ABSTRACT
National Socialist art harked back to the traditions of nineteenth-century genre painting. Adolf Hitler’s artistic obsession was the dream of building a new Germany with its grandiose cities and vast monuments to his epochal achievements. In July that year the Ministry of Labour announced that the destruction of Germany’s cities offered a unique opportunity to build anew and condemned any attachment to the past as sentimental and irrational. The Wartime Economic Law of 4 September 1939 required that 30 per cent of any ‘exceptional increase’ in net profits be handed over to the Ministry of Finance. The Propaganda Ministry was faced with the difficult problem of finding the right balance between propaganda and entertainment in radio programmes. Goebbels knew full well that soldiers and munition workers wanted to relax and be entertained and that they had no stomach for endless propaganda and tendentious literature. Goebbels’ artistic hobby-horse was the cinema.
