As cultural and political conflicts raged in Weimar Germany, the editor-in-chief of the Nazi Party’s official newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (The Folkish Observer), published a front-page editorial marking the 100th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s death on 26 March 1927. In it, Alfred Rosenberg declared that during the present epoch of “spiritual battle,” followers of Adolf Hitler could consider Beethoven’s music a powerful source of inspiration. Whoever understood the spirit of the National Socialist movement especially, Rosenberg claimed, knew that “an impulse similar to that which Beethoven embodied in the highest degree lived in all its members”: namely, the “desire to storm over the ruins of a crumbling world, the hope for the will to reshape the world, and the strong sense of joy that comes from overcoming passionate sorrow.” When the Nazis achieved victory in Germany and across Europe, Rosenberg implied, they would enjoy “heart-warming consciousness” that “the German Beethoven towered over all the peoples of the West.” They would then remember that Beethoven had passed on to National Socialists the “will of German creation.” Living in the “Eroica of the German Volk,” Nazis “wanted to make use of” this willpower.

This inspirational evocation of a cultural-historical hero in the Nazi newspaper was entirely consistent with Hitler’s proclamations that if the National Socialist revolution was going to have a “transformative effect,” its spokesmen would have to “strive by all available means” to get the German people to “believe in its mission with conviction.” Above all, the Nazi leader insisted, this required “demonstrating its cultural worthiness.” At times of “weakened faith” in Germany’s “highest merits,” it was necessary to revive the Volk’s confidence by “invoking works that remained untouched by political and economic troubles,” that is, by invoking great works of Western culture in the name of his ideals.