Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture by David B. Dennis

Dennis, David B. Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xvi + 541 pages. Hardcover, $35.00. In 1938, Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg opened the Salzburg Festival. On that occasion, the Nazi Party's official newspaper and propaganda organ, the Volkischer Beobachter, reported the opera to be not only a theatrical production, but also "a program, a promise, and a symbol all in one" (p. 382). The same could be said of the Nazi understanding of artistic works in general, as historian David B. Dennis demonstrates in his exhaustive examination of culture writing published in the Volkischer Beobachter during its 25-year press run. Dennis carefully traces how the paper interpreted and employed an esteemed cast of historical cultural figures, including Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and Nietzsche--but with Wagner always the most referenced and revered of them all--in order to support and inspire Nazi political goals. In thematically organized chapters, Dennis guides the reader through the paper's use, or as is more often the case, abuse, of the artistic contributions of these figures during major stages in the party's history: from raging against the doomed Weimar Republic to seizing power and enacting anti-Semitic policies to finally plunging the world into war. By Dennis's calculations, over ninety percent of authors writing on cultural topics in the paper were "occasional contributors" (p. 459). The output from these writers could range from only a single piece to dozens during the paper's run. But the writers, nearly forty percent of who were academics, belonged to a group of individuals striving to work toward the opinions of the Fuhrer. As a result, their interpretations of key cultural figures were protean and contradictory. This very conflict demonstrates how Nazi cultural policy was built piecemeal, responding to shifting political imperatives, but rarely coordinated from the top down. As the largest daily in Nazi Germany and the first German newspaper to reach a circulation of over 1 million, the Volkischer Beobachter makes for an important site of inquiry. Previous works in the historiography of cultural reception have looked at Nazi publications targeted at specific audiences, but rarely at how the party communicated to a broad public. Dennis decisively illustrates that cultural criticism was used not merely to validate the anti-Semitic and anti-modern agendas of Nazism, but also to provide an essential rationale for those beliefs. While the paper was successful as an organ for trumpeting outrages, it was much less confident in articulating a coherent cultural policy for the Reich. Even so, race was always inextricably intertwined with culture. An excellent example is the paper's championing of racial and volkisch theorists such as the British-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), who asserted that the "elemental force of all art lies in race, that art must announce an idea, that true German art requires a German philosophy of life" (p. 266). A race's worth could be determined by its cultural production and, by extension, either could be marked for elimination if perceived as failing to meet the Fuhrer's espoused ideals. …