Nazi Culture

The collection of works entitled Nazi Culture successfully provides insights and ideas on different aspects of German and Nazi culture. The collections examine various ideas such as relationships with women, religion, and science. I found the examination of social relationships with people most interesting, and found art interesting aswell. Overall, both of these examinations present good ideas on how they affect Nazi culture.

One of the first ideas examined in the collection of works is the relationships between people. With this in mind, we approach the work about family by Ludwig Leonhardt. “Deeply perceiving the source of the renewal of the Yolk, National Socialism considers the family to be the foundation of the state. In order to grasp the importance of this statement and to evaluate it properly, we must look more closely at the concept of “family.””(34) By this, the author intends to tell the reader that there is more to understand than just parents and children.  He means to say that a family essentially wraps together a definite circle of persons “spiritually and psychically”. The author argues that out of the heritage and endless interlacing of this familial relationship emerges German Volk. “And we must always keep in mind that we are not the last configuration of these multiple endowments, that we are destined to pass them on pure and unspoiled in order to continue what we call the family, and to push our heritage ever forward, so that a German Yolk may emerge out of an ever repeated interlacing of families.”(34) A work by Herman Paull later provides us insight on the concepts, ideas, and perspective on “free love”. The author argues against the idea by saying that, it “ruins generations”. “With free love which aims to offer man many possibilities of change in the exercise of sexual intercourse and in human breeding, a wholly unsurveyable ancestral series comes into being whose biological investigation is much too complicated and therefore wholly impossible.”(35) In this quote, he author attempts to demonstrate the reasoning behind free love, saying that it is for a man to have “opportunity”, but then demonstrates a counterpoint by saying that it makes his ancestral biological investigation complicated and wholly impossible. The author finally argues that free love promotes a low grade quality and degeneration. “Thus biological investigation has uncovered a series of families in which, as a result of the entry of individuals or even only one person of low-grade quality, the whole subsequent generation was ruined. The KaIlikak family in America and the Zeros in Switzerland are now universally recognized as prototypes for the degeneration of whole families through the infiltration of inferior individuals.”(36) To further his argument, the author uses an existing example of the product of free love, the Kalikak family and the Zeros.