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Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

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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.

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.

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.

When I lived in Germany 45 years ago I simply could not understand how those decent and civilized people had allowed themselves to be taken in by Hitler. And amazingly in our many conversations they freely admitted that they still believed, up to a point, that Hitler had been "good" for Germany!

Since then I have turned over a whole library trying to find an answer to that question. Three books go a long way toward explaining the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler: Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography; "Hitler's Table Talk" edited by John Toland; and now Frederic Spotts' "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics."

"Who is afraid of Adolf Hitler?" Frederic Spotts asks at the end of this extraordinarily revealing book. "Just about everyone," is his rhetorical response. Another question this book asks, tangentially, is "Who doesn't loathe Adolf Hitler?" Well, Hitler was personally responsible for the murder of millions of people and a war that destroyed Europe. All of this within living memory -- many of us were nurtured on the events of WWII. So how could any decent person admit to a shred of sympathy or even understanding for a monster like this Hitler? One would rather admit to sympathy for the Devil.

If you wish for any insight into a person's psychology, start with the music he likes and his taste in art. In this book Mr. Spotts makes the case that that these things were essential and central in Hitler's life and career and he does this convincingly. He also proves, to my satisfaction at least, that Adolf Hitler actually had some talent as a painter and an architect, not first-class by any means, but enough that he knew good stuff from trash and that he knew full well the "socialist" art produced during the Third Reich was trash. But one of the most revealing aspects of "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics" is what it reveals about us, the readers. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that much of the art and music and architecture Hitler liked, we like it too, and the stuff he didn't like, that turns us off also. Mr. Spotts concludes that Hitler's personality had many facets and the value of this book is that it forces us to look closely at them and open our eyes to the tiny glimmers of ourselves in there.

Some years ago I thought I had overdosed on WWII books and swore I would never read another. I had also felt that something was missing from all those accounts of Hitler's Germany: Just how did he do it--what was the attraction? This book finally answers that question. Hitler was a great artist, and Germany was his stage. His art was a series of spectacles: pageantries of flags, parades, uniforms, massed formations of men, and skillful oratory--all surrounded by searchlights reaching towards the sky like luminous Roman columns. I can see now how so many people were mesmerized by his show. That's a warning for us today--pay more attention to the message and less to the medium.

I had never previously read books that dealt with Hitler or World War II before reading this one. Like every other Baby Boomer, I've seen enough films and TV shows to write my own WWII movie that most people would probably find credible. What we know of the war is about the fighting, the arrests of those pronounced "undesirable" by the Nazis, children denouncing their parents to the authorities, the concentration camps, etc. The Germany that Hitler presented to his people was a forward-looking state of culture and enlightenment, the acme of modern civilization. People want to believe the best about themselves. Hitler had an instinctive sense of theatre, a passion for ritual, and the desire to make everyone in the entire world subservient to him, as well as the power to squelch all opposition. In some ways, he was visionary. The Volkswagen was mostly his idea. (It was created to justify his building of the Autobahn, which is still one of the wonders of modern Germany.) But he wanted everyone to have HIS taste. Only his taste was acceptable. Everything else was either kitsch or decadent. Disagreement meant losing one's job in most cases or, in some extreme cases, a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. Of course, the most troubling aspect of Hitler was how he could have gotten so many people to go along with him. For me this book explains it. I think this is an important book that made me see things from a different perspective. Parts of the book made me drop my jaw. "Awesome" is an overused word, but it really is the applicable term here. The author made me extremely interested in a subject that basically had little appeal for me. I want to do a lot more reading about this subject now. Spotts' book is a knockout. It gets five stars from me.

This is a thoroughly researched, and horribly fascinating, guide through the cultural interests and pretensions, and later the cultural policies, of Adolph Hitler. Spotts takes us through Hitler's mix of boundless ambition and lack of talent in the visual arts, through his interest in music, and his fascination with architecture. He outlines Hitler's attempt, once he'd gained power, to create a compliant community of artists in his nightmarish Reich, his efforts to get artists to produce what he wanted: the carefully controlled art-in-the-service-of-the-state, populist and uplifting, that Plato stipulated was the only kind of art that could be admitted into his Republic. (Was Plato a precursor of Nazism? Absolutely. An influence? Probably not.)

Though, as with any murderous tyrant, it pleased Hitler to grant indulgences. He allowed some artists in the Third Reich to get away with defiance that would have had anyone else killed. But these indulgences, Spotts observes, were not enough to inspire many of the artists who remained in Germany with anything approximating courage. Musicians like Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler made huge accommodations and moral compromises with the Reich, relying on pathetically miniscule gestures to salve their consciences.

No-one who has not been in the same circumstances has the right to condemn them too easily, but at a time when extraordinary courage was called for they showed only human weakness. Though Strauss composed _A Hero's Life_ and Furtwängler conducted it, neither lived it. If we are tempted to believe that artists have special claims to virtue, or that interest in art is likely to lead a person towards virtue, then Spotts' book is an antidote for that sad illusion. Spotts is rightly hard on those artists who, like Karajan in particular, helped put a civilised gloss on Nazi barbarism.

It has been objected that to focus on the arts in the Third Reich instead of, say, the war in Russia or the Holocaust, is to trivialise the evil of Nazism. That view is mistaken. To focus on one part of a catastrophe where the horrors are more subtle is not to trivialise other, still more atrocious, aspects. Instead it is to show how its distinctive and chilling lack of humanity pervaded every aspect of Nazism. In focussing belated attention on the Third Reich's cultural politics, Spotts does not diminish our appreciation of the horror of fascism but enhances it.

Some information in Spotts' book may provide unwelcome news for vested intellectual interests. For example, Spotts exposes the rose-coloured portrait of Hitler in August Kubizek's _Adolf Hitler: Mein Judengfreund_ ("The Young Hitler I Knew"), showing it to be as fraudulent as the "Hitler" of Hermann Rauschning's imaginary dialogues. Hitler apologists have long clung onto "Kubizek's book", with - from their point of view - good reason given Kubizek's romanticisation of the young Hitler, but Spotts makes it clear that "Kubizek's" book was merely a ghostwritten hoax.

Another myth that is dying hard (though dying) is the one promoted by Köhler, Rose, Zelinsky et alia, claiming Hitler formed his political views and dreams out of composer Richard Wagner's operas and prose. Spotts shows that Hitler was indeed impressed at a young age by Wagner's opera _Rienzi_. But Hitler failed to note that in this early Wagnerian opera (Wagner himself dismissed _Rienzi_ as a "pecadillo of my youth") the Roman Tribune Rienzi becomes puffed up by the pride of his early successes, and is brought down by that unheeding arrogance. Rienzi fails to show compassion for those killed on either side, including his own, in Rome's brief civil war, preferring to spend his time and money on grand costumes and ceremonies, and he fails (eventually) to show mercy for those who fought against him. As a direct result of these failings he is overthrown by the Roman people: Wagner's actual message was obvious. It was Wagner's ill-luck that an evil lunatic, active a century after Wagner's opera was written, liked the sound his music made but failed to take note of his operas' meanings and messages.

But Hitler did eventually get Wagner's message, Spotts reveals, finding Wagner unpalatable after the defeat at Stalingrad brought home the lesson taught in Wagner's _Ring_ cycle: that pursuit of power destroys love and leads to moral degradation and downfall. From then Hitler could no longer bear to listen to Wagner, and in his last years turned instead to the schmaltzy operettas of Franz Lehar. There was no such person as "Wagner's Hitler", Spotts concludes; to Hitler, Wagner was only an opera composer. As an aside, Spotts noted that, Hitler excepted, the Nazi Party as a whole preferred Beethoven.

It would have been good to see more on the Reich's use of radio and film. Spotts hardly touches on Leni Riefenstahl's films, nor on films by other Nazi directors with similar amounts of artistic ambition, or pretension, but none of Riefenstahl's regrettable talent. The theatre under the Third Reich is also only barely covered. But in its central fields - music, painting and sculpture, and architecture including the abstract art of the autobahns - Spotts is comprehensive and authoritative.

Finally, it's important to note that Spotts is not being quite as ambitious as the book's blurb might suggest. Spotts does not "explain" Hitler, still less explain him away, by showing the extent of his artistic interests, and of his artistic disappointment. He writes only about one aspect of the great "catastrophe" (as Spotts called Hitler), but an aspect that contains considerable illumination on the whole.

Spotts provides a great deal of valuable information and insight on the arts in Hitler's Germany, with much that is (so far as I can tell) new and - mirabile dictu! - authoritative and reliable.

Cheers!

Laon

They had the hottest uniforms. They had the coolest flag. Who wouldn't want to be a "storm trooper"? Even their acronyms had a runic panache that leant them a dark and sleek symmetry: SS, designed like a double thunderbolt.

The massive party rallies with their architectural proportions and military precision, the dramatic light-shows and sophisticated stage effects such as made the film "Triumph of the Will" so breathtakingly beautiful you can almost forget--these were the bad guys!

Frederic Spotts does us a service in this book by attempting to explain what is still one of the most troubling aspects of Nazism--why is it still so visually compelling, so conceptually seductive?

And what about those watercolors and architectural sketches--perhaps we were ashamed to say it out loud, but what was so bad about them, anyway? They were competent enough. In fact, we discover that Hitler actually sold his paintings on the streets and even had a dealer for his work from which he eked out a living.

These are facts, perhaps, we'd rather not know, but facts they remain.

Hitler was an artist--and if he "failed" to become a painter on the level of a Winslow Homer, it was perhaps less a matter of a lack of skill than that until he became Chancellor of Germany he hadn't found his proper medium: Hitler used the world as his canvas and the 20th century is largely his work of "art"--a dark masterpiece of the Hieronymous Bosch variety. Like Bosch, Hitler illustrated what hells we were capable of creating--and suffering--if we let the devil in ourselves loose.

And Spotts gives the devil his due. Though he tries to downplay Hitler's artistic ability whenever possible, one can't help but come away impressed at the incredible range of the Fuhrer's skills. Hitler comes across here as a creative tyro--painting, music, architecture, city-planning...Hitler demonstrated considerable expertise and made significant contributions to each. He even personally designed uniforms, party banners, and furniture. Yes, furniture.

At worst you could say that Hitler was a jack-of-all trades and a master of none. But then again, how could he find the time? He was busy conquering half the world and coming within a mistake or two of conquering the other half of it.

Spotts records here the well-known fact that Hitler's first desire was to be an artist. What he also reveals is the lesser known fact that Hitler repeated, apparently in all sincerity this desire right to the very end of his life. Indeed, as Spotts records, Hitler often seemed (to the consternation of those around him)every bit, if not even more, concerned with his cultural and artistic pursuits as he did with his military conquests.

Spotts treatment of all this is pretty lively for the first 200 pages or so but then the book gets kind of bogged down in details such as which paintings were confiscated from where and ended up where, etc--the kind of thing that might be of interest to art historians and collectors, but few others. The entire last half of the book--dealing mainly with opera and architecture--lacks a great deal of the immediacy of the first half where Hitler-as-actor and Third Reich-as-stage is the subject.

On balance, though, for what is essentially a work of serious scholarship, "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics" is a surprisingly engaging read and the sometimes dense text is relieved with seldom seen photos with which the book is liberally illustrated throughout.

What is the most interesting--if unasked question--raised by "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics", however, is that given the well-known dictatorial temperament of most great--and even not-so-great--artists, what might we have expected if even Picasso had become Fuhrer--or (and one trembles to think of it) Dali?

Is there something about the utter amorality of art and artists as a whole, of the human imagination unbound, that should make us all grateful for the usual run-of-the-mill dolts, corrupt bores, and materialistic crooks who ordinarily become our leaders?

In "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics," Frederic Spotts takes the pop-culture theme of "Hitler-as-frustrated-artist" and turns it into a learned and compelling narrative that goes a long way towards illuminating the intellectual background of many recurring themes in Hitler's thinking and in the growth of Nazism as a movement in general. Given that most works on Hitler understandably focus on political and military history, the importance of Hitler's background as an artist is often forgotten. For instance, as Spotts points out, Hitler dedicated an entire chapter of "Mein Kampf" to excoriating modernist trends in the visual arts and music, tying them in with what he perceived as an international conspiracy of cosmopolitan Jewish leftists. Spotts expertly traces out the ramifications of these preoccupations for Hitler's years in power, not just narrating such well-known incidents as the exhibitions of "degenerate art" staged by Joseph Goebels, in which modernist pictures were held up to public ridicule, but also detailing the politico-aesthetic ideals that Hitler proposed in opposition to modernism - in particular, an ultra-nationalist, "Aryan" art, whose main themes were the glorification of Germany, Germanic culture, and the so-called Thousand Year Reich. Showing the importance of these ideas to phenomena as diverse as Albert Speer's architecture, Leni Riefenstahl's films, and the carefully choreographed Nuremburg rallies, as well as the work of specific Nazi artists, photographers, and sculptors, Spotts makes a forceful and intelligent case for seeing the rise of Nazi ideology through the lens of aesthetics. This is a useful, well-written, and compelling book that could be read with interest by scholars and laypeople alike.

It's easy to accept a good vs. evil mentality. It simplifies things a lot. However, this book is amazing in how it exposes you to a very different way of viewing the man Adolf Hitler. To see and understand his master plan without the barrage of foaming mouths calling him satan is truly a reason to check this book out, if only for the pure intellectual curiosity to understand. Destruction comes with every act of creation. Though he instigated the destructive waste of humanity that was WW2 by invading and retaking the part of Poland that was stolen from Germany after WW1, after which England and France officially declared war to begin WW2, he intended to create a beautiful Germany and rid the nation of all that was base. Hitler apparently observed, enough to his conviction, that Jewish people and Communists were the chief promotors of this degeneracy, the modern artists and modern art gallery owners. As an analogy, it is as if Hitler was simply a man on the street who saw a bunch of hoodlums destroying a beautiful sculpture or work of art, and he wasn't going to stand by and let it be destroyed. Instead, he would destroy those hoodlums and resurrect not only a new beautiful work of art but an entire nation filled with the aesthetic ideal, of people, of architecture, of music, of art. It may be Hitler's aesthetic ideal, but a lot of people with good taste share it as well, and it's hard to admit, but there has to be something fishy going on to enable artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline to become famous. Neat book to own, nice cover also.