>"Germany became a unified state 150 years ago this week – and no other country has produced such original, provocative and powerful art since, from Richter to Klee, from Dix to Höch"

Other radical Germans turned on the Wagnerian heritage of aesthetic reverie itself. For, as every Germanophobe knows, Hitler was a Wagner fan. The German Marxist Walter Benjamin argued in the 30s that fascism is an aesthete’s ideology, its motto, “Let art flourish and the world perish.” To see what he meant, watch the disturbingly seductive Nazi films of Leni Riefenstahl. For Benjamin, the art of democracy is the photograph, endlessly reproducible and replacing romantic sublimity with human information.