Walter Benjamin wrote, “the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.” But as seen in the strategies of Nazi ideologues, it can be argued that the opposite was also true: that fascism as practiced also worked to politicize artistic culture. Thus, in addition to attesting that favorite figures of Western cultural history were of Germanic and definitely not of Jewish descent, and volkish rather than urbane, Nazi propagandists also countered notions of art for art’s sake by promoting the view that the primary creative impulse was as much political – especially patriotic and nationalistic – as artistic. Hitler contributed to the politicization of art history on numerous occasions. While acceding that “art has at all times been the expression of an ideological and religious experience,” he insisted that it is “at the same time the expression of a political will.” For him, “all great art is national . . . Great musicians, such as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, created German music that was deeply rooted in the very core of the German spirit and the German mind . . . That is equally true of German sculptors, painters, architects.” At the opening of the Reich Culture Chamber in 1933, Joseph Goebbels expanded on this view of the true artist as engaged in the politics of his day:

So, another central dictum of Nazified cultural history promoted in the Völkischer Beobachter was that the great works of the Western tradition were politically inspired, especially in the spirit of patriotism and nationalism, as these concepts might have been relevant for any particular historical context.