Nazi Culture

Another idea examined in the collection of works is art. The first work about art, by Jurt Karl Eberlein, expresses ideas of what art truly is in essence. He begins to say that art is subject to opinion. “Art is never objective. It is an offense against romanticism to call the naturalism of our debased “sailor painting” romantic. “The spirit, in terms of which we act, is the loftiest.” And this art spirit is as loveless as a medical diagnosis, a photograph, Or a statistic. The pleinair civilization of modern painting which began with French Impressionism does not belong,either to the soul Or to the language of the soul: it does not contemplate, but looks. Its art is seen, with susceptible time-conditioned nerves, with time-conditioned eyes, newspaperlike, and in the same way, therefore, is this art to be seen, to be enjoyed, but not to be experienced.”(163) The author essentially argues that German art is a thought process. You essentially have to see through the art to see what the artist tries to convey. The article does a good job of expressing the ideas conveyed by German art.

The depictions of social relations and art as conveyed by these sources suggests a great deal about Nazi culture. Perhaps by comparing these ideas and concepts presented to us by German culture and our own, we may develop a universal structural pattern for cultures of different types of societies.