NAZI CULTURE: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich

by George L. Mosse ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Here, in the words of leaders and followers, intellectuals and workers, many translated for the first time, is the inside story of the Nazi view of ""the great society."" George Mosse has aimed to give the reader a taste of what National Socialism wanted to create, how it met the crisis of the post World War I world, and how it affected the German populace. It consisted of a total view of politics, an erasure of the line between public and private lives which required subordination of every experience, emotion, thought, act to the state as embodied in der Fuehrer. Art, science, education, religion were all perverted to conform to the Nazi ideology based on racism. The means taken to weld together a Volk are alarmingly apparent, although the author points out that he has not traced the increasing terror which accompanied the drive for a total culture. Hitler speaks on the state, Jews, the masses, culture, art, education in Mein Kampf; Goebbel's Michael: A German Fable devastates Christ and sets up a new hero; Alfred Baeumler transformed Nietzsche's thought into a myth in consonance with the Nazi Weltanschauung; Guenther and Clauss built the bases of racism. The experience of an SA man's bride, of a girl student bear witness to the effect on women of the Nazi philosophy. Psychoanalysis is denigrated with Freud, but Jung with his mythical archetypes is upheld. The Jew are not treated separately; they are dealt with again and again throughout the material. The emergence of the irrational and idolatrous with its anti-religious, anti-aesthetic, anti-intellectual elements is suffocatingly clear. These selections are mainly dated from 1933 to 1939; the final assumption of power in a bloodless revolution indicates the effectiveness of what came before. Important admissible evidence.

Pub Date: N/A

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Page Count: -

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1966

Categories: NONFICTION