The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany

Presenting a new interpretation of National Socialism, this work argues that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which their ideology was founded. Through the myth of the Aryan race , a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'etre of a regime defined by Hitler as the dictatorship of genius .