Culture and Politics in Nazi Germany

Abstract

National Socialism was a result and — at the same time — an expression of a far-reaching crisis of modernisation. It was a product of bourgeois society and an organised mass protest against it. Thus its characteristics were traditional and modern, bourgeois and anti-bourgeois. The dual face of the Third Reich was ambiguous and diverse. Above all, the regime not only afflicted people with anxiety and terror, but had a strong fascination for them as well. The success of the NS regime was based, to a great extent, on mass mobilization and mass integration with the aid of aesthetic means and cultural strategies, apart from the excessive use of power. The NS state neither could nor even wanted to help people to their own rights, but was therefore obliged to at least help them to find their expression in order to win them over, as Walter Benjamin remarged to the point.