This absorbing book chronicles the exploitation of Beethoven's life and work by German political parties from the founding of the modern nation in 1870 to the peaceful East German Revolution of 1989. David Dennis taps a wealth of new archival resources to examine for the first time how propagandists of every persuasion have transformed Beethoven and his art into powerful, and varied, national symbols. "In fascinating detail, Dennis introduces many 'Beethovens, ' each fashioned as part of a process that transformed the composer into the most protean, and widely abused, cultural-political...

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 Volkischer Beobachter, the party's official organ and the most widely circulating German newspaper of the...