Culture
The regime promoted the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, a national German ethnic community. The concept was to build a classless society based on racial purity and the perceived need to prepare for warfare, conquest, and a struggle against Marxism. The German Labour Front founded the Kraft durch Freude (KdF; Strength Through Joy) organisation in 1933. In addition to taking control of tens of thousands of previously privately-run recreational clubs, it offered highly regimented holidays and entertainment experiences such as cruises, vacation destinations, and concerts.
The Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) was organised under the control of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in September 1933. Subchambers were set up to control various aspects of cultural life, such as films, radio, newspapers, fine arts, music, live theatre, and literature. All members of these professions were required to become members of their respective organisation. Jews and people considered politically unreliable were prevented from working, and many emigrated. Books and scripts has to be approved by the Propaganda Ministry prior to publication. Standards in the arts deteriorated as the regime sought to use cultural outlets exclusively as propaganda media.
Hitler took a personal interest in architecture, and worked closely with state architects Paul Troost and Albert Speer to create public buildings in a neoclassical style based on Roman architecture. Speer constructed huge and imposing structures such as the NSDAP rally grounds in Nuremberg and the new Reich Chancellery building in Berlin. Hitler's plans for rebuilding Berlin included a gigantic dome based on the Pantheon in Rome and a triumphal arch more than double the height of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Neither of these structures were ever built.
Hitler's opinion was that abstract, Dadaist, expressionist, and modern art were decadent, and his opinion became the basis for policy. Many art museum directors lost their posts in 1933 and were replaced. Some 6,500 modern works of art were removed from museums and replaced with specially selected works chosen by a Nazi jury. Exhibitions of the rejected pieces, under titles such as "Decadence in Art", were launched in sixteen different cities by 1935. The Degenerate Art Exhibition, organised by Goebbels, which ran in Munich from July to November 1937, proved wildly popular, attracting over two million visitors.
Composer Richard Strauss was appointed president of the Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber) on its founding in November 1933. As was the case with other art forms, the Nazis ostracised musicians who were not deemed racially acceptable, and for the most part did not approve of music that was too modern or atonal. Jazz music was singled out as being especially inappropriate, and foreign musicians of this genre left the country or were expelled. Hitler was particularly fond of the music of Richard Wagner, especially the pieces based on Germanic myths and heroic stories, and attended the Bayreuth Festival each year from 1933.
Movies were very popular in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, with admissions of over a billion people in 1942, 1943, and 1944. By 1934 German regulations restricting currency exports made it impossible for American film makers to take their profits back to America, so the major film studios closed their German branches. Exports of German films plummeted, as their heavily antisemitic content made them impossible to show in other countries. The two largest film companies, Universum Film AG and Tobis, were purchased by the Propaganda Ministry, which by 1939 was producing most German films. The productions were not always overtly propagandistic, but generally had a political subtext and followed party lines regarding themes and content. Scripts were pre-censored.
Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), documenting the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, and Olympia (1938), documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, pioneered techniques of camera movement and editing that have influenced many later films. New techniques such as telephoto lenses and cameras mounted on tracks were employed. Both films remain controversial, as their aesthetic merit is inseparable from their propagandising of national socialist ideals.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Unthinking people will often try to teach you how to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them. If you are sure of all this, you can start to add to your value as a mother by learning the things that can be taught, for the best of our civilization and culture offers much that is of value, if you can take it without loss of what comes to you naturally.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)