Arts, Economy, and Foreign Relations

Week 13

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uVrO5d6KU

Light-weight screwball comedies

Glückskinder (Lucky Kids, 1936)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hgUx9h3nU4

“Degenerate art” exhibit, 1937

Arno Breker’s Readiness

Speer’s New Reich Chancellery, 1934-43

Hitler’s plans for Germania

Nazis’ economic revamping

• Preceding administrations’ improvements• World-wide improvement in the economy• Autobahn: over 100,000 jobs• Reinhardt programs: investment in job creation• Support of agricultural sector, hereditary farms• Marriage loan scheme: women at home• Creative way with statistics

“Primacy of politics”

• Tim Mason’s Marxist reinterpretation of Nazi Germany, written in 1960s and 1970s

• Rather than a consequence of capitalism, Fascism was driven by ideology

• Big industry stayed on the side• In the middle of the total war, improving workers’

standard of living• Lively discussion among East German historians

German foreign policy, 1933-41

• At first calming other countries, pact with Poland• Failed coup in Austria in 1934, turning the country into autocracy• Saarland (1935), Rhineland (1936)• Rapprochement with Italy: conflict in Ethiopia and Spain• Berlin-Rome Axis, 1936: closing ranks with Mussolini• Hossbach memorandum, Nov 1937• Japan becomes ally in 1937• Austria annexed in March 1938• Appeasement: Czechoslovakia broken up Sep 38, occupied March 39• Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, August 39• Attack on Poland and beginning of WWII, Sep 1, 1939• Operation Barbarossa: attach on the Soviet Union, June 1941