Michael Kater's impressive book makes plain that “the relationship between culture and tyranny is complex” (xiv). Ultimately, Culture in Nazi Germany aspires to be a “new history of the Third Reich … from the vantage point of culture, its protagonists and detractors” (xvi). Kater's encyclopedic narrative accomplishes this aim by doing four things: tracing the longer durée of culture from the late Weimar era into the post–World War II years; covering a wide variety of cultural activities; showing the close relationship between culture and political events; and detailing human experience.

The leaders of the Third Reich “wished German culture to be related to the core values of their ideology” (1). They never really managed to sync those two, but they tried very hard, often in creative and brutal ways. As a result, Germans suffered from fewer and weaker cultural offerings, as well as lies, repression, violence, and insidious opportunities to use cultural activities for personal benefit. Kater shines a very bright light on the resultant suffering of Jews and the deep moral compromises many Germans involved in cultural life had to make, both in Germany and in exile.

This book balances well historians’ twin desires to tell a good story and to build an effective argument. It deserves additional praise as the first complete treatment of culture in the Third Reich and synthesizes the topic more effectively than previous attempts by George Mosse, Joseph Wulf, Jost Hermand, and others. Yet its greatest strength is the close attention Kater pays to the lives of people creating, controlling, and experiencing culture in Nazi Germany. Kater fills the pages with stories about cultural icons such as Thomas Mann and cultural survivors such as the Jewish guitarist Coco Schumann, whose playing at Auschwitz saved his life.

This study of human effort and human cost leads Kater to explore a cultural system based on Ian Kershaw's idea of “working toward the Führer.” In cultural life, too, we see the competitive bureaucratic overlap and intense personal rivalries that fueled some of the greatest horrors of the Nazi regime (repression, racialist laws, war, genocide). As cultural policy, though, this system mostly resulted in ever-diminishing cultural offerings, talent going into exile, occasional bouts of repression and brutalization, and mixed signals on how culture should have supported the regime. And that is just the story from the top down! Overall, Kater offers a bleak tale, in which few cultural purveyors escape with much dignity.

The book is composed of six lengthy chapters and a short conclusion that compares culture in the Third Reich to that in fascist Italy and communist Russia. The thirty-seven-page bibliography and ten-page index make the book an invaluable research tool. Chapter 1, “Deconstructing Modernism,” explains the Third Reich's purge of modernist culture and the regime's attempt to control and shape cultural output. Early on, the combination of arbitrary personal rule and fixed laws generated personal conflicts in Nazi Germany, weakening would-be totalitarian control and making regulation consistently capricious. Chapter 2, “Pre-War Nazi Culture,” demonstrates that culture served three main purposes in the Third Reich: to promote and support the state, as entertainment and diversion, and to impress foreign governments. Although film was the most pliable and popular medium, radio was better suited to these purposes. Music needed the least tweaking to extoll the state, but even so the “visual arts served totalitarian governance best” (110).

Chapter 3 explores the role of Jews in the Nazi cultural establishment. Beyond the regime's attacks, repression, exile, and murder of Jews, this chapter follows the fortunes of the Jewish Cultural League, whose history shows the Third Reich's synchronization of anti-Jewish policies, the war, and cultural politics. This analysis exemplifies Kater's desire to write a new history of the Third Reich through culture. Chapter 4 covers culture and propaganda during World War II and offers particularly striking details on how Joseph Goebbels used culture, especially the press, to support the fragile and often-flagging public morale in wartime. Here too Kater's deft pairing of military, political, and cultural history is novel and illuminating.

Chapter 5 on émigré artists tells the story of about half a million German speakers, including approximately 278,000 Jews, who fled Germany for mostly hostile locations. Almost half landed in the United States, and few among them flourished. Regulations, professional and linguistic barriers, depression, alcoholism, and different cultural landscapes left most of them indigent. Kater offers a mini-biography of the prickly Thomas Mann, who used his eminence to attack the Third Reich, as well as a wealth of stories about less successful exiles. Chapter 6 is about Germany after World War II and reveals that cultural continuities undermined new political systems, especially in West Germany. The fact that most exiled artists were not welcomed back after the war illustrates that Nazism's legacy lasted longer and ran deeper than most Germans cared to admit. Kater reveals that most artists who stayed and survived in Nazi Germany did so by making significant moral compromises. Very few avoided working with Hitler's regime or managed to do any kind of good from within. All in all, it's an informative and invaluable book, but the conclusions are sobering and dispiriting.

All in all, this is an informative, invaluable, but not necessarily inspirational book. Kater also mentions a few of his own personal conversations with people discussed in its pages, which emphasizes the fact that he has been working on these topics since the 1960s. A massive accomplishment that draws on nearly fifty years of work and scholarly experience, Culture in Nazi Germany will be the standard work on this important topic for years to come.