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:
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“I’ve finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“The first time many women hold their tiny babies, they are apt to feel as clumsy and incompetent as any man. The difference is that our culture tells them they’re not supposed to feel that way. Our culture assumes that they will quickly learn how to be a mother, and that assumption rubs off on most women—so they learn.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)