Basic Ideas of National Socialist Cultural Policy

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translated from the Third Reich original Grundgedanken nationalsozialistischer Kulturpolitik by Munich university professor Wolfgang Schulz, which was published by the central publishing house of the NSDAP (Franz Eher Verlag) in 1939 after the author‘s death. The objective of this policy was a culture that remained true to folk and race and hence promoted the spiritual and biological health and integrity of both.

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Softcover. 117pp.

…The false doctrine that all human beings are the equal still haunts heads and resists the fundamental truth of the inequality of human beings according to their appearance, their genes and their accomplishments. The valuation of human beings that results from this is portrayed as arrogance of the more valuable, yes, as injustice.

One scorns our desire as racial arrogance, without noting that we do not judge the individual according to race, rather according to accomplishment. But in regard to the folk whole, we are concerned about the race, because the Nordic race alone has over the course world history passed a performance test that is so mighty that it obligates us to also employ this race for the new, even far greater accomplishments that matter now…

…Or one says: Culture must grow, one cannot manufacture it artificially. Just what previously proliferated among us were the weeds, and we want to exterminate them so that the beautiful and noble plants, which up until now often withered or even died, can better thrive.

Cultures need their care like forest, field and garden, and indeed a reasonable one that accounts for the laws of nature and increases them to greater beauty and order.

Forester, farmer and gardener must love nature, must understand it intimately, but must also know and have learned much about it so that the growth entrusted to them does to grow wild or become desolate…

…We speak of race, if a larger group of individual beings within their species agree in the special and balanced constitution of many and precisely the most important genes, and hence in the characteristics and traits in which the genes show themselves. Corresponding to the unity of body and soul, it is about the physical and psychological characterizes, and in man, whose soul produces spiritual and moral forces, also about the spiritual and moral and about the genes that determine this. Race is hence so comprehensive that may sciences are involved in researching and portraying the various sides of its essence, its physical and its psychological, spiritual, moral, its meaning in the present and its working in the past…

…The genes in which the members of a race must agree so that the race exists at all determine through the characters and accomplishments that grow from them the value of this race. These characteristics and accomplishments can hence be designated as racial properties…

…The valuable, cultural-creative characteristics of the culture-bearers are the foundation; the inherited goods, their products, build upon them. So it is justified to designate the respective supply of gene-based characteristics as racial properties of the first order and the tradition values as racial properties of higher order…

…Third, an effeminacy of cultured man through his cultural institutions, which enrich his life of feeling, broaden his knowledge, beautify his existence, but all too easily paralyze his decisiveness down to the bone.

It is as if the creations of culture had become independent, as if the culture-bearers had lost their mastery over them, even though they are still able to ever increase and perfect the accomplishment itself, and as if the cultural institutions rebelled against their creators…

…Genes are fate. Their application and development, however, elevates itself above fate and juts into the realm of freedom. The products finally, which the racial properties of the first order bring into the racial properties of the higher and highest order, make us really free, if we apply them correctly and make sure that they continue to work according to the law from which they have been breed, according to the law of the spirit of our own nationality and the culture-bearing race determining it.

For the freedom for which we strive does not consist of us renouncing our own folk’s essence, rather of fulfilling it. We want to finally be, and be allowed to become, those who we actually already always were, and we want the freedom to act accordingly.

The insights according to which the dangers of high culture are banished, and being able to move the forces that work in the wrong direction into the right one, demand that we develop a conscious cultural technology…

…The educators of the old school believed that all people are equal and education can achieve its goal with everybody. If one encounters difficulties, then one only needs to employ more and better educators and teachers.

Insight into the processes of hereditary and the fatefulness of the genes has destroyed this delusion. There are limits to rearing, even education. They can be broadened under favorable conditions and through suitable means, but not overcome. Much that the individual educator does not achieve can be performed by the educating force of a well delineated community. If the necessary traits are lacking or if they are too weak, than all effect is ultimately in vain, however.

On the other hand, if the traits are especially valuable and decisively effect in a certain direction, they triumph even if rearing and education have been lacking for long stretches. The young mind seizes at the decisive moment with natural force what is necessary for its thriving and growth and constructs for it its inner and outer life. It triumphs even against an oppressive environment or at least can do it, in the event the outer conditions are not all too unfavorable.

But this it not true for the average person; he needs rearing and education, and even the extraordinary talents are endangered without it.

The teachers of the old school believed that it depends on knowledge. Knowledge was supposed to encompass everything worth knowing. And what would not be worth knowing? So the subject matter burst the school, but one did not take that too seriously. The pupils learned for test and diploma and thereby earned their right to advancement and employment. Certainly, if he wanted to achieve more, he had to sit longer. The ability to devote oneself to a cause, even an intellectual one, was killed in favor of flat practicality considerations. Nobody portrayed the moral damage of this system of justification better than Lagarde…

…The statements by Lagarde characterized the situation already back then. The first: We cannot educate in our schools as long as the parents of the children who sit in front of us are not educated. The second: The pupil sits in school, gaze fixed on the door and not at the object of instruction. The third: One cannot educate generally, rather only for something…