Cultural exploration of Nazis numbing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2019 (2340 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This is an important book about a horrifyingly fascinating topic.

But it’s also an important book that lacks any verve or punch in the telling.

It examines how the Nazis appropriated culture — meaning the various branches of the arts, plus architecture and newspapers and radio — to create propaganda and serve the agenda of a totalitarian regime. It was an agenda that included extermination of the Jews and the subjugation or annihilation of non-Aryans (meaning, principally, Poles, Slavs and Romani peoples).

It covers all facets of the arts — literature, music, painting, sculpture, opera, theatre, film — in-depth and in detail. And there’s a wealth of interesting information here.

But that information is presented in such a dull and formulaic way that it’ll fast put the average Joe reader to sleep.

Author Michael Kater is a professor emeritus of history at Toronto’s York University and the author of several books about aspects of culture in the Third Reich. This volume seemingly attempts to consolidate much of his prior research in one omnibus work.

If his object is to reach an audience beyond a handful of academics, he’s failed. Neither he nor his editors know how to marshal historical evidence in a way palatable to the public.

Kater has a penchant for listing an artist, providing a potted bio, and then quickly moving on to the next person and repeating the process, without much thematic linkage or broader context. In the result, his writing too often has a jumpy, laundry-list feel about it.

Someone at Yale University Press should have told Kater a book for public consumption shouldn’t read like a collection of pieces culled from learned journals and academic works.

A number of contemporary academics have written outstanding historical works accessible to a non-academic audience — Americans Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen E. Ambrose, and Canadians David Bercuson and Jack Granatstein come to mind. Proof positive it can be done.

When Kater abandons his mania for abbreviated-bio listings of the cultural movers and shakers of the Weimar Republic as it morphed into Hitler’s Third Reich, his writing finally sings.

In a chapter titled Artist Emigres, he provides longer focused narratives about famous refugees from the Reich — both genuine and faux.

The individual stories of actor Marlene Dietrich, writers Erich Maria Remarque and Thomas Mann, soprano Lotte Lehmann and conductor Fritz Busch are compelling. But, by the next chapter, he’s again reverted to list-as-narrative prose.

Which is a shame, because that entirely novel chapter deals with latent aspects of Nazi culture that survived the war and existed in one form or another, particularly in West Germany, until the early 1970s. Kater also gives past-due historical comeuppance to some of the players in Nazi culture who, post the end of the Second World War in 1945, minimized or camouflaged their former roles in promoting a brutal ideology.

There’s no doubt Kater is an expert, and has done his homework. (The footnotes, bibliography and index, all told, run to well over 100 pages.)

And while he’s provided plentiful detail and copious research, his account never rises to being readily readable history.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.