In the introduction to his edition of Hitler's Table Talk, Hugh Trevor-Roper maintains that Hitler's ideas on culture were "trivial, half-baked and disgusting". This seems questionable. At least, there are marked similarities between the cultural ideals promulgated in the Führer's writings and conversation and those of the intellectuals we have been looking at... The contention, then, that Hitler's ideas on culture were trivial, half-baked and disgusting can be allowed only if the same epithets are applied to numerous cultural ideas prevalent among English intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, some of which are still espoused today. The superiority of "high" art, the eternal glory of Greek sculpture and architecture, the transcendent value of the old masters and of classical music, the supremacy of Shakespeare, Goethe and other authors acknowledged by intellectuals as great, the divine spark that animates all productions of genius and distinguishes them from the low amusements of the mass — these were among Hitler's most dearly held beliefs. His contempt for "gutter journalism", advertising and "cinema bilge", his espousal of the aristocratic principle, and his comparison of the "dunderheaded multitude" with women and children, are other features that readers of this book will have no difficulty matching in intellectual discourse. To such readers, his various rewritings of the mass — as exterminable subhumans, as an inhibited bourgeois herd, as noble workers, as peasant pastoral — will also be familiar intellectual devices. The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In the introduction to his edition of Hitler's Table Talk, Hugh Trevor-Roper maintains that Hitler's ideas on culture were "trivial, half-baked and disgusting". This seems questionable. At least, there are marked similarities between the cultural ideals promulgated in the Führer's writings and conversation and those of the intellectuals we have been looking at... The contention, then, that Hitler's ideas on culture were trivial, half-baked and disgusting can be allowed only if the same epithets are applied to numerous cultural ideas prevalent among English intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, some of which are still espoused today. The superiority of "high" art, the eternal glory of Greek sculpture and architecture, the transcendent value of the old masters and of classical music, the supremacy of Shakespeare, Goethe and other authors acknowledged by intellectuals as great, the divine spark that animates all productions of genius and distinguishes them from the low amusements of the mass — these were among Hitler's most dearly held beliefs. His contempt for "gutter journalism", advertising and "cinema bilge", his espousal of the aristocratic principle, and his comparison of the "dunderheaded multitude" with women and children, are other features that readers of this book will have no difficulty matching in intellectual discourse. To such readers, his various rewritings of the mass — as exterminable subhumans, as an inhibited bourgeois herd, as noble workers, as peasant pastoral — will also be familiar intellectual devices. The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy." in the context of "John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (1992), pp. 198, 208" to mean that wisdom is timeless.