Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Thus, the saddest thing about the state of our whole culture of the pre-War period was not
only the total impotence of artistic and cultural creative power in general, but the hatred with
which the memory of the greater past was besmirched and effaced. In nearly all fields of art,
especially in the theater and literature, we began around the turn of the century to produce
less that was new and significant, but to disparage the best of the old work and represent it
as inferior and surpassed; as though this epoch of the most humiliating inferiority could
surpass anything at all. And from this effort to remove the past from the eyes of the present,
the evil intent of the apostles of the future could clearly and distinctly be seen. By this it
should have been recognized that these were no new, even if false, cultural conceptions, but
a process of destroying all culture, paving the way for a stultification of healthy artistic
feeling: the spiritual preparation of political Bolshevism. For if the age of Pericles seems
embodied in the Parthenon, the Bolshevistic present is embodied in a cubist
monstrosity.
In this connection we must also point to the cowardice which here again was manifest in the
section of our people which on the basis of its education and position should have been
obligated to resist this cultural disgrace. But from pure fear of the clamor raised by the
apostles of Bolshevistic art, who furiously attacked anyone who didn't want to recognize the
crown of creation in them and pilloried him as a backward philistine, they renounced all
serious resistance and reconciled themselves to what seemed after all inevitable. They were
positively scared stiff that these half-wits or scoundrels would accuse them of lack of
understanding; as though it were a disgrace not to understand the products of spiritual
degenerates or slimy swindlers. These cultural disciples, it is true, possessed a very simple
means of passing off their nonsense as something God knows how important: they passed off
all sorts of incomprehensible and obviously crazy stuff on their amazed fellow men as a socalled
inner experience, a cheap way of taking any word of opposition out of the mouths of
most people in advance. For beyond a doubt this could be an inner experience; the doubtful
part was whether it is permissible to dish up the hallucinations of lunatics or criminals to
the healthy world. The works of a Moritz von Schwind, or of a Bocklin, were also an inner
experience, but of artists graced by God and not of clowns.
Here was a good occasion to study the pitiful cowardice of our so-called intelligentsia, which
dodged any serious resistance to this poisoning of the healthy instinct of our people and left
it to the people themselves to deal with this insolent nonsense. In order not to be considered
lacking in artistic understanding, people stood for every mockery of art and ended up by
becoming really uncertain in the judgment of good and bad.
All in all, these were tokens of times that were getting very bad.
As another disquieting attribute, the following must yet be stated:
In the nineteenth century our cities began more and more to lose the character of cultural
sites and to descend to the level of mere human settlements. The small attachment of our
present big-city proletariat for the town they live in is the consequence of the fact that it is
only the individual's accidental local stopping place, and nothing more. This is partly
connected with the frequent change of residence caused by social conditions, which do not
give a man time to form a closer bond with the city, and another cause is to be found in the
general cultural insignificance and poverty of our present-day cities per se.
At the time of the wars of liberations the German cities were not only small in number, but
also modest as to size. The few really big cities were mostly princely residences, and as such
nearly always possessed a certain cultural value and for the most part also a certain artistic
picture. The few places with more than fifty thousand inhabitants were, compared to presentday
cities with the same population, rich in scientific and artistic treasures When Munich