It wasn’t just terror: The Nazis won the cultural battle in a year

Influential in the frenzy surrounding the destruction of Europe was an ethnographic account written by Cornelius Tacitus at the end of the 1st century, titled Origine et situ Germanorum (On the Origin and Situation of the Germans), commonly known as Germania. It begins: “Germany is separated from Gaul, Rhaetia, and Pannonia, by the rivers Rhine and Danube; from Sarmatia and Dacia, by mountains and mutual dread. The rest is surrounded by an ocean, embracing broad promontories and vast insular tracts, in which our military expeditions have lately discovered various nations and kingdoms.”

That old notebook from Roman times became “the talisman of the Third Reich,” according to Christopher Whitton, a professor of Classics at Cambridge. By culturally appropriating something as concrete as the writings of Tacitus, the Nazis claimed the right to transform the weakened Germany that emerged from the rubble of World War I into the third incarnation of the Holy Roman Empire (the first Reich was in the 10th century, and the second emerged in 1871).

As early as 1928, under the leadership of ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, the National Socialists founded a Militant League for German Culture, which paved the way for cultural control once the Nazis came to power. And so it was. On January 30, 1933, German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler and his followers launched a propaganda blitzkrieg (lightning attack) to spread their ideology across every cultural and artistic sector in the country.

In fact, one of the first casualties of Nazism was a theater actor — a handsome, popular communist named Hans Otto. Shortly after Hitler’s party seized control of the central government, orders were given not to renew his contract at the Prussian State Theater. Otto went into hiding but was eventually arrested by stormtroopers in a small café in Berlin’s Schöneberg district. From there, he was taken to Sturmabteilung (SA) and Gestapo headquarters, where he was beaten and then thrown out of a window. This is explained by Michael H. Kater in Culture in Nazi Germany.

Kater, professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, shows that the Nazi government’s first steps in the field of cultural were highly planned. Their objectives were to dilute and eliminate all traces of influence from the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) and to present and spread the National Socialist worldview throughout the country. These efforts were also designed to serve as entertainment and distraction for the citizens, without alarming the rest of Europe.

And they succeeded. According to Kater, the true establishment of the new culture began in the summer of 1933, when a legislative change mandated the creation of a “Jewish Culture League” to monitor and partially eradicate what was considered “Jewish” culture before 1933. Racist literature from prior years, however, was allowed to continue and was even encouraged, especially after the establishment of the Reich Chamber of Culture under Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, which controlled major cultural and artistic activities. “From then on, German cultural creators had to abide by state censorship and self-censorship,” Kater explains in an email.

A new imaginary

Goebbels’s mandate was to expand the great “culture,” a vital force for the Volksgemeinschaft (national community). Within this framework, “content could be truths, half-truths, or outright lies, depending on what suited Nazi policy,” explains Kater, author of books such as Hitler Youth.

However, for this new type of culture to take root, previous cultural forms had to be liquidated first. The priority was to purge all traces of Weimar culture. This meant eliminating all remnants of the Bauhaus movement, Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism. Paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were removed from museums, films like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Metropolis were deprogrammed, and plays by Bertolt Brecht and concerts by Kurt Weill were also banned.

After Germany’s defeat in World War I, “Jews were blamed for causing national decline, which the German far right increasingly associated with the rise of modernism [Weimar culture],” Haker reflects.

Thus, the new cultural imaginary rejected anything associated with the urban and industrial, repudiating the complex, the ambiguous, or the abstract — essentially a process of demolition against the forms, colors, and sounds of Weimar and its experimental legacy of freedom and tolerance, according to Kater.

The new culture, in contrast, emphasized the celebration of purity and classical beauty, promoting clarity, simplicity, and imagery of the countryside and village. It idealized the clean air of the mountains — among the Nazis, there was a particular obsession with the Alps — and embraced representations of virtue, the idyllic past, the strength of the family, humility, and industriousness.

These new values quickly found their way into literature, with books bearing titles like The Voice of Conscience, The Last Riders, The Rebels of Honor, and The Simple Life. One of the most successful novels of 1933 was Volk ohne Raum (People Without Space) by Hans Grimm, which had been published years earlier and portrayed the dangers of racial mixing. “Reading texts that spoke of supposedly hostile foreign neighbors became a common pastime among Germans,” explains Kater.

For the Nazi elite, every cultural product held political value, whether it was theater, film, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, or dance. Within the cultural establishment, the representation of the Jewish population was gradually suppressed, and loyalty to the regime was prioritized above all other virtues. This alignment extended to all cultural and artistic organizations, with contracts, subsidies, and state funding being granted — or withheld — based on adherence to the new government’s ideology.

Control was strict. Efforts were made to impose a new social trend through the circulation of German dance pieces, with dance instructors assisted by musicians from the Nazi stormtroopers. A new kind of music was also created — completely distancing itself from the jazz craze that had flourished during the Weimar era — through youth competitions that encouraged the composition of melodies “that could be whistled in the street.” This led to the creation of songs like High Starry Night, composed by Hans Baumann, the bard of the Hitler Youth.

The Nazi’s artistic obsession was long-standing and had personal overtones. Hitler had a certain affinity for the arts; as a young man, he aspired to be a painter, adored cinema, enjoyed going to the theater, and loved surrounding himself with actors and actresses. However, in literature, things were different: his library was filled with detective stories or rustic tales, “like the elaborate narratives about the American Wild West written by the German author Karl May, born in Saxony,” Kater recounts.

Calendar of oppression

Throughout 1933, a series of legislative initiatives were swiftly passed to eliminate all remnants of democracy and freedom in the country’s social, cultural, and artistic spheres. The first major step came after the burning of Parliament on February 27, when a state of emergency was declared. This led to the suspension of freedom of expression, the press, and the right to assemble, and the government assumed the power to arrest political opponents without charge, dissolve organizations, and censor newspapers.

On March 23, the Law for Rectification of the Distress of Nation and Reich — more commonly known as the Enabling Act — was passed, granting Hitler the authority to propose and sign laws without consulting Parliament. On April 7, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was signed, enabling the dismissal of civil servants deemed politically dubious, including Jews and those lacking the “correct inclinations.” The law aimed to marginalize artists suspected of disloyalty within state institutions at municipal, regional, and national levels.

In June, Hitler granted Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry increased supervisory powers, which were taken from the Foreign and Interior ministries. Meanwhile, literary critics focused on suppressing works by communists, social democrats, and confessional Christians, such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Erich Maria Remarque. Books related to women’s emancipation, pacifism, or sexuality were also banned, and by December 1933, over 1,000 titles had been removed from circulation.

On July 14, the Reich Film Law was enacted, marking the beginning of strict thematic and organizational control over films. A new Film Academy was established under the direction of Wolfgang Liebeneiner, an actor described by Goebbels as “young, modern, determined, and fanatical.”

In September, a centralized organization for artists, writers, and journalists was created, with specific chambers (Kammern) for each discipline: literature, journalism, radio workers, theater artists, musicians, and visual artists. Over time, membership in these chambers became mandatory, and Jews were excluded from joining. Then, in October, a new law was passed to regulate the press, requiring a registry of “racially pure” editors and reporters, and prohibiting newspapers from publishing any information that could potentially undermine the power of the Reich.

“Darwinian jungle”

Kater explains that the ultra-nationalist Alfred Rosenberg and his Militant League for German Culture, which had been engaged in open opposition to Weimar literature and the liberal content of the urban press, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung, played a significant role in the rapid process of cultural “replacement.”

This rapid escalation of freedom restrictions in favor of authoritarianism and intimidation was mirrored in the fierce competition between Rosenberg and Goebbels to secure the title of supreme cultural leader, with Goebbels ultimately emerging victorious

Culture in Nazi Germany aligns with what Ian Kershaw, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield, outlines in Hitler: The Definitive Biography: Hitler’s personalized style of governance fostered radical initiatives from the ground up, supporting them as long as they aligned with the broad goals he had previously outlined.

Thus, fierce competition was fostered at all levels of the regime: between Nazi institutions, rival groups, factions within these groups, and, ultimately, individuals within those factions. In this “Darwinian jungle” of the Third Reich, the ruthless path to power and advancement consisted of anticipating the Führer’s will and, without waiting for instructions, taking the initiative to further Hitler’s presumed goals and desires.

This triggered a spiraling process of radicalization that proved impossible to halt. According to Kershaw, this radicalization found its most extreme expression during the war in several ways: the escalation of terror in the judicial system, the speed of the first lightning victories, the savagery of the Nazis in the eastern campaign, the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, and above all, the persecution of the Jews.

Kater, author of other works such as The Nazi Party (1983), Doctors Under Hitler (1989), and Composers of the Nazi Era (2000), notes that one of the most surprising aspects of his research “is the apparently easy conversion of cultural media into instruments of propaganda, and the absence of any contemporary criticism in this regard.”

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