BOOK REVIEW
Assessing Hitler's havoc on the arts
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 7/1/2003
Adolf Hitler wanted to be the greatest patron of the arts in
history. ''It was a pity,'' he observed, ''that I have to wage war on
account of that drunk [Winston Churchill] instead of serving the works of
peace.''
By ''the works of peace'' -- a phrase Hitler may have taken from a
movement of Richard Strauss's symphonic poem ''A Hero's Life'' -- he meant
the lasting achievements of civilization and the arts in general, but
especially architecture, painting, and music. He seems to have taken
comparatively little interest in fiction, poetry, and film, although he
certainly knew what he liked and what he didn't, and therefore what other
people had no right to experience.
Of course, Hitler was as catastrophically destructive in the
cultural arena as he was in everything else, but this important dimension of
his delusive thinking has been more often ridiculed than studied.
And, like everything else about Hitler, it is an uncomfortable
subject for study. He was right about the importance of the arts, but just
about everything he wanted to accomplish in the arts was grotesque. It is
amusing to read about his atrocious taste in furniture and interior
decoration, for example, and to look at photos of hideous rooms he helped
design, but to think about it all in the context of his monstrous ideas and
deeds in other areas feels disproportionate.
Frederic Spotts's new book, ''Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics,''
is a thorough, sane, and illuminating study of Hitler's aesthetics. It
begins with the striking image of Hitler in his bunker, in the last weeks of
World War II and of his own life, when he spent countless hours hovering
over a scale model of his native city of Linz as he wished to re-create it.
Special lighting had been installed to help him envisage how the city would
look throughout the day and by moonlight. He wanted the carillon in the bell
tower to play a favorite theme from Bruckner's ''Romantic'' Symphony.
From this Spotts moves to a description of Hitler's manipulation of
aesthetics to control crowds in his rallies and public ceremonies. David
Bowie called Hitler ''one of the first great rock stars''; playwright
Bertolt Brecht mordantly observed that Hitler's ''virtuoso use of lighting
is no different from his virtuoso use of the truncheon.''
From this Spotts flashes back to trace Hitler's own history as an
artist -- he failed the entrance exam at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts
three times but managed to make a modest living at the level of a street
artist. The many examples of Hitler's drawings and paintings reproduced in
this book show Hitler did everything that doggedness and will can accomplish
in the absence of talent. His attention to ornamental architectural detail
is obsessive, while his command of design and structure is feeble. Of
course, his perspective is always skewed, and he was completely unable to
draw a human figure. His subjects were sometimes interesting, however: stage
settings for Wagner operas, many designs for opera houses, and imposing
public buildings.
Detailed chapters survey such subjects as Hitler's crazed agendas in
painting, architecture, and music and his special relationship to Wagner's
operas and to the Wagner family -- Spotts is more lucid and balanced on this
last subject than many commentators. The accommodations that the conductor
Wilhelm Furtwaengler, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, such composers
as Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, and Werner Egk, and others made to the
regime are painfully explored. The closing chapters focus on two of Hitler's
few aesthetic successes: the autobahn superhighway and the Volkswagen.
Spotts is a brilliant and careful writer and an alert ironist.
Always the great dictator, Hitler wished to impose his personal taste on the
nation; his idea of rewarding soldiers and industrial workers was to invite
them to free performances of Wagner's ''Die Meistersinger.'' But Spotts does
not dwell on the greatest irony of all, which is that Hitler did prove a
great patron of the arts -- but not in the Third Reich. The number of
artists Hitler murdered who might have made imperishable contributions to
the world is incalculable. However, those who fled, at great personal cost,
brought with them major creative and recreative talents, a whole spectrum of
superstructural skills (critics, managers), and a receptive audience to new
homes in other lands. The enemies of the Reich advanced the history of
civilization as surely as Hitler advanced the history of barbarity.
Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
By Frederic Spotts
Overlook, 456 pp., illustrated, $37.50
This story ran on page D10 of the Boston Globe on 7/1/2003.
C Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
Paul Moor
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
D-10715 Berlin
Telefon (4930) 8639-5784
Telefax (4930) 8639-5785
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