Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics [Paperback]

Frederic Spotts (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2004

A startling reassessment of Hitler’s aims and motivations, Frederic Spotts’s Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics is an adroitly argued and highly original work that provides the key to a fuller understanding of the Third Reich. Spotts, author of the distinguished Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, convincingly demonstrates that unlike the traditional biographical view that Hitler was an “unperson” who had no life outside of politics, Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism—and that he used the arts to disguise the heinous crimes that were the means to fulfilling his ends.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The opening paragraph and photo powerfully capture Spotts's argument: The Soviet army is soon to launch its final, devastating assault on Berlin; the British and the Americans are about to invade Germany from the west. And there sits Adolf Hitler, gazing longingly at a model of a rebuilt Linz, his hometown, which is slated to become a grandiose symbol of the Thousand-Year Reich. For Spotts, this proves what Hitler himself claimed: that he was at heart never a politician, but an artist. Spotts, who has written an acclaimed study of the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, tries to substantiate his thesis by providing a panorama of Hitler's artistic activities, including his failed career as a painter, the purge of Jews and others from the cultural sphere, and his personal patronage of artists, musicians and architects. According to Spotts, Hitler's essence is to be found in his desire to create an empire in which "true" German art could flourish as never before. Yet Spotts overlooks the fact that Hitler, in megalomaniacal fashion, also claimed mastery of engineering, history and military strategy. His primary focus was arguably not on art, but on the creation of a racial utopia. Art and politics were but two sides of the same, racially minted coin. Spotts provides a lively, encyclopedic account of Hitler and the arts, but a more comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime can be found in Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography, which will remain the standard work for many years to come. 100 b&w and 4 color illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Unlike biographies of Adolf Hitler that focus on the ideological and humanitarian disaster wrought by his intense anti-Semitism, Spotts's book posits that the 13-year nightmare of the Third Reich was just as much a result of Hitler's artistic nature. Though other authors have touched on certain aspects of Hitler's artistic side-the dictator's obsession with monumental architecture or his grandiosity and love of Wagnerian opera-Spotts (Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival) has leapt with both feet into a full exploration of Der F hrer as artist. Spotts argues that Hitler's aesthetic nature compelled him to destroy society only to re-create it according to the image in his artist's eye and that the crusade against the Jews (and, indeed, all "degenerate" influences) was the result of what Hitler viewed as the destruction of German culture by the practitioners of what he referred to as "modernism." Hitler's art-the art of centuries past-envisioned nothing new. Spotts makes the point visually, with numerous photographs and drawings, many by Hitler himself. With scholarship and true artistry, Spotts has exposed this picture in a book that is accessible to the average reader but that will be of interest to academicians as well.
Michael F. Russo, Louisiana State Univ. Libs., Baton Rouge
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Overlook TP (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585675075
• ISBN-13: 978-1585675074
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,168,982 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cyanide Capsules Are Available At The Door..., June 6, 2003

By 

Bruce Loveitt (Ogdensburg, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Hardcover)

Do we really need another book about "Der Fuhrer"? Surprisingly, if the book is this one, the answer is yes. Because this book looks at Hitler from a different angle- one that is pretty much unknown to the layperson: this book is about the "sensitive," "artistic," and "cultivated" Hitler. As you might expect when using such words in connection with Hitler, contradictions abound. The man who could weep while listening to the music of Wagner is the same man who, the moment he came to power, fired or drove into exile musicians and artists he didn't approve of: Jews, Bolsheviks, Modernists, etc. On the other hand, if he liked you personally and thought you were talented, he would sometimes look the other way- he supported, or at least didn't harass, several people who were Jewish or who disagreed with him politically. Some of you may have winced when I used the word "cultivated" in connection with Hitler. But, consider the following: he was very well read (and had a tremendous, possibly photographic, memory); he was a competent, though unimaginative, artist- he could draw and paint as well as your average art school student (and he was completely self-taught); he knew a tremendous amount about the operas of Wagner, and was a good judge of opera singers; he was knowledgeable about architecture, could make architectural sketches, and could intelligently discuss technical aspects of the craft, etc. Having said that, we must remember the flip-side- Hitler was very narrowminded. His love of art was pretty much limited to 19th century German Romantics and some of the painters of the Italian Renaissance. He thought all modern art- which for him started with the Impressionists- was trash, and decadent to boot. He loved opera, but only Wagner and Puccini. He didn't much care for other music- he wasn't really enthusiastic about Beethoven, Mozart, etc. He couldn't stand Brahms, although he eventually did develop a taste for Bruckner. He thought modern music, with its dissonances and atonality, was horrible. In architecture, he admired the Greeks and Romans- but in his building plans for the Third Reich everything had to be magnified to colossal size to awe people. Glass and steel structures left him cold, although he grudgingly realized he'd have to agree to build skyscrapers if only to show that National Socialist Germany could outdo America. Surprisingly, Hitler generally liked his culture "neat." He didn't want political messages- he wanted high-quality, beautiful, soul-elevating art/music/sculpture. Of course, he would tell you what qualified as high-quality, beautiful, and soul-elevating. It may seem odd, but Hitler was embarrassed by the crudity of his Nazi cronies. The vast majority of them had no interest in art, music and sculpture. They'd be dragged, although only silently kicking and screaming, to Bayreuth for the yearly dose of Wagner. They'd fall asleep and start to snore. No wonder the Little Corporal preferred the company of artists, musicians and sculptors. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the man who wanted "art" with no political content- "art" that elevated people and helped them to get away from the problems, big and small, of everyday life, succeeded in politicizing culture to an unprecedented degree. This book is a brilliant achievement by Mr. Spotts. It forces us to look at Hitler not as a ranting, foaming-at-the-mouth, caricature, but as a fellow human being with, dare I say it, some positive qualities. Yes, the devil is given his due.....but Mr. Spotts never forgets who or what he is dealing with. Why did I give this review the title I did? Mr. Spotts mentions that it was agreed that, when the end of the "Thousand Year Reich" was at hand, the Berlin Philharmonic would add Bruckner's Fourth Symphony to the programme. On the night of April 13th, 1945, the symphony was finally played. As people filed out of the concert hall afterwards, Hitler Youth were in the lobby, hawking cyanide capsules to interested takers. Poor Bruckner probably turned over in his grave.

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, necessary, disturbing, and unique, September 8, 2005

By 

T. Bachman (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Paperback)

If there is any justice in the world, Spotts' book will go a long way toward eradicating from popular consciousness the facile descriptions of Hitler as not much more than a cross between a risible, Chaplin-esque, comic book character and an insane, incarnate demon.

Part of the first notion of Hitler includes the idea that he ought to be dismissed as a failed, lousy artist. As Spott points out, the truth is that Nazism, like all self-styled utopianisms, was something like a gigantic project in aesthetics using people rather than pigments or plastics, and control and murder rather than downstrokes and glazing - and Hitler was the artist behind that (very popular for some years in Germany) project; he therefore must be taken seriously as an artist in this sense (obviously a grotesque, genocidal one).

As Spotts notes, even his hatred of Jews emerges from this context: the Jews are "ruining all art" by embracing atonalism, cubism, jazz, dadaism, etc., as well as ruining all life by embracing "Bolshevism". But in his mind, there doesn't seem to be much difference there: Picasso, Marx, Alban Berg - all the same. Since, in Hitler's view, art can't be separated from culture, and culture can't be separated from the state, and the state can't be separated from life itself, the eradication of the Jews becomes, in Hitler's mind, nothing less than a matter of national survival, or, strangely, to say the same thing, the artistically appropriate choice.

Spotts does a good job of underscoring another aspect of all this by calling attention to the seeming homoeroticism in Hitler's taste, particularly as it expresses itself toward the human being: at bottom (pun intended), Hitler preferred, aesthetically, buff blond males with blue eyes, i.e., "Nordic" types. The Jews, in addition to being greedy, "Bolsheviks", destroyers of art/culture/life, etc., just...looked "wrong". And so in this sense, in Hitler's mind, ridding the proper-looking race of these improper-looking portions of it was as obviously a necessary decision as would be getting rid of a "wrong" piece of furniture cluttering up an otherwise beautiful living room. (Spotts even includes a contemporary German cartoon caricaturing the physical features of a "typical" Jew).

But what I started out to say was this. Spotts surveys how Hitler very consciously used colour, shape, rhetoric, size, proportion, angle, material, sound, light, symbol, rhythm, story, pageantry, texture, surprise, music, fire, sculpture, formation, etc., to, quite literally, achieve a truly terrifying degree of control over the minds of his subjects, even as a conversion tool over those who had resisted him. (Spotts describes how awed even American visitors were by the Nuremberg rallies.)

And page by page, one begins increasingly to get a sense of what it would have been like, to be a human being, subject to all the mental and emotional strengths and weaknesses we are, living in a country (our world, for all purposes) which only a year or two before had been totally chaotic and depressed...and then to be stirred, roused, when that world around us begins to change, prompted to feel different, pleasurable things, think different, exciting thoughts, and in the end, perform different - and ultimately - indescribably horrific actions. In every way, we are preyed upon by the mesmeric, sick genius of a man who was rejected by the art school in Vienna, and who sought his revenge for this affront by dominating human psychology through all those elements I mentioned above more totally than perhaps any other "artist" of the 20th century.

I saw a BBC documentary a couple of weeks ago, in which several elderly Germans candidly recalled with fondness Hitler's early years. What they said they missed most were the euphoric feelings they had, going to the pageants and rallies, seeing the flags, hearing the speeches and the music, those feelings of belonging, meaning, "specialness". And for the first time, reading Spotts' book, in a really disturbing way, I could imagine what that might have been like, imagine that I might have been just as susceptible to the manipulator as millions of Germans had been. For the first time, how the whole thing could have happened seemed imaginable. Scary.

Bravo to Spotts for his brilliant and disturbing book. I would love to see him now do a documentary on this, using real footage.

Highly recommended.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tremendous Achievement, June 25, 2004

By 

A. S. Haropulos (Rockville, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Hardcover)

This is the book that I wanted to write. That having been said, I think Mr. Spotts did a considerably better job of it that I ever could. It is impossible to begin to understand Adolf Hitler without understanding his aesthetic approach to the world as he wanted it to be. Usually, histories and biographies of Hitler dismiss his interest in art as either sub-bourgeois sentimentality or propaganda-oriented. This book is intelligent enough not to take either of these tacks, and as a result delivers an exhaustive and meaningful account of how Hitler was, ultimately, an artist who achieved political power.

I wrote an initial paper on the subject in college (imagine how popular that was), but my thesis centered primarily on Hitler's hopes for his art career and the psychological issues underlying his artistic preferences. This book addresses the former, but not the latter, I think quite rightly. What Spotts does, which I would never have been able to do, is exhaustively examine Hitler's work schedules and attendance at specific meetings and events, not to mention budget allocations. This establishes without question the priorities he put on various components of the arts, versus politics or even the business of fighting the war.

Spotts is mostly objective, or mildly condemnatory. This makes for a more focused read.

I think this is the only book I have ever seen on Amazon.com where all the reviews are five stars. It absolutely deserves it.