1028 Ch. 25 • Economic Depression and DictatorshipAdolf Hitler visiting the “Exhibition of Disgrace” in 1935,
which anticipated the so-called “Exhibition of DegenerateArt” of 1937.
youths hiking in the Pomeranian forests, and square-jaw soldiers portrayed
as medieval Teutonic knights.
In their attacks upon modernist composers, the Nazis reserved particular
vehemence for the works of Jewish composers, while the late-nineteenth
century compositions of the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner delighted Hitler.
The theater, too, suffered from censorship, as well as from the departure of
a number of Germany’s leading playwrights. Hitler himself preferred light
plays, such as a rustic comedy that earned the Critic’s Prize in Berlin in
1934, in which the leading character was a pig. Anti-modernism could be
seen in Nazi attacks on the supposed hedonism of the “roaring twenties,”
which Nazis associated with licentiousness, homosexuality, neon lights, jazz,
and modern dances. Nazis did not do the Charleston.
Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Hitler’s minister of propaganda, orches
trated the cult of Hitler. The Fuhrer commissioned the popular filmmaker
Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) to produce Triumph of the Will. This impos
ing propaganda film, which depicts the carefully orchestrated Nuremberg
rally of 1934 where 250,000 regimented, uniformed Germans with Nazi
banners and flags saluted Hitler, contributed to the cult of the Fuhrer. The
Nazis encouraged the production of a number of virulently anti-Semitic
films, above all The Jew Suess (1940), the story of an eighteenth-century