The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture

Without wishing to sound flippant, the Nazi regime has a lot to answer for insofar as the word “Culture” is construed. Leaving aside the devastation Hitler's Germany perpetrated on the peoples and cultures of those countries it overran, the celebrated misquotation “When I hear the word Culture I reach for my gun”, attributed incorrectly to Hermann Göring, originated during the Third Reich (the source was probably Hanns Johst, a German playwright active then, and the quote probably ended with the word Browning – indeed a gun but possibly a reference to the doyens of nineteenth century English literature Elizabeth Barrett...