Author: Michael H Kater Publisher: Yale University Press Price: £25 (Hardback) Released: Out now
This is the concluding book in a series from Michael H Kater on German culture following Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present (2014) and Culture in Nazi Germany (2019). Having tracked cultural movements and influences from one of Germany’s most influential cities to the upheaval of Nazism, he now looks at the post-war era and it’s possibly the most fascinating of them all.
Kater paints a picture of a nation stripped of cultural touchstones it could rely on. The Nazis had destroyed and sidelined art that it considered unworthy (at best) and degenerate (at worst). Now, in the post-war era, anything connected to the Nazis was also taboo. With so much lost under the Third Reich and now a whole generation of art considered tainted by Hitler’s regime, a cultural chasm
