Nazi Aesthetics Essay - 1375 Words

Nazi Aesthetics (Essay Sample) Content: Nazi AestheticsInsert NameTitle of CourseName of InstructorDatePaper Summary The argument in the paper is that art and culture are inseparable in many respects. Art produces culture and culture manifests its own art. Nonetheless, it is acknowledged that within political and economic predicaments in society, the strategic orientation of art is sometime intercepted by art to produce artificial political ends and programs. The strategic function of leadership, socialization of the masses through popular art and media therefore perform a leading role in this regard. The peculiarity of the Nazi propaganda machine in promoting atrocities and social discord through art cannot be gainsaid in this regard. Hitler took the role of a leader and educator in his great wittings, which provided the ideological framework for the Nazi incursions with the Jewish minorities. The strategic function of the propaganda machine among the German people is here epitomized as having fetched t he justification for the horrendous acts of the Nazi regime. Hitler had the conviction that the great art and architecture of the Roman Empire were responsible for the Roman rule of the European territories during their reign. In reproducing fascist Italy in Germany, Hitler personally and collaboration with other Third Reich leaders designed grand new structures to boldly symbolize the German might as well as disapprove the previously perceived embedded Jewish culture and traditions. In addition, the paper epitomize the observation that ideally, Nazi art is merely an oxymoron because the representations attributed to this genre are total violations of the trinity of art which comprise the three conditions and benchmarks of true art as beauty, truth and goodness. Any art that symbolize absurdity is in many respects not treated as true art because it defeats the very role and function of art. In the ideological climate of modernity and its insistence on uncertainty and impermanence p roduced an ever unstable social and economic predicament that flourished into mainstream culture. This transitory progress of culture and art permitted and emblematized all forms of moral justifications and rationalization of human conditions and behaviors. Nazi Art Aesthetics, Modernity, and Politics Nazi art and aesthetics glorified a utopian preoccupation with totalitarian political whims, which combined fascist ideals and Marxist extremism. The very acknowledgement of Nazi drawings, architecture, and rhetoric as art has been widely repudiated for the reason they violated gravely the art trinity of goodness, truthfulness and beauty. Since all forms of Nazi artistic message was chiefly whimsical in a grotesque manner, there is rabid rebuttal of the fact that it can be appreciated as realistic art. The modern era was nonetheless a time of great technological and scientific progress. The critical contribution of the Third Reich in German society and social philosophy strategicall y captures the epitome of the tragedy that cinematic illusions and propaganda manifested. During this era, German society revolted and exercised extreme incursions on the Jewish populations across Europe as a result of mere propaganda and incitement. Art and political expression fetched the ideology and strategy for mass mobilization f the nation into the horrendous onslaughts on the Jewish people. The legitimacy of war and aggression and the politics of vengeance gripped the German society as a result of the bitterness emanating from the penalties of the Versailles treaty. In the German experience with modernity, there were conflicting ideologies about the function of government in the light of the economic challenges created by the economic boom after the scientific and industrial revolution. Whereas a few wealthy individuals with ethnic allegiances sprung up, multitudes of the ordinary and native populations were languishing in poverty and material deprivation. The precarious s tate of the nation found by dint of sheer ill luck, the attendance of charismatic and flamboyant leaders in the personality of Adolf Hitter and his cronies. The modernist project of national rebirth and its impetus for scientific exploration landed the fate of propagandist film and theatre directed at the very questions of social mobilization in plural terms and the gilded nationhood. The nation-state, mantra of solidarity and populism in the modernist perspective befell the socialist project, which was well underway in Germany, and as such, the Nazi state only played a coordinating role to galvanize the political, the economic and social dimensions through aesthetics. The antagonistic factions of the Jewish and Nazis broke down to a simplistic moralist contention about race identities. The political jostling to redress the situation between widening social and economic gaps propagated a nationalistic diabolical curse upon international Jewry. Besides, a cult of German superiority under extreme nationalism and the deplorable state of a mystic racial identity promoted the discord in both art and culture. Wagners opera epitomized the quest for German heroism in film and art like never before and aided in the creation of the phantasmagoric myths, which spurned ideological identities models of personality that were requisite for the revolutionary machine. Hitlers persona helped to galvanize Nazi ideologies in a special way because it satisfied the irrational and displaced hopes of the masses who believed the media to define the outcomes of the revolution through film illusions. By Nazi partys commitment to the propagation in film their ideologies, cinematic representation of realism for the bourgeoisie classes targeted intense indoctrination both with art and film media. The gilded age therefore produced the eventual holocaust and its spillover into popular culture until the new World stood up to mop up the mess. Culture performs a dual function of producin g or manufacturing popular movement and or being the result and aftermath of such popular movements in society. The National Socialism movement in Germany during the Third Reich encapsulates a very distinctive cultural action both supported by artistic campaigns and social mobilization through propagandist. Kenneth Frantom in his incisive discussion of the Nazi experience coined the term Cinematic Martyrdom to depict the notion that Nazi propaganda created heroic personalities in the media and film to parody individuals involved in what were depicted as heroic acts when these characters only depicted strange and perverted display of loyalty to tribe and ethnic affiliations. The cinematic personalities embodied the Triumph of Illusion in the sense that the achievements they were created to embody were unrealistic and tailore...