Language:
English
Year of publication:
1998
Titel der Quelle:
Patterns of Prejudice
Angaben zur Quelle:
32,1 (1998) 51-67
Keywords:
National socialism Philosophy
;
Racism and the arts
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), and art
Abstract:
The conception of the Jew as a "destroyer of culture" was instrumental in the Nazi critique of Weimar culture and in defining the goals of the Nazis' cultural policy after 1933. This idea was by no means a Nazi invention - its roots may be traced to the 19th century. However, in the Nazi ideology of culture, the Jew occupied a pivotal position. Discusses three arguments on which the Nazis focused: that the racially inferior Jew corrupted German art (the idea may be found in Fichte's and Wagner's writings); that the Jew was the principal agent of "cultural Bolshevism"; and that the Jews controlled culture and imposed their aesthetic taste on the German people. There were some differences of opinion between Hitler and Rosenberg on the one hand, and Goebbels on the other, concerning the identification of Jews with modernist art, as well as the party's attitude toward this art.
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