Inhumanities is an unprecedented account of the ways Nazi Germany manipulated and mobilized European literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and music in support of its ideological ends. David B. Dennis shows how, based on belief that the Third Reich represented the culmination of Western Civilization, culture became a key propaganda tool in the regime's program of national renewal and its campaign against political, national, and racial enemies. Focusing on the daily output of the Völkischer Beobachter, the party's official organ and the most widely-circulating German newspaper of the day, he reveals how activists twisted history, biography, and aesthetics to fit Nazism's authoritarian, militaristic, and anti-Semitic worldviews. Ranging from National Socialist coverage of Germans such as Luther, Dürer, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner, and Nietzsche to 'great men of the Nordic West' such as Socrates, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, he reveals the true extent of the regime's ambitious attempt to reshape the 'German mind'.

This work chronicles the exploitation of Beethoven's life and work by German political parties from the founding of the modern nation to the East German Revolution of 1989. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, David B. Dennis examines how politicians have associated Beethoven with competing visions of German destiny, thereby transforming art and artist into powerful national symbols. Dennis shows that propagandists of every persuasion have equated Beethoven's works with dogma. In the late-19th century, supporters of Bismarck and the German experors endorsed a militaristic interpretation forged during the Franco-Prussian War, while opponents promoted portraits of Beethoven as revolutionary. In World War I, Beethoven was drawn into the trenches, where Germans countered enemy allegations that they had forfeited the right to enjoy his music. Beethoven interpretations fragmented the Weimar Republic, as every faction formulated its own variation. The Nazi view of the composer as Fuhrer was enforced in the Third Reich. After 1945, German views of Beethoven corresponded to the division of the nation, but when the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989 one sentiment rose to dominance: that all people could become brothers, just as the composer had wished in his Ninth Symphony. By establishing connections between Beethoven's art and public policy, Dennis has written a book that should interest historians, musicologists and Beethoven enthusiasts alike.