialist fantasies and spectacular propaganda set-pieces contributing to this atmosphere alongside more benign cultural offerings such as performances of classical music or popular film comedies.
A cultural palette that catered to the tastes of the majority helped encourage acceptance of the regime. The Third Reich was therefore eager to associate itself with comfortable middle-brow conventionality, while at the same time exploiting the latest trends that modern mass culture had to offer. And it was precisely because the culture of the Nazi period accommodated such a range of different needs and aspirations that it was so successfully able to legitimize war, imperial domination, and destruction.
Moritz Föllmer turns the spotlight on this fundamental aspect of the Third Reich's successful cultural appeal in this ground-breaking new study, investigating what 'culture' meant for people in the years between 1933 and 1945: for convinced National Socialists at one end of the spectrum, via the legions of the apparently 'unpolitical', right through to anti-fascist activists, Jewish people, and other victims of the regime at the other end of the spectrum. Relating the everyday experience of people living under Nazism, he is able to give us a privileged insight into the question of why so many Germans enthusiastically embraced the regime and identified so closely with it.
List of contents
- Introduction: 'Living in a Dream'
- 1: From Weimar Culture to 'German' Culture
- 2: National Socialism as a Cultural Synthesis
- 3: Towards a 'Pure' Culture
- 4: Wars of Culture
- 5: Culture of Destruction
- Conclusion
- Index
About the author
Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam, and the author of a number of books and articles on identity and culture in twentieth century Germany, including most recently Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (2013).
Summary
A 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.
Additional text
Moritz Föllmer's artful and nuanced study of culture in Nazi Germany explores a wide range of topics, including not only "official" Nazi culture as reflected in the work of Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer, but also subjects such as Jewish cultural life, the exile experience, and Nazi art plundering. Föllmer shows the myriad ways in which culture matteredfrom indoctrination and an effort to legitimize the war, to satisfying a desire for entertainment, among other reasons. Situating culture in the broader socio-political history of the Third Reich, Föllmer has produced a tour de force.
Report
[Föllmer] applies a sharp cultural lens to metropolitan life, politics and individual strivings and pastimes as the backdrop to disaster falling on Germany. Anne McElvoy, The Observer
