This was a deep and thorough academic look at art in Nazi Germany. It was clearly well researched and a bit much even for me, who studied art history at the graduate level. This is one that belongs in the syllabus and will enrich your understanding both of art and the period.

Fantastic read. Learned so much reading this one. It was so exciting and easy to read. Good well written and flowed well

This was a very informative book on how the Nazi Regime tried to control the minds of people through culture, New art made during the Weimar Era was bad and old art was good. Jewish art was bad except for Jews and after Kristallnacht, non-existent, Hitler even arranged a travelling art show to showcase bad art called a "degenerate art" show. Books and movies were written to show pure Aryan love and the countryside as the ideal. Whether this was real or not. Hitler went with the idyllic.

It was interesting to note as the war continued and losing seemed a real possibility, that Goebbels added light music and jazz back into the playlists. The soldiers were already listening to this music on BBC broadcasts and people were upset by the depravities of war. Movie houses were destroyed by allied bombs and there were few musicians left due the amount of men needed at the front and women in munitions work. Radio entertainment was the only outlet as people scrunching for food do no read a whole lot.

While there was much culture created by the Nazis, much of it has not been translated into English. The literature and movies of the Weimar Republic for the most part has been and that is the true test of a lasting culture.

A slog for the layman perhaps, this book really has to be considered if its rarefied subject tallies with any of your interests or academic bent. It's an exhaustive one of a kind book, concerning not only the culture the Weimar Republic created and which the Nazis hated (once calling atonal 'classical music' a Bolshevist attack on "the senses of German man"), but fully surveying what came about under the Nazi watch before September 1939, what became of all the Jews involved, and how the cultural life manifested itself during the actual war years. Everything gets a look in at one point, whether it be architecture, journalism, theatre and opera or visual arts. So we learn of 'Freikorps fiction', where the brutality of soldiers cleansing the Lebensraum out east was justified and lauded, we see complaints of an "asphalt culture" (city-scapes, risque night-clubs and all that horrid jungle Jazz music, and so on), and so much more.

The author clearly knows his subject – there is a sense of this being a summary of a life's work, for he's approached various art media before now separately. This is a relatively chronological look at the whole kaboodle, however, and so is not the slightest volume out. He shows how this is merely for the academic audience in many small ways, least of which is so often mentioning which Land everyone comes from, as if we all have a passing knowledge of German geography (a quirk I found more annoying was constant air-quotes around the word Aryan). If you have any concerns for 1940s German drama successes, or which of a number of authors and artists may have been in bed with the Nazis philosophically (even if they later denied it, of course, with the protestation that things would have been worse without their efforts), this is a must-turn-to wallow through no end of detail.

This was a very interesting and informative read. The topic was something I had been curious about and the author did a good job with it.

An incredible read, well told that does not get dull or bogged down. The music and art that was taken. All the pretty things, all the enjoyable things. Such a horrific and sad time.

NetGalley has provided this reviewer with an advance copy for review.

Michael H. Kater's history of culture before, during, and after the Third Reich is neither overly academic or limited to popular culture. I found myself reading, not skimming, Kater's book about those who suffered at the hands of Nazi culture czars.

The first thing the Nazis set out to do was destroy Modernism in all of its manifestations—atonal music, Expressionism in film, the Bauhaus in architecture, and more. The Nazis didn't believe in art for art's sake, but as political propaganda. When they attacked Modernism they were striking at the Weimar Republic and all their enemies on the left.

In 1928 Nazi Alfred Rosenberg created the Kampfbund fur deutsche Kultur (the Militant League for German Culture) as a political tool to identify and eliminate non-Aryan elements in German society.

After the Nazis took power in 1933, communist actor Hans Otto was one of their first victims—beaten, thrown out of a window of the SA/SS headquarters building, and killed.

For the Nazis, the enemy was asphalt culture—urban life.

In November 1938 (when the Kristallnacht pogroms occurred) Leni Riefenstahl was in Hollywood, trying to convince American movie makers that German film was a legitimate part of world cinema. Few Americans wanted to have anything to do with her.

Another Nazi attempt at fooling the world was the creation of the Jewish Culture League. By 1933 around 8000 Jewish artists had been expelled from their positions in the arts. The Nazis used the Jewish Culture League to defuse social unrest and as propaganda overseas.

When the Third Reich began, Propaganda Minister Goebbels didn't use movies as lessons in Nazi ideology, the way some Soviet art had been immediately after the Revolution in 1917.

But a trilogy of German films—Jud Suss, The Rothschilds, and The Eternal Jew—were propaganda aimed at preparing the German people for the Final Solution.

In Jud Suss, Kristina Soderbaum played a role in which she became typecast—a pure Aryan maiden who drowned after being ruined by a Jew. Soderbaum became known as the Reich Water Corpse.

After Goebbels spoke for the Fuhrer by announcing total war at a rally broadcast by radio all over Germany the Allies responded by destroying dozens of German cities and tens of thousands of Germans in 1944.

The regime kept movie exhibition going as much as possible and audiences kept going for entertainment, if it's possible to use that word under the circumstances. Like movies all over the world, they were escape. Germany just had more to escape from than many countries.

In the film Ohm Kruger the international movie star Emil Jannings tried to convince Germans that the British invented concentration camps—a fact which was irrelevant if true.

Kater shows us Ernst Junger, who became a renown European literary figure after the war, described by historian Saul Friedlander as a connoisseur of violence. Junger was one of the many fence-sitters who did more than just try to survive, one of those who would have, you suspect, spoken differently about the nature of the regime if the war had ended otherwise.

Thomas Mann represents German culture abroad. Mann, like others, was not welcome back in the new Germany that took decades to come to terms with the Third Reich.

I accepted this not knowing it is PDF only. I read exclusively on my kindle. I would love a printed copy to read and review.