Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture, and Film in the Third Reich

by Brandon Taylor

This study is devoted to the visual arts, architecture, design and film of Nazi Germany. Studiously avoided by most art historians, the culture of the National Socialist period is presented as complex and contradictory, the result of forces within German history which were unique and perhaps unrepeatable.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0950678392
• ISBN13: 9780950678399
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Winchester Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.

Customer Reviews

culture and complicity

In the introduction of this book, Taylor makes a very important point: to examine the context in which art was conceived within the Third Reich is not to empower the ideological framework at hand. Quite to contrary, as the book reveals, it is a poignant indictment of the cultural administration which controlled the production and consumption of art under Nazi control. Artists are not precluded from this complicity either. Arno Breker, in particular, is appropriately interrogated and berated for his prolific production of sculptures specifically designed to uphold the values of national socialism. This book is a significant contribution to the discourse on cultural production as a maintenance of the ideological status quo. As such, it reifies the complicity of those (dare I say?) people ('monsters' is more appropriate), with real names and real faces, who were responsible for maintaining the dominant cultural context which frames the holocaust. I highly recommend this book.