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Joseph Goebbels: Art, Culture and the Nazi State

Joseph Goebbels was the first to see the potential of fusing art, culture and the Nazi state. Hitler so wished this merging, and so came to pass the transmission of Nazi ideology through art and culture. This is the second of three articles.
Given his own intellectual and academic background, cultural and artistic things intrigued the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. It was almost certainly by this that he seized on the dissemination-potential that cultural outlets could serve in propagating Nazi ideology – but also on the potency of culture in fomenting dissent. “Goebbels was an impresario of genius, the first man to realize the full potentialities of mass media for political purposes in a dynamic totalitarian state.”1 Not everyone within the Nazi hierarchy agreed with the prospect of fusing art, culture and the Nazi state together, notably Alfred Rosenberg, with whom Goebbels would have a lengthy rivalry that would emerge between and within their respective ministries.
Goebbels won out, in the end, because Hitler so wished this convergence. “Yet this was exactly what Hitler wanted: a fusion of politics, propaganda, and art. He considered politics to be the greatest of all arts, and propaganda the most important arm of politics. And Goebbels was in full agreement with Hitler…”2