David B. Dennis Bücher

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 Völkischer 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, Dürer, 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'.

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 Fuhrer 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.