Situation was special in Germany after the country’s defeat in 1918. Developing rapidly around 1910, European, and consequently also German, art, especially in the fields of music, visual arts and literature, confronted mostly conservative, traditionally-minded public. The majority of audience were unprepared for the reception of modern art; in the aftermath of WWI and the following revolution it regressed. Modern art was identified with political economic and social changes that were negatively looked on. In 1919, the Weimar Republic was established and on 11 August 1919, the National Assembly in Weimar passed a new constitution that founded a bourgeois republic instead of the former monarchy. New forms of government appeared: democratic, conducive to fairly elementary social transformation such as the emergence of a strong middle class: politically active but at the same time having no adequate artistic education or information. This class was the artists’ potential audience that would soon set the general tone and level of the arts. In the future, this public became susceptible to the influence of national socialist propaganda in art.

High-brow culture of the artistic elite kept spawning various innovative streams and movements: expressionism, dadaism, abstractionism, Bauhaus with its diversified activity, the New Objectivity and others. In the majority of cases artistic innovation went hand in hand with social and political radicalism. On the other hand, in the times of the Weimar Republic unbridled commercialisation of public life – and of art – could be observed, as was a general tendency towards increasingly secular art that yielded to the laws of free market. Art became a commodity in the first place, and an artist was only apparently a “cursed” creator. Society imposed rules of competition and success, defining them only in commercial terms. The laissez-faire principle, or the rule of unrestricted liberalism, prevailed, which in the 1920s lead to a widespread conviction in Germany (or at least in some circles) of a crises in art and culture, evoking Spengler’s atmosphere of collapse and decline.

Writing in the 1920s of a general crisis in the understanding of science, art and religion, Professor Othmar Spann, one of the trail-blazers o the nazi ideology, lamented that the situation “…in all art ….is absolutely hopeless. When we think of Dada, futurism or atonalism etc, when we think of the development of the cinema, revues etc., we can see that …everything is in a terrible state [im argen liegt]”. For the Viennese professor, that general crisis of art and culture was an effect of a social crisis, and for him the only chance to reform culture lied in generous help from the state enjoying considerable authority. Culture had to regain its historical, guiding and constitutive role, and its leading position in education.

According to Spann, democracy was to blame for the degradation of culture (Ruin der Kultur); democracy was the source of outrageous things happening: everyone could do what they wished, anyone could be a culture leader. Restoring the authority and significance of the state, with sword and with fire if necessary, was the only rescue from a dark abyss at the brink of which stood the German country and society in the age of cultural crisis.
The example of Spann as well as other representatives of German intellectuals proved the active role of scholars, artists, writers – in other words the German intellectual elite – in promoting and accepting views that presaged a programme postulated by the Nazis. This needs emphasizing because a common opinion is that national socialism was based mainly on petit bourgeois and peasants. This view is only half-true. Intellectual elites were observably willing to join actively in already in the 1920s.