Abstract: This book analyzes how the primary propaganda outlet of the Nazi party presented the History of Western art, literature, music, and thought according to the National Socialist worldview. It is a study of every major article the main newspaper of Hitler’s movement—The Völkischer Beobachter (Folkish Observer)—published about leading writers, composers, artists, and their works, including Germans like Luther, Dürer, Mozart, Schiller, Goethe, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, non-Germans such as Socrates, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Byron, Rimbaud, Picasso, and Stravinsky, and minor figures they preferred over “enemies” such as Heinrich Heine and Thomas Mann. My extensive archival research demonstrates how Nazi Germany attempted to appropriate not only the Germany of “Poets and Thinkers,” but History of Western Humanities from Ancient Greece through the Second World War. Nazi leaders viewed their movement as the culmination of Western Civilization, and this book leads readers through their cultural self-justification. Indeed, it is the first comprehensive survey of the terms National Socialist propagandists used to discuss the great names of European culture.
This database is "under construction." It is housed as a "Library" in a Public Group of Zotero.org. This will allow you to easily search the listings by tags, especially the names of major creative figures covered in the articles. This will provide you with the author, title, and date on which the article appeared in the newspaper. You will then need to order a copy via ILL. I am working to scan all of the articles, then I will add links to those PDFs.
From the cover: This absorbing book chronicles the exploitation of Beethoven’s life and work by German political parties from the founding of the modern nation to the East German Revolution of 1989. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped archival resources, David B. Dennis examines how politicians have associated Beethoven with competing visions of German destiny, thereby transforming art and artist into powerful national symbols. Dennis shows for the first time that propagandists of every persuasion have equated Beethoven’s works with dogma. In the late nineteenth century, supporters of Bismarck and the German emperors endorsed a militaristic interpretation forged during the Franco-Prussian War, while opponents promoted portraits of Beethoven as revolutionary. In the First World War Beethoven was drawn into the trenches where Germans countered enemy allegations that they had forfeited the right to enjoy his music. Beethoven interpretations fragmented in the Weimar Republic, as every faction formulated its own variation. The Nazi view of the composer as Führer was enforced in the Third Reich. After 1945 German views of Beethoven corresponded to the division of the nation, but when the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989 one sentiment rose to dominance: that all people could become brothers, just as the composer had wished in his Ninth Symphony. By establishing connections between Beethoven’s art and public policy, Dennis has written a book of compelling interest to historians, musicologists, and Beethoven enthusiasts alike.