| Everybody knows about Hitler the failed watercolour painter in Vienna. But who knows about his artistic drive and the importance that Art, Music, Paintings, Architecture took in his life after his accession to power ? Few people and there is one good reason : after the war, allies leaders destroyed everything "Hitlerite" left untouched by the bombings and sort of obliterated Hitler's legacy. Hitler was the architect of the Holocaust, period. Nothing good or even fair could be said about this man, responsible for the massacre of millions of Jews and the death of millions of soldiers and civilians In France and Italy, today it is still impossible to buy Nazis memorabilia, even from e-Bay. Millions of little French kids have never been told anything about Hitler's artistic views and achievements except that he was a miserable "peintre en bâtiment" (building painter) not far from being a complete "clochard" (bum). That such an ordinary and mediocre man would elevate himself to the position of Germany's Fuhrer should be a subject of puzzlement for smart little French but in fact the lies or the omissions of the victors have been swallowed all along without questionning since the glorious Liberation of Paris by Gaullist troops. As far as propaganda was concerned, Europe nations -especially the "collaborative" ones - stepped in Goebbels boots with flamboyant panache. Even today any Frenchman would be very surprised to be told that when visiting the Opera Garnier in 1940 Hitler asked the attendant where was the room devoted to the "Chefs d'Etat". The guy mumbled that there was no such room and at the insistence of Hitler eventually recalled that this room was removed during previous modernization works after WW1. Hitler knew the technical details of any building of importance in the world to the astonishment of his architects. The man was not only a formidable orator but he was too an encyclopedic connaisseur in music, painting and architecture. Hitler-Promoteus in the making The reality is that Hitler was a mix of Promotheus and a of a Demiurge pretending to shape everything cultural or artistic in Nazi Germany and to this end enrolled army of artists, architects and painters who jumped on the bandwagon with the appetite of their devouring ambitions. The list of the principal Nazis artists can be consulted at this page. But Hitler was also a bohemian, he could be wavering and eventually a dilatory dictator : his press officer Otto Dietrich said about him in his "Memoirs" that "he allowed himself to be guided almost exclusively by emotional considerations." As far as Art was concerned, the result was disastrous. For his favorite architect, the ass-kisser Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler was basically an artist. For the historian John Toland, he was basically an architect. The problem was that he actually thought he was both and a genius in both matters. The problem was aggravated by the fact that Hitler confused aesthetic drive and artistic talent but he was simply too full of himself to realize it. As a young man in Vienna, according to his friend August Kubizek, he was already "aesthetically driven" but Kubizek was too smitten by Hitler to make the difference between a pretentious snob and a really talented young artist. Furthermore, his narration of his life with Adolf Hitler (published in 1953 under the title "Hitler the friend of my youth" in German) has been tampered with by ghost writers whereas his Reminiscences written in 1938 for the NSDAP archives are far from rendering the same gentle description of Hitler's artistic talents and aspirations. |
| Caricature of Hitler-Promoteus breaking the mold of an upset Jewish sculptor to substitute the perfect German individual |
A flourishing culture
After Hitler's accession to supreme power in 1933,
the Promotheus in him had a free hand. And it was
not long before the Demiurge took over not only the
power but the whole cultural and artistic life of
Germany, infiltrating every aspect of the society
including its music, its buildings, its transportation
network, its paintings and poetry. Above all, Adolf
Hitler was convinced that the key to Germany's
identity and repute was a flourishing culture but it
should be his culture or at least his vision of what
was culture. And here lays a huge problem : what
exactly was "Kultur fur der Fuehrer" ? Apart from
the fact that Hitler sacred himself the "Pope of Art",
his actual definitions of art or culture are inexisting :
first, as a good Shopenhauer's follower, he thought
that "art came from iron will, not from talent".
| The Berghof in 1940 (above) and in 1945 (below) : Hitler's artistic drive turned out to be rather destructive |
Then he thought that no art has even been produced since 1911 and
that Athens and Rome were the "creme de la creme" in matter of art
and culture. He was probably influenced by the ideas of the German
writer Oswald Spengler who had published in 1919 to phenomenal
success The Decline of the West where he predicted the end of
European cultural hegemony. In a later essay, Pessimism (1922),
Spengler wrote that the men of the West must still be men, and do
all they could to realize the immense possibilities still open to them.
Above all, they must embrace the one absolute imperative : the
destruction of Money and democracy, especially in the field of
politics, that grand and all-encompassing field of endeavor. In 1931
he published Man and Technics, a book that reflected his fascination
with the development and usage of the technical. The development
of advanced technology is unique to the West, and he predicted
where it would lead. Man and Technics warned the European or
white races of the pressing danger from the outer colored races.
It predicts a time when the colored peoples of the earth will use the
very technology of the West to destroy the West [as the
Fundamentalist Arab terrorits are currently doing]. There is much in
Spengler's thinking that permits one to characterize him as a kind of
"proto-Nazi": his call for a return to authority, his hatred of
"decadent" democracy, his exaltation of the spirit of "Prussianism,"
his idea of war as essential to life. However, he never joined the
National Socialist party, despite the repeated entreaties of such NS
luminaries as Gregor Strasser and Ernst Hanfstängl. He disliked
Hitler and could not take him seriously. In Hour of Decision published
before the war, het wrote that the National Socialists were not
sufficiently watchful of the powerful hostile forces outside the
country that would mobilize to destroy them, and Germany. The book
was a huge success but was ultimately banned by the Nazis. He died
in 1936 of a heart attack in Munich. Before his death, he wrote :
"And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore
the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without
creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad."
If he was fascinated by the Italian Renaissance and German XIXth
century artists, Hitler was not going much further. For him, the XXth
Century had produced nothing, so he was frozen in a sort of
neo-classical approach that excluded everything else. But as he was
also a man of his time, he succumbed to Functionalism so that in the
end his artistic tates were limited to a neo-classical functionalism
that condemened his ass-kissers architects, the Speer, Giesler,
Fick, Gall and other devouts, to produce a rigid symmetry where
human beings were barely more than little robots (see above
picture) who could be disposed of like in his Vienna's paintings and
in the wars he waged .
that Athens and Rome were the "creme de la creme" in matter of art
and culture. He was probably influenced by the ideas of the German
writer Oswald Spengler who had published in 1919 to phenomenal
success The Decline of the West where he predicted the end of
European cultural hegemony. In a later essay, Pessimism (1922),
Spengler wrote that the men of the West must still be men, and do
all they could to realize the immense possibilities still open to them.
Above all, they must embrace the one absolute imperative : the
destruction of Money and democracy, especially in the field of
politics, that grand and all-encompassing field of endeavor. In 1931
he published Man and Technics, a book that reflected his fascination
with the development and usage of the technical. The development
of advanced technology is unique to the West, and he predicted
where it would lead. Man and Technics warned the European or
white races of the pressing danger from the outer colored races.
It predicts a time when the colored peoples of the earth will use the
very technology of the West to destroy the West [as the
Fundamentalist Arab terrorits are currently doing]. There is much in
Spengler's thinking that permits one to characterize him as a kind of
"proto-Nazi": his call for a return to authority, his hatred of
"decadent" democracy, his exaltation of the spirit of "Prussianism,"
his idea of war as essential to life. However, he never joined the
National Socialist party, despite the repeated entreaties of such NS
luminaries as Gregor Strasser and Ernst Hanfstängl. He disliked
Hitler and could not take him seriously. In Hour of Decision published
before the war, het wrote that the National Socialists were not
sufficiently watchful of the powerful hostile forces outside the
country that would mobilize to destroy them, and Germany. The book
was a huge success but was ultimately banned by the Nazis. He died
in 1936 of a heart attack in Munich. Before his death, he wrote :
"And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore
the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without
creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad."
If he was fascinated by the Italian Renaissance and German XIXth
century artists, Hitler was not going much further. For him, the XXth
Century had produced nothing, so he was frozen in a sort of
neo-classical approach that excluded everything else. But as he was
also a man of his time, he succumbed to Functionalism so that in the
end his artistic tates were limited to a neo-classical functionalism
that condemened his ass-kissers architects, the Speer, Giesler,
Fick, Gall and other devouts, to produce a rigid symmetry where
human beings were barely more than little robots (see above
picture) who could be disposed of like in his Vienna's paintings and
in the wars he waged .
| Hitler enjoyed the warm atmosphere of the Wagners who became a second family to him : here he is seen with Winifred Wagner and one of her daugthers Friedelind. During the war, Friedelind fled to England and published a serie of anti-nazi pamphlets full of indiscretions about the Hitlerite Court at Bayreuth (compiled after the war into a book titled "The Royal Family of Bayreuth") that infuriated Hitler |
Hitler felt at home at the Wagners and Winifred's sons and daughters used to refer to him as "uncle Adi". The poor two boys were literally brainwashed by their opportunist mother and too proud to be Hitler's toys. |
| Eventually, Adolf Hitler artistic and cultural policies weres more defined by what was forbidden than by well-formulated expectations : if in politics, the NSDAP wanted order, discipline and purity, the Fuhrer wanted the painting works to be "finished" and "beautiful", the music to be "healthy, right and genuine" (sic) and the buildings to be "Germanische Tektonik" (resic).The result of this was that in the end everything cultural in Germany was highly political : and as everything in politics was subordinated to the will of a tyran, everything had to please Hitler or be banned. |
Poisoners and imbeciles
The first to suffer from such a political assessment of artistic life
were of course the Jews, those "poisoners" of German life, German
culture and German art trade. Hitler conveniently forgot that :
- Jewish art traders, like the Morgensterns or the Altenbergs,
had been the only art traders to buy his mediocre Vienna
watercolours - Nathaniel Rothschild and the Gutmann family were the main
benefactors of the Mannerheim men's hostel in Vienna where
Hitler stayed and lived comfortably from 1909 to 1913. After
the war, Morgenstern's daughter who unlike her parents
survived deportation declared that "Adolf Hitler's paintings
were the cheapest we ever sold". Not only Jewish artists
were banished and forbidden to work or show their works
but Jewish art collections through Europe were confiscated,
notably the Rothschilds's, the David-Weill's and the Kann's,
for the sake of the future Linz Art Museum that was never
constructed : more than 2200 pieces of art were "acquired"
but 70% of them were confiscated from Jewish collectors.
Eventually, art definition by Hitler and the Nazis was so vague that
the only truth was that Jews, Liberals and Bolsheviks were to be
excluded from artistic institutions and forbiddent to practice their
art. Like this, through some miracle, a National-Socialist Art would
emerge. But unfortunately the miracle did not occur and Hitler had to
admit his own failure and revert to good old classicism of the XIXth
century and admitted :"we should content ourselves with the great
masters of the past."
His frustration was vented out on the Modernists, the Futurists, the
Dadaists, "saboteurs of art, imbeciles or impostors" and in June
1937 he promulgated a decree defining "degenerate art" (Entartete
Kunst) as "works that insults German feelings or destroy or confuse
natural form or reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic
skill."
A touchy Hitler would send you to Dachau
Today, nobody could seriously utter such a ridiculous opinion
without everybody bursting out into laughters. But here he was, the
Fuehrer of Nazi Germany, signing so ridiculous a decree that its own
materiality seems today surreal. But what really mattered for Hitler
was his ideas, his opinions, his views, the rest, like sciences &
technology, was left behind, secundary, of no importance. A modern
Nero, Hitler saw himself like a great artist and nobody could argue
with his views : he was so touchy about his projects, notably cities
remodelling, that he sent to a concentration camp a Cabaret artist
who had the bad idea to make fun of them.
Such was his grip on culture and art that a Court of sycophants, led
by Speer and Goebbels, mushroomed around him like lice : men like
Gehrart Hauptmann, Nobel Prize for Litterature, Ernst Bertram, poet,
Sepp Hilz, painter, Hans Albers, actor, Emil Jannings, actor, Caspar
Neher, stage designer, not to mention celebrities like Arno Breker,
sculptor, who became a rabid Nazi, enjoyed huge favors and
stipendia from Hitler.
Money was flowing around like never and dispensations of war
duties were issued for a list of thousands of nazis artists whose
names were written down on list A and list B : Albert Speer, the only
friend Hitler ever had after his accession to power, received 7
millions marks for the responsibility of the Berlin remodelling project
that was never even started because of the war.
In 1937 however when he inaugurated the House of German Art,
nobody could escape to notice that the Fuhrer had no program for
the Arts and that no leadership was coming from him. Once more he
reverted to utterances of threats and promises of sending the
Modernists and other "criminals" to madhouses. At the same
period, Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reich Culture Chamber,
thought he could profer such stupid threats like this :"Our patience
with all those who have not been able to fall in line is at an end. ...
What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness,
impertinence, and lack of talent. I would need several freight trains
to clear our galleries of this rubbish. This will happen soon".
Thus, cultural pretension became the way to find one's own way to
the Fuehrer : as Nicholas von Bulow, his Luftwaffe adjutant,
discovered "it sufficed to love Opera to become a member of his
private circle" of sycophants. This lack of imagination and of
conceptualistic ability led historian Frederic Spotts to conclude that
"it is possible to see in the victories of 1940 the triumph of impulse
over experience, will over reason, creativity over orthodoxy and of
the failed painter over the artistic pedants of the Vienna Academy of
Arts."
Stupidity or Crime, no alternative
It is certainly possible. In 1940, Hitler the autodidact had his revenge
over every sort of establishment in Europe. It was his personal
triumph but short lived. However the end of the war was still a long
way ahead and Hitler had 5 more years to dictate his tastes and
spread his fantasies. In the paintings field, he had decreed as soon
as 1921 in an article titled "Stupidity or Crime" that the German
people were poisoned by Modernists painters. So he encouraged -
sometimes with his own fortune made of the royalties from Mein
Kampf (1)- neo-classical painters whose works pretended to be Nazi-
inspired but which could have been exalting any other form of
regime. The new nazi art, especially in paintings, produced a variant
of past style that had been recycled into new-old work : a caricature
of the past and the grand masters Hitler was so proud of. The great
majority of the 3rd Reich painters were timid middle-class guys from
the Munich conservative Schoolf of Visual Arts [where Hitler failed to
enter in 1907 and 1908] who lacked the imagination to develop
anything, even a nazi style.
In music, it was worse in so far as Hitler could only stand Wagnerian
music and hated operattas, jazz (the Negroes' music) and even
comedies or chamber music. But Wagner, he did love :"I love
Richard Wagner’s music, he said once in 1932, must I close my ears
to it because he was a pederast?” (2). During their months together
in Vienna, Hitler and Kubizek attended every Wagner's performance
at the Opera : they saw Lohengrin and the Meistersinger at least ten
times. Actually, Wagner was his real mentor, his idol, the Man he
adored and admired. Hitler's life was largely void outside politics,
said an historian. He should have added "and outside Wagner",
including Wagner's anti-semitic rantings. Cosima Wagner used to
put entries in her Diary as :"Richard is in favor of expelling them (the
Jews) entirely. We laugh to think that it really seems as if his article
on the Jews marked the beginning of this struggle." When Hitler met
the Wagners in 1923, Richard was dead since 1883, but the "spirit"
lingered on. Cosima, then 86, kissed him : her daughter-in-law
Winifred, and her son-in-law, the racial theorist, Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, called Hitler "God's gift to Germany". Hitler could not
find more sympathetic ears than the English-born Winifred and
Houston.
Listening to Wagner, Hitler would get into trances and if by chance
Winifred Wagner, who almost became his wife, was present, he
would bestow a religious kiss on her hand. The music moved him :"it
was, he said once, the rythms of the primeval world" or as his
secretary Christa Schroder wrote in her anonymous Memoirs "a
revelation of the divine". Thus Wagner's political writings were
Hitler's Bible, the pomposity of his style influenced Hitler whose
education was to say the least incomplete. Actually Hitler had all the
"little manias" of the perfect autodidact : borrowing here and there
what he deemed convenient and flattering for his ego even at the
risk of pomposity, ridicule and redundancy. And the irony is that it is
precisely in these borrowings that he found the "granite
foundations" for his views of the world. How Charlie Chaplin was
right to ridicule such a pretentious clown !!!
But the clown was also a dictator and the musicians who disagreed
with him had only a way-out : like Gustav Mahler who had left Vienna
in 1907 for New York city, Bruno Walter went into exile. Adolf Hitler's
biggest affront was Toscanini's refusal to conduct at Bayreuth
precisely because Hitler had fired Walter. The italian conductor
joined Walter in Salzburg to the fury of the Fuhrer. Here again,
Modernism was eliminated from music, staging and directing.
However, during the 3rd Reich, some non-Opera composers gained
huge favors with Hitler, as did Bruckner, like Hitler, an Austrian of
humble origin. If Hitler appreciated as well Puccini and Lehar's
operettas, his basic tastes remained that of a conformist petit-
bourgeois : in 1929, he was scandalized by a performance of "Neues
vom Tage" by Hindemith at the Kroll Opera in Berlin in which a
seemingly naked soprano sang in her bath about the wonders of
modern plumbing.
Healthy and genuine, this it !
But once more when it came to define what should be a good nazi
music, Hitler could only come up with the directive that it should be
"healthy and genuine". Well, personally I find Jazz "healthy and
genuine" and Opera "boring and sickening". Hitler would have
probably considered I was insane and worth a mental asylum.
Anyway, he wanted music to occupy in Germany the same place it
had in ancient Greece, i.e. to be a tool of social purpose to exalt the
aesthetics feeling of the general public. Furthermore, everything
Jewish was banished, even the text in the Librettos : for instance, in
Mozart's Requiem, the words "Deus in Sion" became "Deus in
caelis" (sic).
This insanity had sometimes its own limits : when ass-kissers nazis
dignitaries tried to ban all together every Christian religious music,
Hitler got into a rage and stopped the attempt. But in the end, the so
much vaunted national-socialist musical revolution just pettered out
as the revolution in paintings did : it became a policy of purge leaving
nothing else than German music. A wall that was not completely
efficient either : by 1939, Verdi had replaced Wagner as the most
performed Opera composer. The German public did not always
followed his leader in his tastes and passions. Once again, the
theatrocracy he tried to impose collapsed. After the fall of Stalingrad
in 1943, it was over for the Wagnerian passion : Hitler could not
listen anymore to Wagner with whom he had so much in common.
Some authors still maintain that not all the Nazis were fond of
Wagner, notably Rosenberg and Goebbels, and that Hitler himself
could have found his desire, in spite of his anti-semitism, to
assimilate German Jews and non-German Jews embarrassing. It
can be added too that the Nazi Party hierarchy much preferred
Beethoven; that Liszt was the composer used for the signature tune
for Nazi broadcasts; that Hitler’s favourite composer in the end was
not Wagner but Franz Lehar; that the Nazis banned Parsifal in 1939,
principally because of the pacifist content, though Goebbels also
complained that it was “too pious”. Still the influence of Wagner on
Hitler was tremendous and can not be denied. The Wagner family
milked that influence as shrewd business people. They lived to
regret it and tried to play it down after the war although Winifred
reaffirmed to the very end her profound attachment to uncle "Wolf".
But it is in the sculptural and architectural fields that Hitler reached
his best. Hitler raved about the magnificent architecture of Vienna's
city hall designed by Danish Theophil Hansen :"A Hellenic miracle on
Germn soil." He admired Gottfried Semper's Burgtheater on Vienna's
Ring (main Boulevard), "the most beautiful and best thing that can
be."
Obsessed with new and perfect buildings to his glory and to the
promotion of the NSDAP, he became a maniac ready to anything to
achieve his ambitions, putting aside any consideration about cost,
feasibility and human risks. In The Psychopathic God, Robert Waite
describes ways Hitler tried to compensate himself for only having
one testicle. These entailed an interest in designing more complete
and perfect buildings, carrying guns, whips, which were the means
to assert his power and aggression. Hitler's passion for 'Tektonik'
architecture derived from him being a monorchid ? It is very likely.
The ex-future European Culture Centre in Linz
In sculpture, Hitler had one passion, the Greeks and his favorite
sculpture was the Discus Thrower by Myron that he eventually
managed to purchase for the astronomical sum of $327,000 in order
to complete his Linz museum collection. His views about sculpture
were once more neo-classical and some talented sculptors litterally
threw themselves to his feet to enter the private cenacle of his
providers. The most famous was Arno Breker, an extremely talented
artist who prostituted his talent to the Fuhrer and became a rabid
Nazi, going to such extremes as tipping off Hitler about non-nazis
artistic activities or exhibitions.
To please his master, Breker produced caricatures of virility : his
works owed to size and exaggeration, shoulders too broad, hips too
narrow, muscles outrageously pronounced... The whole thing reeked
of some sort of homoerotic scent that raised questions about the
Nazi ideals of comradeship. As everybody knows, the homosexuality
was so spread out during the war among the SS that in 1942 Hitler
decided to punish by death any SS member guilty of homexuality. So
by exalting virile virtues and nazi comradeship, in the end Hitler and
his henchmen obtained -as said once Trostsky- an atmosphere of
military barracks homosexuality. It is not exactly what they had
planned to get.
The peak of the peak was reached in architectural matters with
grandiose plans for Berlin, Munich, Linz and almost every important
city in Germany. The global cost of the cost of remodelling Berlin and
German cities to the tastes of the Fuhrer was estimated in 1938 at
150 billions marks whereas the whole 3rd Reich budget for the
same year, including armaments expenses, was a mere 38 billions.
In this domain, neoclassicism reigned supreme. And the bluepint
documents were all identical : a North-South axis, a railways station
at one end, a huge column at an other, and in the middle buildings to
the glory of the NSDAP, operas, libraries, hotels and restaurants.
Click to see a photograph of the projected Globe of Berlin with its
741 million of cubic feet.
Hitler's architects, devouts like Speer and Giesler, would acquiesce
to any suggestion or modification that he would constantly brought
to the projects to the point that they would eventually become his
assistants carrying out the boss's ideas. As for the design, it was
German Tektonik, i.e. neoclassical functionalism à la Hitler or a rigid
symmetry duplicated everywhere in Germany whose capital Berlin
was supposed to be renamed Germania (sic). His ideas had some
supporters even outside Germany : British ex-Prime Minister David
LLoyd-George was enthusiastic about Hitler's plans when he visited
him in 1936 and called him a "great man". In the late 1930s he was
even sent by the British government to try to dissuade Adolf Hitler
from his plans of Europe-wide fascist expansion.
Hitler's favorite plan was for the city of Linz where he lived with his
parents at the end of the XIXth century which he planned to turn into
a European Culture Center : he commissioned the director of a
Dresdner's Art gallery Hans Posse to purchase or confiscate art
works for the future museum and the man did so well that in 1940 he
had amassed 7,000 works of Art from all over Europe and 200,000
plus books essentially stolen from 13 religious foundations in
Austria. From this total, some 2293 pieces were specifically set
aside for Linz Museum, a project that never came to fruition. The
confiscation of Art in Europe went so well in the 40s that even today
about 50% of the 220,000 works of Art confiscated and valued at $25
billions (current value) are still missing of subject to litigation. The
blueprint document for Linz only was a memorandum of 75 pages
titled "Future economic status of the city of Linz", it was found at the
end of the war in Hitler's personal papers.
Small achievements
Finally, instead of getting architectural ruins, Hitler collected urban
rubbles. When he fled back from his Prussian headquarters in 1945
to take refuge in the Chancellery's bunker, he flew over Berlin and
was appalled. Under the plane laid miles an miles of rubbles,
the legacy of a madman. Adolf the Demiurge then saw the
result of his demented ambitions and of his formidable
hatred of the International Jewry to whom he attributed
every single German problem : while he was convinced
he had promote Art, he had ruined it, while he was
thinking about a more beautiful world, he engaged
the country into savagery and destruction. Adolf Hitler
the Fuehrer had only proved one thing : better than Nero,
he made culture and barbarism coexisted under his
paternalistic and autocratic wing. As Walter Benjamin's
tombstone says :"There is never a moment of culture
without it being at the same time a document of barbarity."
Hitler stretched the quote to its utmost veracity. But the most
amazing thing about Hitler's culture or lack of real culture is that, for
somebody so found of Classicism and Greek art, he completely
ignored Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrate. Their readings
could have taught him some ideas about a just government of the
people and the virtues of tolerance. Adolf Hitler was to the culture
and to the world of ideas what the nouveaux riches are too often to
money : bombasts and destructors. After all, was he anything else
than a nouveau riche in politics ? A pretentious and arrogant
Philistine.
(1) During the 30s, Mein Kampf's royalties brought to Hitler about 1,5
million marks per year. Until 1933, it has hardly been read at all.
(2) "I Knew Hitler : The Story of a Nazi who Escaped the Blood Purge"
by Kurt G. W. Ludecke, Jarrolds, London, 1938, page 429.
| Even at the end of WW2 in his bunker der Führer loved to contemplate his architectural projects for Linz, Berlin and Munich. Berlin was to be renamed Germania and Linz to become the cultural capital of Europe |
| Without his mustache, Hitler looked a very ordinary man, a schoolmaster of provincial Austria and certainly not the artistic & military genius he thought he was |
| The creme de la creme nazi always joined en masse to the inauguration of one of the architectural achievements of the Hitler-Speer tandem. Here Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, Viktor Lutze |
| By 1937,the concept of "degenerate art" or "entarte" was firmly entrenched in Nazi policy, and authorities like Adolf Ziegler, head of the German Art House purged German museums of modern art now condemned as degenerate. The entartete Kunst exhibit premiered in Munich in March, 1937, and travelled to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria. The show was intended as an official condemnation of modern art, and included over 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, and books from the collections of thirty two German museums. |
| Adolf Ziegler organized also shows of Entarte Kunst which to the despair of the Nazis drew thousands of Germans more interested in decadence thant in good Nazi Art..... |
| Heinrich Himmler was not particularly a model of German virility but tried his best to look like it. Nevertheless he was the commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. As Reichsführer-SS, he controlled the SS and the Gestapo. He also became a leading organizer of the Holocaust. |
| A remarkable equestrian statue by Josef Thorak which is not particularly "nazi" nor neoclassic but would probably still today be judged as "indecently" provocative by Nazi hunters |
| At Nuremberg rallies the Nazis displayed an artistic sense of mass gathering that impressed the visitors and many foreign observers. This annual gathering is a powerful arena in which the energy of the entire people is gathered to set the next goals and receive new direction. The cultural session takes place that evening. Adolf Hitler gives a major speech that expounds on the cultural duties of the movement. |
| Although supposedly great admirers of culture and art, the Nazis could not stand the competition of other forms of expression. If books burning did not begin with the Nazis -it came to them after being initiated by the Church- they practiced this form of censorhip with a savage joy as testifies this picture of 1933 . |
| Another view from the Berghof where Hitler liked to entertain his friends and relaxed from the hardshhip of the war. |
| Another view of the living room at the Berghof where Hitler liked to entertain his friends and relaxed from the hardship of the war. |
| Unattributed bust sculpture of Julius Steicher, Gauleiter of Franconia and editor of Der Stürmer, anti-semitic magazine with a limited circulation |
| The Discus Thrower by Myron was the ultimate sculptural passion of Hitler whom he eventually managed to purchase for the astronomical sum of $327,000 in order to complete his Linz museum collection. |
| Another massive sculpture by Josef Thorak in the taste of Hitler : exalting virilty and comradeship. Lenin would have talked of "barrack's pederasty." |
| The Brown House, SA headquarters one of the sole 6 buildings, completed by Nazi architects i.e. the new Chancellery, the Fuehrer Building, the NSDAP administrative quarters, the House of German Art and the Temples of Honour, all constructed with slave labour from the camps |
| This young girl statue would probably be judged "pedophilic" by the American Leagues of Virtue. |
Eventually all what Hitler collected was emaciated dead human bodies and urban rubbles. A tragic artistic legacy |
| The reception room at the Berghof in Berchtesgarten : the coffered ceiling, oriental carpets, tapestries and paintings are pure Hitler; the furniture and interior decoration are the work of Gerdy Troost |
| Detail of a bronze nude by sculptor Josef Thorak, one of Hitler's favorite with Arno Breker. This work is not particularly "nazi", however Thorak was vilified after WW2 for his collaboration with the Nazis. |
| Hitler the artist was also an orator and a comedian. He was trained in this discipline by Dietrich Eckart of the Esoteric Thule Society and by the Jewish magician Erik Jan Hanussen. Hitler possessed a manner of speaking to large masses of people that absolutely captured their imaginations and stimulated within them a tremendously powerful emotion. When Hitler was elated, his normal halting awkward style was transformed into a magical flow of words, delivered with spellbinding effect. |
HITLER ARTISTIC DRIVE
| Hitler sketched the outlines of a new opera house for Munich and gave the sketches to Waldemar Brinkmann to carry out |
| The House of German Art completed in 1937 is one of the few buildings planned by Hitler that actually was built |
| Highlights of this 1940 model of hte north-south axis of the new Berlin are the South Railway Station (foreground), the Arch of Triumph and the Great Hall (top) |
| The centrepiece of the new Munich was to be an east-west axis, nearly six miles long and 360 feet wide, running from the Monument of the Movement to the great railway station. The boulevard was to have no intersecting streets, cross traffic was to use underpasses. |
| In 1934, Hitler charged Speer with the construction of viewer stands for the Zeppelin Field at Nuremberg. The stone structure, 1300 ft long, was one of the most emblematic of the Third Reich building and one of the few that were actually completed |
| The sculptor Arno Breker produced caricatures of virility : his works owed to size and exaggeration, shoulders too broad, hips too narrow, muscles outrageously pronounced... |
| When English singer David Bowie saw Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will", he said that Hitler was the first great rock star and that he made the entire country a stage show. Right. Hitler's fascism anesthetized politics and made the Nazi regime looks sexy. As the historian Frederic Spotts put it, "like never before, was a clearer example of aesthetics used to promote enslavement and heroic death." As soon as 1937, Bertolt Brecht had said that Hitler was the first actor of the IIIrd Reich. |
| To be accepted by Hitler you had to belong to the neo-classic shool or Art whatever be painting, sculpture or architecture. A requisite not particularly original but more spread out in pre-WW2 world than it is now acknowledged. |
| This rather elegant sculpture of a SS soldier launching a grenade is excellent as a work but ridiculously "nazi" by its subject. Hitler would approve. |
| What was Hitler's artistic drive ? THE ARTISTIC AMBITIONS OF A PROMOTHEUS with the tastes of an autodidactic petit-bourgeois |
| Inside the Grosse Halle would have been over seven hundred feet in height and eight hundred feet in diameter, sixteen times as large as the dome of the St. Peter's. Notice the portrait of der Führer in the background |
Eventually all Hitler's personal projects came out to little : before the war, his henchmen completed only 6 buildings, i.e. the new Chancellery, the Brown House (above picture), the Fuehrer Building, the NSDAP administrative quarters, the House of German Art and the Temples of Honour, all constructed with slave labour from the camps. As for Berlin and Munich projects, they were so out of proportion that some architects simply chosed to defect : in 1940, Paul Bonatz fled to Ankara where he had found employment and declared that "if I had one single reason for going abroad, it was to flee this insanity." To remodel Germany according to the wishes of Hitler, the Nazis confiscated properties, notably Jewish : 23,765 Jewish properties were stolen from their owners and 75,000 occupants were sent to concentration camps. Behind his projects stood one single idea : the theory of ruins value. Hitler was convinced that buildings and cities should be constructed to last centuries whatever the cost. |
| Hitler and his good friend Albert Speer, the architect made Minister of Armaments, had grandiose projects for the new Berlin of the 50s whic should have be renamed Germania. Simply. |
| Watch here a video of Hitler at the inauguration of the first exposition of German Art in 1937. |
The overall effect of all these projects was identical : to aggrandize Hitler himself
and to debase human beings into tiny objects, small robots as they had been in his
watercolours. Hitler had no respect for other people's life and even declared once
that "really outstanding geniuses permit themselves no concern for normal human
beings, their deeper insight justifies any cruelty." The evidence that Hitler had no
real sensibility and was far from being the artistic genius he thought he was. He
was a brutal, homocidal maniac with visions of grandeur and huge pretensions.
French ambassador André-Francois poncet said about Hitler that he was "an
ice-cold realist, a profoundly calculating person."
| The end : contemplating a legacy of rubbles in the Chancellery on 20th March 1945. Hitler and Schaub are looking at the dammage.It is allegedly the last pic of Hitler. |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |