While ancient Greece remains the stereotypical blueprint of Western democracy, it was also, as Marker points out, formative to Nazi ideology. Heidegger famously claimed Germany as the true heirs of ancient Greece, while “The Dorian World,” a Nazi intellectual charter written by the poet Gottfried Benn in 1934, argued for ancient Greece as an image of the future German state. As religious scholar Renate Schlesier describes over footage of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, turn-of-the-century neo-paganism, which often included recreating Dionysian myths, helped pave the way “for a movement of irrational ideas, which eventually led to Nazism.”

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