Inhumanities

This book is both valuable and frustrating. It is valuable because it provides a wealth of information; it is frustrating because of the way the material is organized and examined. Its conceptual framework fails to convince and there are several methodological problems. David B. Dennis, Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago and a specialist in German cultural history, has set himself the arduous task of ploughing through the cultural section of every single issue of the Nazi Party’s daily newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter ( VB ), from the days when it was purchased by the NSDAP in 1920 to its end in 1945. He has created a sample of about 1,600 articles, all of which deal at some greater length with literature, philosophy, painting and music—with more than 1,000 articles devoted to the latter subject. Three criteria seem to have guided his choice of articles: first, a strong focus on ‘important creators’ and ‘masterpieces of art’; second, a decidedly National Socialist ‘spin’; third, some relation to what he calls the ‘Western tradition of humanities or Kultur ’. The main objective of the book is to present the various appropriations und political uses of these ‘great masters’ in the pages of the VB . It seeks to ‘understand how great works of humanism can ultimately be used to validate inhumane policies’.

Aesthetics · Art · Comic strip · Comics · German · Humanism · Library science · Media studies · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Relation (database) · Section (typography) · Sociology · Subject (documents) · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law

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