Old Dreams Of A New Reich

Old Dreams of a New Reich, the translation of Jost Hermand's comprehensive study of prefascist and fascist utopias (Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich), examines tracts and futuristic novels crucial to the development and final radicalization of German national sentiments from the second part of the eighteenth century. Scholars and propagandists used the glorified virtues of ancient German tribes to create the cult of Germanic values. These works offer a vivid insight into the public imagination between 1871 and 1945, and into the highly successful media machinations employed by the Right as it used all literary genres - including avant-gardistic works as well as pulp novels and works of science fiction - to manipulate the general public.

The first history of postwar fears of a Nazi return to power in Western political, intellectual, and cultural life.

Table of contents

This book is the first survey in English of literature and film in Nazi Germany. It treats not only works sympathetic to National Socialism, but also works of the so-called Inner Emigration, of the resistance, and those written in prisons and concentration camps. Much of this literature is not easily accessible in German, and not available at all in English translation. Historical and ideological context is provided in chapters covering influential works of the time such as Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century and Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Schoeps also analyzes Nazi cultural policies, fascist histories of literature, and the role of German studies and Germanists in the Nazi movement. A major section of the book is devoted to film, then a relatively new medium of communication whose propaganda value was clearly recognized by Goebbels, the minister for propaganda and president of the Reich's Chamber of Culture. One of the most interesting areas of research in recent years is the relationship between Hitler's cultural commissars, in particular Goebbels, and the literature and film production of the Nazi years. This book is based on the revised and expanded second German edition, Literatur im Dritten Reich (1933-1945), but has again been revised and expanded, especially the chapter on film and Nazi policies toward the film industry. The chapter on cultural policies has also been expanded to include Himmler's efforts to meddle in this area. New also are sections dealing with Jewish entertainers in concentration camps (for example, Kurt Gerron) and activities of the Jewish Cultural League. Karl-Heinz Schoeps is professor of German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

'It's like being in a dream', commented Joseph Goebbels when he visited Nazi-occupied Paris in the summer of 1940. Dream and reality did indeed intermingle in the culture of the Third Reich, racialist fantasies and spectacular propaganda set-pieces contributing to this atmosphere alongside more benign cultural offerings such as performances of classical music or popular film comedies. A cultural palette that catered to the tastes of the majority helped encourage acceptance of the regime. The Third Reich was therefore eager to associate itself with comfortable middle-brow conventionality, while at the same time exploiting the latest trends that modern mass culture had to offer. And it was precisely because the culture of the Nazi period accommodated such a range of different needs and aspirations that it was so successfully able to legitimize war, imperial domination, and destruction. Moritz F�llmer turns the spotlight on this fundamental aspect of the Third Reich's successful cultural appeal in this ground-breaking new study, investigating what 'culture' meant for people in the years between 1933 and 1945: for convinced National Socialists at one end of the spectrum, via the legions of the apparently 'unpolitical', right through to anti-fascist activists, Jewish people, and other victims of the regime at the other end of the spectrum. Relating the everyday experience of people living under Nazism, he is able to give us a privileged insight into the question of why so many Germans enthusiastically embraced the regime and identified so closely with it.

Profiles five key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany who plundered art masterpieces from museums and private collections across Europe at the behest of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich--museum director Ernst Buchner, art critic Robert Scholz, dealer Karl Haberstock, art historian Kajetan Muhlman, and sculptor Arno Breker.

This text is based on current research findings and is written for students and general readers who want a deeper understanding of this period in German history. It provides a balanced approach in examining Hitler's role in the history of the Third Reich and includes coverage of the economic, social, and political forces that made the rise and growth of Nazism possible; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; the Second World War; and the Holocaust.