Basic Ideas of National Socialist Cultural Policy

Basic Ideas of National Socialist Cultural Policy presents Wolfgang Schulz's systematic attempt to define what "culture policy" should mean inside a modern state-how education, art, literature, science, and public formation are expected to align with a unified national worldview. Originally published in Munich in 1939 by Franz Eher Verlag after the author's death, this edition brings that historical text to today's reader in a translation that has been reviewed and adjusted for clearer modern readability while aiming to preserve the work's original intent and structure. Schulz frames the book as both an instruction manual and a learning text-designed not as a static overview, but as a practical guide meant to be worked with, reflected on, and applied. He explicitly positions the work as a response to confusion and gaps in how biological concepts (heredity, race science, population policy frameworks) were being connected to cultural development, arguing that these connections had not been sufficiently clarified in earlier public discussion. Across its chapters, the book moves from foundational definitions and aims ("Race & folk," "History & Politics," "Folk convalescence") into a larger interpretive framework that draws on world history and intellectual history, then turns toward concrete cultural domains-especially German education and its component disciplines (from biology and history to philosophy, technology, and art). Later sections extend into questions of knowledge, faith, desire, literature, and social roles-presented through topical chapters and named contributions/figures in the contents list. For readers interested in primary-source political thought, ideology-to-institution translation, and the intellectual machinery behind state-directed culture programs, Schulz offers a forceful, methodical blueprint-one that is historically specific, internally coherent, and revealing in how it tries to turn an abstract worldview into lived cultural policy.