Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture

Inhumanities is an unprecedented account of the ways Nazi Germany manipulated and mobilized European literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and music in support of its ideological ends. David B. Dennis shows how, based on belief that the Third Reich represented the culmination of Western Civilization, culture became a key propaganda tool in the regime's program of national renewal and its campaign against political, national, and racial enemies. Focusing on the daily output of the V lkischer Beobachter, the party's official organ and the most widely-circulating German newspaper of the day, he reveals how activists twisted history, biography, and aesthetics to fit Nazism's authoritarian, militaristic, and anti-Semitic worldviews. Ranging from National Socialist coverage of Germans such as Luther, D rer, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner, and Nietzsche to 'great men of the Nordic West' such as Socrates, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, he reveals the true extent of the regime's ambitious attempt to reshape the 'German mind'.

Author: David B. Dennis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 05/14/2015
Pages: 558
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.62lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9781107521858

About the Author
Dennis, David B.: - David B. Dennis is Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago. He is the author of Beethoven and German Politics, 1870-1989 (1996) and other works on the intersection of German music and politics.