As one of the forms of the cultural superstructure, art – whether as an ideological commitment, an instrument of power or a commercially traded commodity – has always been closely linked to the socio-economic processes of change in the prevailing social conditions. How close this dependency was in the area of ​​German culture from the Middle Ages to the present is what this book tries to show as emphatically as possible in a succinct manner. The main emphasis is placed on the historically given market conditions which, after early bourgeois strivings for emancipation, finally led to that cultural supermarket in the course of the industrial revolution, which despite the continuing split into an elitist e-culture and an entertaining underground culture as "democratic ’ instead of striving for a universal A culture.