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After the summer of 1942, the tide began to turn against the Nazi Reich. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was losing out in the North African war arena and, in Russia, the Wehrmacht suffered more opprobrium. By May 1945, the denouement had been marked by three or four altogether disastrous developments. First, on February 3, 1943, Adolf Hitler had to concede defeat at Stalingrad. The Allied armies then landed on the Normandy coast during D-Day, the sixth of June. The Red Army entered Berlin in the last week of April 1945. On the eighth of May, a mere eight days after Hitler and Joseph Goebbels committed suicides, the government capitulated unconditionally. To a large extent, the fate of German jazz was tied up with these events. The most immediate phenomenon that increasingly affected jazz and dance music, as well as its resilient subculture, was the recurrent bombing raids, especially when they targeted Berlin.

Nazi faithfuls who might have thought that jazz music had vanished from the Reich could be proven wrong just a few weeks into World War II. These Nazis were deploring a state of affairs which, unbeknownst to them, was in perfect accord with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's own directives. For the sake of social peace, but initially also because the war had been planned as a short interlude, Goebbels conjured up a myth of continuity, of normalcy, from peace to wartime. By blanking out the unaccustomed consciousness of stress and pain, the hardships of this new war could be more easily legitimized. Toward that goal, cultural events of all kinds, in content and in form not significantly different from their prewar proportions, would help the propaganda machinery that was busily at work on so many other facets of the nation's collective life.

Assassinations in Nantes and Bordeaux on 20 and 21 October 1941 placed General von Stülpnagel and the military administration in the center of a political firestorm. Using assassinations as a pretext for genocide, Hitler ordered the execution of hundreds of hostages, sanctioned mass deportations through the Night and Fog Decree, and ordered subordinates to carry out severe reprisals that focused on Jews and communists after every resistance attack. General Otto von Stülpnagel condemned ‘Polish Methods' that neither made political sense nor sat well with his conscience, but this stance poisoned his relationship with Hitler, Armed Forces High Command (OKW), Army High Command (OKH), and Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels. Assassinations and brutal German reprisals divided communist resistance groups like Main‐d’œvre immigrée from Charles de Gaulle's movement, upset Germany's relationship with Marshal Pétain and the French government, and exposed sharp disagreements between various German institutions in Paris.

This chapter examines the fate of the Hindenburg myth during the period of relative stabilization of German politics and society. The author shows that Hindenburg's first term witnessed profound changes in attitude among his followers and former opponents. Although he had largely owed his presidential victory to the political right, radical right-wingers such as Heinrich Claβ and Joseph Goebbels started to turn their back on the President for his failure to overturn the republican order. Republicans, on the other hand, began to sing his praises for his constitutional stance and backing of crucial foreign policy initiatives. However, there was a considerable, if momentary, overlap of republican and anti-republican Hindenburg-worship, most evident during the near-regal festivities of his eightieth birthday in 1927. The chapter charts the mythical narrative as a multi-layered phenomenon appealing to different groups simultaneously, which helps to understand Hindenburg's remarkably broad and enduring appeal.

In the area of popular culture in the Third Reich, the history of jazz, with its inherent contradictions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes, well illustrates the improvised nature of a dictatorial regime whose alleged totalitarianism was neither seamless nor inevitable. It was punctured by compromise and accommodation, evident primarily in the executive organs of the Reich propaganda ministry and Joseph Goebbels himself, who was ridden with duplicity and often inertia. In the case of jazz, Goebbels was compelled by a never-ending series of circumstances to allow for the continued existence of a phenomenon, which he personally found contemptible from an aesthetic vantage point as well as from the perspective of the racial purist. Ironically, it was jazz and not the Third Reich that saw the Final Victory so often conjured up by the Nazi leaders. This victory was possible because enough genuine musicians and true believers in jazz had managed to stay alive, quietly treasuring the music in their hearts.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the decade following Germany’s defeat in 1918, when the ‘shame peace’ of Versailles and the despised parliamentary system of the new Republic deepened the chasm between Germany as it actually was and Germany as—according to the radical right—it should be. The duality from which the formula ‘Germany is Hamlet’ drew its political edge is dramatized in Joseph Goebbels’s confessional novel Michael (1924/1929), whose ‘riven’ hero resembles both Goethe’s Werther and Hamlet. As a counterpoint, this chapter also examines two ‘democratic’ Hamlets from the opposite side of the political spectrum: Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet film (1920) and Leopold Jessner’s theatre production of Hamlet (1926). They are included here because they epitomize the modernist culture of Weimar which became the object of increasingly bitter right-wing attacks.

This chapter deals with the debut of Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum in Nazi cinema and her impact on Harlan’s life. After choosing her to play the female lead in Jugend (Youth, 1938), the adaptation of the play that had provided him with his breakthrough in the theater, he not only falls in love with and marries her but also chooses her to be the dominant presence in his future films. In the play, the character Söderbaum plays is shot, but in the film she drowns herself, earning her the nickname “Reich’s Water Corpse.” In Jugend and in its follow-up Verwehte Spuren (Lost traces, 1938), Harlan directs her in a sadistic and often voyeuristic manner. Thematically, both films are more personal than Harlan’s previous ones. They deal with the early loss of parents, inherited sin, incest, religious dogma, and distrust in a relationship. Both are costume films set in the previous century and, despite their apolitical nature, are admired by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

This chapter deals with a particular episode in the Nazi empire’s collapse, Hitler’s last neo-Roman performance, taking place on the eve of his suicide. Writing his Political Testament, which the author calls his Aeneas/Dido Fragment, Hitler reached for Roman and Carthaginian death masks, returning to the ancient city of Dido and Hannibal. The political testament demonstrates the breakdown of the neo-Roman imaginary. The author connects this analysis to the Reich Chancellery’s seventeenth-century Carthaginian tapestries and a series of recent German essays about the Second Punic war that were published in the wake of the Nazis’ defeat at Stalingrad and in Northern Africa. The author ends the chapter with an episode from the Battle of Tunis in 1943.

With Hitler’s takeover, which was greeted by many, though not all, rightist intellectuals, a triumphant Germany once again shed its Hamletian affiliations. Chapter 6 discusses how Shakespeare was seamlessly incorporated into the cultural assets of the new regime. He had, after all, been seen as the exemplary Germanic, or Nordic, dramatist since the days of Herder. The importance attached to Shakespeare by the regime is reflected in the controversy over Hans Rothe’s unorthodox translations which were eventually ruled out by Goebbels himself. But there was also opposition to the seemingly ‘natural’ alliance between the Bard and the ‘New Germany’. According to Shakespeare’s detractors, he represented the era of tragic individualism. But that era was over, and therefore Shakespeare no longer had anything relevant to say. The dispute, in which the composer Hans Pfitzner came out on the side of the Bard, remained inconclusive to the last.

Immediately upon coming to power, the Nazis brought the German film industry under their direct command. The 1936 feature film Ewiger Wald (“Eternal Forest”) shows the Nazis’ view of the cycle of life and death in nature and among the people and culminates in the Nazi era. The film’s first historical scene is the Roman defeat in the Teutoburg Forest. Uniquely, it is the Volk, not Arminius, who beat back the invaders with the help of patriotic nature. Rarely has history been presented on screen with such blatant distortion. In its portrayal of Romans and Germans, Ewiger Wald harks back to Die Hermannschlacht of 1924, the subject of the preceding chapter. Ewiger Wald also parallels the Nazis’ greatest self-glorification on screen, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). The chapter closes with a discussion of Nazi views about ideological uses of history in films and spectatorship of historical cinema.

Volksgemeinschaft is an idealized concept referring to the Germanic ethnic or national community. The members of this community enjoyed the economic gains under Hitler, but most remembered the past and feared another war. To gain support for Hitler’s military aggression, Goebbels tapped into fears of Bolshevism and a Jewish world conspiracy and propounded the Nazi racial ideology of extreme anti-Semitism. The “master race” and “slave” ideology led to the imprisonment and genocide of European Jews and others marked as racially inferior or handicapped. In need of manpower for armaments production and in other industries, the Germans used Jewish prisoners and Soviet POWS as slave labor in high-mortality working conditions. The regime also employed and abused foreign laborers living in Germany. Increasing numbers of labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps were added in Germany and occupied areas. Müller notes that German civilians definitely witnessed the presence of these prisoners and were drawn into the system, similarly to the Wehrmacht. Civilians feared the Gestapo, acquired a fatalistic view, and offered little support for a coup. For many, the Wehrmacht’s conspiracy and failed assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, Valkyrie, stands as a hopeful symbol of a rebellion of conscience.

This chapter turns to Goebbels. During this time, “Everything that motivates and inspires the German people,” prescribed by Goebbels as the products of the nation's creativity, was beginning to take shape. The leadership was well advised when it chose as Propaganda Minister a man who (like only Diebold before him) seems capable of stimulating tourism (currently the prime objective) as well as intellectual reconstruction. The man in charge of culture had it all at his fingertips. He was a master of all the literary buzzwords—those arcane abstractions every typewriter in Berlin spews out—and on occasion he even knew how to hit the polemical-satirical note. As for other forms of productivity, some of the nation's creative writers—those who have not exhausted themselves writing on the windows of Jewish shops on Boycott Day—had made a promising start. Polemical writing was given a fresh impetus, and topical verse that employs biting satire to get to grips with grievances was encouraged.