Paul Schultze-Naumburg

Schultze-Naumburg was born in Almrich (now part of Naumburg) in the current federal state of Saxony-Anhalt and, by 1900, was a well-known painter and architect, emerging as a more-conservative member of the group of artists who established the Jugendstil and the Arts and Crafts workshops in Munich.

His series of books the Kulturarbeiten ("Works of Culture"), nine volumes published 1900–1917, were extremely popular and established him as an important tastemaker for the German middle class.

[1] In response to Germany's defeat in the First World War, and of his own traditionalist marginalization in the interwar "progressive" architectural discourse, Schultze-Naumburg's articles and books began to take on a far more robust character, condemning modern art and architecture in racial terms, thereby providing some of the basis for Adolf Hitler's theories, in which classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art.

Its Nature and Its Works") and Kunst und Rasse ("Art and Race"), the latter published in 1928, in which he argued that only "racially pure" artists could produce a healthy art which upheld timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially "mixed" modern artists showed their inferiority and corruption by producing distorted artwork.

[3] Along with Alexander von Senger, Eugen Honig, Konrad Nonn and German Bestelmeyer, Schultze-Naumburg was a member of a Nazi para-governmental art propaganda unit called the Kampfbund deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure (KDAI) (Combat Association of German Architects and Engineers).