Having wrapped up this work, I come away with the sense that a better name would be "The Purge," in that the purge of modernist and "Jewish" currents from Nazi German, and the organizational fight to control those processes, is what Kater is mostly writing about. As for Nazi culture creation, there is really not much to say, apart from writing checks to the artistic second-raters left after this purge.

Besides that, Kater does write sympathetically (mostly) about those artists caught up in the maelstrom, and their attempts to survive. Kater basically ends by considering the continuities that made it past "Zero Hour," into post-1945 Germany, and how just because Hitler's vision was slapped down, it doesn't mean that his victims could pick up and begin anew in Germany. One suspects that, in a twisted irony, that those who had not been present in the homeland to experience the whirlwind were not wanted as witnesses to the failures of German society, as the silent complicity to try and forget the immediate past draped itself over Adenauer's Germany. Remembrance and coming to terms would have to wait until another decade.

On the whole I thought this was a worthwhile book, but as a magisterial final statement (Kater is in his mid-eighties), I thought it fell a bit short. At points I got the impression that Kater himself is tired of writing about the Third Reich. Kater's conclusion trying to draw comparisons between how the great totalitarian states managed culture mostly came off as a throwaway effort. ( )