Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture
"David Dennis's long awaited study of the metamorphosis of Nazi Kultur during World War II has arrived like a block-buster.  The role that the regime gradually tailored for the finest artists and thinkers to serve a proposed new world order has been researched with the painstaking care of the true scholar, yet reported here with the elegance and thrust of a novelist.  The book is more than a good read; it is destined to become a classic." -Glenn Watkins, author of Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War"This is an ambitious and important book that conveys the immensely depressing conclusion that even intellectual and cultural figures of great creativity and imagination (Dante, Bach, Beethoven) are dangerously malleable in the hands of their interpreters. Scholars, students, and the general public need now look no further than Dennis's book to find a cogent, reliable, and astute assessment of every Nazi attitude toward every canonical cultural figure of the western tradition, and a number of others besides." -Celia Applegate, author of Bach in Berlin"Dennis's distinctive contribution is to reveal in great detail how the Nazis understood and misunderstood, used and misused, selectively read and then appropriated bits and pieces of the Western tradition. Inhumanities again reminds us that the Nazi regime attacked what we understand to be the core values of the Western tradition. Yet they often did so in the name of defending Western civilization as its intellectuals, scholars, journalists and propagandists understood it. The book is an important advance in the scholarship about Nazi culture. Dennis' tone is restrained yet the impact is powerful." -Jeffrey Herf, author of Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust."Recommended." -Choice