Culture in dark times

"The meaning of "culture" today has expanded to include almost everything that surrounds people in their daily life, but today's usage would have baffled the influential ideological opinion makers of the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1933 and 1945 most members of all three groups--the Nazi fascists, Inner Emigration, and Exile--fought with equal fervor over who could definitively claim to represent the authentically "great German culture," as it was culture that imparted real value to both the state and the individual. But when authorities made pronouncements about "culture" were they really talking about high art? This book analyzes the highly complex interconnections among the cultural-political concepts of these various ideological groups and asks why the most artistically ambitious art forms were viewed as politically important by all cultured (or even semi-cultured) Germans in the period from 1933 to 1945, their ownership the object of a bitter struggle between key figures in the Nazi fascist regime, representatives of Inner Emigration, and Germans driven out of the Third Reich. Jost Hermand is Vilas Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has been visiting professor at Austin (Texas), Harvard, Berlin, Bremen, Marburg, Giessen, Kassel, Essen, Freiburg, Oldenburg, Potsdam, and Munich. He is an ACLS Fellow, recipient of the Hilldale Award for Academic Excellence, fellow of the Vienna Academy, member of the Saxon Academy in Leipzig, and holds an honorary PhD from the University of Kassel. His research and teaching encompass German literature and culture since 1750, with special emphasis on democratic traditions, German-Jewish relations, fascism, and Germany after 1945, as well as on schools of criticism and a comparative arts approach to German culture."--Publisher's website.