Culture and Propaganda in World War II

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The Nazi Party stressed the superiority of Germanic culture, and the promotion of Richard Wagner and Carl Orff was central to Hitler's cultural program. In Britain, the War Office under Winston Churchill chose to promote Edward Elgar and Hubert Parry, but also to appropriate and 'de-Nazify' Ludwig van Beethoven – whose Fifth Symphony was used extensively in wartime broadcasts and has since become synonymous with VE Day. Meanwhile, the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music was commissioned by Powell and Pressburger for use in 49th Parallel, reclaimed a particularly English past stretching back to the Tudors. A cultural history of music in wartime based on detailed archival research, Culture and Propaganda in World War II analyses the use of music in the work of British and German film-makers and will be essential reading for historians, musicians, film scholars and propaganda analysts.