Das Land der Dichter unt Denker

I find it curious that pre-WW2 Germans saw Germany as "Das Land der Dichter unt Denker" – The Land Of Poets And Philosophers. Germans have had great success in every field. But, apart from football, their image abroad is more closely associated with good science and engineering than it is with poetry. Despite Goethe! But I find such self-identification interesting. In WW2, the Nazis showcased scientists supportive of their theories, but they were thinly spread - science was always their enemy. Einstein's equations were Jewish, therefore wrong, and scientists knew their work ultimately couldn't continue in such a climate. Those "Jewish" theories led to the production of a working Bomb, anyway.

I think the Nazis rose on the back of (not in spite of) the Poet and the Philosopher in the German. We know that Hitler was an artist, and he loved the theatrical, glorious nature of Wagner’s music. It made me think that, for intellectuals, amongst other things, Nazism was the result of literature and music, and hundreds of years of radically different currents of thought in German philosophy, particularly in the irrationalism of people like Hegel and in Martin Heidegger.
The poetry side of it makes me think Nazism was also more the result of some simple aesthetic ideal for non-intellectuals. The swastika, the displays of power, the flags and colours, the military might, the clean uniforms, and efficiency as simple things that broad elements of the population delight in. Fascism could also be seen as an artistic man’s theatrical, musical, dramatic outlet. The “German philosophy” is also embodied somewhat in the idealists and in decades of authoritarian hatred of British liberal traditions. The population, besieged by The Depression and humiliated domestically, allowed the philosophy of its thinkers, intellectual statesmen and historians to leach through to them and just fell for the allure of Hitler’s promises of their future power and grandeur