WHEN WILHELM KUNZE WISHED FOR a little more forgetfulness and a little less self-consciousness about Nuremberg's cultural heritage, he was probably not thinking of the Nazis, who, in 1927, had held their third party rally in Nuremberg — the first two were held in Munich and Weimar respectively — and who, less than five years later, were to be given control of all Germany. Since the Nazis’ rise to power, there have been two diametrically opposed ways of looking at their relationship to the German cultural tradition. The first, and most common, has been to view them as primitive barbarians, completely untouched by a love of culture. This is what the eminent German exile and Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor W. Adorno meant when, in an essay published in 1949, he spoke of the Nazis as “savage hordes” filled with an unreasoning anger and “envy of Kultur” because they felt excluded from it. Victor Klemperer, a scholar of Romance languages who survived what the Nazis called the “Third Reich” in Dresden even though the Nazis persecuted him as a Jew, was subscribing to a substantially similar viewpoint when, in a book published shortly after the end of the Second World War, he described the Nazis as “the most extreme opposite of the basic views of the German classical era.” Such a view of the Nazis as enemies of traditional German culture is comforting, at least to many Germans, because it leaves that culture, its values, and its implied assumptions about German cultural superiority unquestioned.

However from the beginning there has been another way of looking at the Nazis: not as primitive barbarians but as eminently modern Europeans who, far from breaking with the German cultural tradition, had reaffirmed or even fulfilled it. It was this approach to the Nazis that Thomas Mann was thinking of when he allowed Serenus Zeitblom, the first-person narrator of his great postwar novel Doktor Faustus (1947), to declare that the Nazis, far from being “something quite foreign to the nature of our people, [something] forced upon us,” in fact represented in some ways the culmination and embodiment of German cultural development, and that even the greatest representatives of German culture already bore within them the traces of the horrors later wrought by the Nazis.