Joseph Goebbels: Expressionist dramatist as Nazi minister of culture

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama, but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wide relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barrett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetic--the necessary condemnation of 'degenerate' art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937.