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Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

Reviewed by Joel Greenberg
February 22 2003

By Frederic Spotts
Hutchinson, 488pp, $75

There's a scene in the World War II Hollywood musical Tonight and Every Night in which dancer Marc Platt performs a solo routine not to music but to one of Adolf Hitler's recorded speeches.

It's an inspired concept, metaphorically encapsulating the uncanny spell Hitler somehow contrived to cast over the German people. And not only Germans: to judge by the number of books about him that constantly appear in English and other languages, Hitler's fascination transcends national and linguistic barriers nearly 60 years after his death.

"More than any other single person," Frederic Spotts claims, "Hitler made the 20th century what it was and largely created the world we live in today."

It's a claim many people might find unconvincing. But Spotts does provide a provocatively fresh take on the Nazi dictator by considering him less as a politician, strategist or statesman and more as an aesthete, driven in all he did by an overriding passion for the arts.

To be an artist was, in fact, his earliest ambition. But he had no training and little talent, as his surviving sketches show. And, having been rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, young Adolf blamed the city's Jews for his failure and became a lifelong anti-Semite.

By the time he entered politics at 31, his artistic tastes were more or less permanently fixed: in painting, 19th-century German romanticism, music (Wagner), and sculpture and architecture (ancient Greece and Rome).

All very conventional and unexceptionable. But, once in power after January 31, 1933, Hitler enjoyed the capacity available only to dictators of being able to impose his taste on a nation, suppressing all art inconsistent with that taste.

Spotts is surely right in insisting that, for Hitler, art and politics were inseparable; that, in his hands, art - or his version of it - became a political weapon, employed domestically to subjugate the population and abroad to propagandise National Socialism.

He was scarcely installed as chancellor before, in November 1933, he established the Reich Cultural Chamber, under propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, to oversee literature, radio, theatre, music, film, visual arts and the press.

Practically overnight, the vibrant, forward-looking culture of Weimar Germany vanished, its leading figures forced into exile, captivity or, in some cases, suicide.

Jewish occupants of posts in art galleries, museums, symphony orchestras and similar organisations were dismissed en masse. "Unacceptable" books were banned and, in May 1933, ritualistically burned outside the Berlin Reichstag. By the end of 1937, German museums had been stripped of all modern works - products, according to Hitler, of "cultural Bolshevism".

The same year, the House of German Art, one of the Fuhrer's pet projects, opened in Munich. It was filled with mediocre Nazi paintings. By a piquant irony, few came to see them. Instead, people flocked across the street to contemplate a major exhibition of so-called "degenerate art" - works of modernists and the avant-garde justly described by Spotts as "the biggest blockbuster art show of all time", attracting nearly 3 million visitors.

If modern painting was anathema to Hitler, so was modern music. For him, Wagner represented the highest summit of the art. Tristan and Isolde was his favourite opera. From 1923, he maintained a close connection with the Wagner family, endowing the Bayreuth Festival with state funds for the first time.

Architecture, however, was his chief artistic joy. Here, aided by the ambitious, gifted Albert Speer - who later called Hitler "a genius of dilettantism" - he could indulge to the full his predilection for the monumental, the grandiose and the banal.

Even as the fortunes of war turned against him, he obsessively pursued plans for the world's largest opera house in Munich and radical redevelopments for Berlin, Hamburg and especially his birthplace, Linz.

Of these, only the bombastic new Reich Chancellery in Berlin was completed.

Spotts confronts the paradox of Hitler the culture vulture and Hitler the mass murderer, and comes away bemused.

"The combining of culture and barbarism was the essence of Hitler's Reich. It is the conundrum that Hitler himself epitomised," he writes.

How to explain it? Spotts offers the rather unhelpful suggestion that Hitler's was a dual personality - part artist, part homicidal maniac - but this is probably more descriptive than explanatory.

It is also difficult to accept the author's assertion that artistic concerns mattered more to Hitler than world conquest or temporal power.

Still, there's no denying that Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics makes a substantial, highly readable contribution to our understanding of a phenomenon that will always remain inexplicable.

Joel Greenberg is a Sydney writer.




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