Hitler (102 page)

In drawing up comprehensive plans for rebuilding almost all the larger German cities Hitler was realizing his ideal of the artist-politician. Even in the midst of urgent government business he always found time for prolonged discussions with architects. At night when unable to sleep he would make drawings of ground plans or renderings of buildings; he often went through the so-called ministerial gardens behind the chancellery to Speer's office, where he stood before a “model avenue” 90 feet long, illuminated by spotlights. Together with his younger associate he would wax enthusiastic over fantasy edifices that were destined never to be built. Among the buildings that were planned to give the city of Nuremberg “its future and therefore its eternal character” was a stadium for 400,000 spectators that was to be one of the most tremendous structures in history. There was to be an arena with stands seating 160,000 people, a processional avenue, and several convention halls—all clustered in a spacious “temple area.” Following a suggestion of Speer's, Hitler devoted special attention to the materials used, so that even as ruins overgrown with ivy, the buildings would still testify to the greatness of his reign, as do the pyramids of Luxor to the power and glory of the pharaohs. At the cornerstone laying for the convention hall in Nuremberg he declared:

 

But if the Movement should ever fall silent, even after thousands of years this witness here will speak. In the midst of a sacred grove of age-old oaks the men of that time will admire in reverent astonishment this first giant among the buildings of the Third Reich.

 

But while architecture was his first love, he did not ignore the other arts. The youth enthralled by painting and music drama was still present in him. To be sure, he had decided that the artistic rank of an era was only the reflection of its political greatness. By this logic he regarded cultural productions as the real legitimation of his achievements as a statesman. The proud prophecies in the initial period of the Third Reich must be understood in this sense; the dawn of an “incredible blossoming of German art” or of a “new artistic renaissance of Aryan man” was predicted because it had to come. And Hitler was therefore all the more discountenanced when this Periclean dream of his refused to come true.
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Shutting himself off more and more from the world, he developed a pseudoromantic cult of what he called “the basic elements of life”: rich plowland, steel-helmeted heroism, peaks glistening with eternal snow, and vigorous laborers performing their work despite all obstacles. That this formula resulted in cultural atrophy was as obvious in literature as in the fine arts, even though the annual art shows, sometimes juried in part by Hitler himself, tried to cover up the prevailing dreariness by lavishly arranged celebrations. Hitler's vituperation of “November art,” which took up a good deal of space in almost every one of his speeches on art, reveals the emphatic way in which he equated artistic and political standards. He would threaten the “cultural Neanderthalers” with custody in a mental hospital or prison; and he declared that he would annihilate those “international scribblings on art” which were nothing but “offscourings of brazen, shameless arrogance.” The exhibition of “degenerate art” organized in 1937 was partly a fulfillment of this threat.

In Hitler's attitudes toward art we again encounter that phenomenon of early rigidity which characterizes all his mental and imaginative processes. His standards had remained unchanged since his days in Vienna, when he paid no heed to the artistic and intellectual upheavals of the period. Cool classicistic splendor on the one hand and pompous decadence on the other—Anselm von Feuerbach, for example, and Hans Makart—were his touchstones. With the resentments of the failed candidate for the academy, he raised his own taste into an absolute.

He also admired the Italian Renaissance and early baroque art; the majority of the pictures in the Berghof belonged to this period. His favorites were a half-length nude by Bordone, the pupil of Titian, and a large colored sketch by Tiepolo. On the other hand, he rejected the painters of the German Renaissance because of their austerity.
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As the pedantic faithfulness of his own water colors might suggest, he always favored craftsmanlike precision. He liked the early Lovis Corinth but regarded Corinth's brilliant later work, created in a kind of ecstasy of old age, with pronounced irritation and banned him from the museums. Significantly, he also loved sentimental genre painting, like the winebibbing monks and fat tavernkeepers of Eduard Grützner. In his youth, he told his entourage, it had been his dream some day to be successful enough to be able to afford a genuine Grützner. Later, many works by this painter hung in his Munich apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse. Alongside them he put gentle, folksy idyls by Spitzweg, a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach, a park scene by Anselm von Feuerbach, and one of the many variations of
Sin
by Franz von Stuck. In the “Plan for a German National Gallery,” which he had sketched on the first page of his 1925 sketchbook, these same painters appear, together with names like Overbeck, Moritz von Schwind, Hans von Marees, Defregger, Böcklin, Piloty, Leibl, and, finally, Adolph von Menzel, to whom he assigned no fewer than five rooms in his gallery.
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He early set special agents to buying up all the important works of these artists. He was bent on keeping them for the museum that some day, after the accomplishment of his goals, he intended to set up in Linz, with himself as director.

But just as everything he undertook began compulsively to shoot up into superdimensions, his plans for the Linz gallery rapidly expanded beyond all proportion. Originally, it was going to contain only a fine collection of German nineteenth-century art. But after his Italian trip in 1938, he obviously felt so overwhelmed and challenged by the riches of the Italian museums that he decided to erect a gigantic counterpart to them in Linz. His dream of “the greatest museum in the world” came to a final intensification at the beginning of the war, when it combined with a plan for redistributing the entire stock of European art. All works from so-called zones of Germanic influence would be transferred to Germany and assembled principally in Linz, which was to figure as a kind of German Rome.

In Dr. Hans Posse, director-general of the Dresden Gallery, Hitler found a respected specialist who would serve his ends. With a sizable staff of assistants, Posse scoured the European art market, buying, and later on mostly confiscating in the conquered countries, all important works of art, and cataloguing them in “Führer catalogues” running to many volumes. The paintings Hitler picked were assembled in Munich, and even during the war, whenever he came to that city he would first go to the Führerbau (the Führer's Building) to inspect the masterpieces and, escaping from reality, to lose himself in lengthy discussions of art. As late as 1943–44, 3,000 paintings were purchased for Linz, and in spite of all the financial burdens of the war 150 million Reichsmark were spent on them. When the space in Munich no longer sufficed, Hitler had the entire collection housed in castles such as Hohenschwangau or Neuschwansteirt, in monasteries, and in caves. In the one repository of Alt-Aussee, a salt mine used since the fourteenth century, 6,755 Old Masters were stored by the end of the war, in addition to drawings, prints, tapestries, sculptures, and innumerable pieces of fine furniture—the ultimate expression of an infantile greed that had grown to monstrous dimensions. Among the paintings were works by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, as well as the Ghent Altar of the van Eyck brothers and canvases by Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer. Apparently considered on the same level was Hans Makart's
The Plague in Florence,
which Hitler had received as a gift from Mussolini after having insistently asked for it.

From the bunker of the Führer's headquarters during the last weeks of the war an order was issued to blow up the repository. The order was transmitted by August Eigruber, gauleiter of the Upper Danube region, on pain of execution if it were not obeyed. But it was never carried out.
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A curious note of inferiority, a sense of stuntedness always overlay the phenomenon of Hitler, and not even the many triumphs could dispel this. All his personal traits still did not add up to a real person. The reports and recollections we have from members of his entourage do not make him tangibly vivid as a man; he moves with masklike impersonality through a setting which he nevertheless dominated with uncontested sovereignty. Though one of the greatest orators of history, he coined not a single memorable phrase. And similarly there are no anecdotes about him, although while holding power he operated entirely by his own lights, more arbitrary and unrestricted than any other political actor since the end of absolutism.

Because of this bizarre personal element, a good many observers have called Hitler a dilettante. And, in fact, if we mean by this the prevalence of inclination over duty and of mood over regularity and permanence, then the advent of Hitler did indeed mean the entrance of the dilettante into politics. The circumstances of his early life were wholly marked by the dilettantism that ultimately brought him into politics, and the period during which he exercised power was one prolonged demonstration of personal idiosyncrasy at the helm of state. The audacity and radicality that made him so successful also came from the same source. A true
homo novus,
he was not hampered either by experience or by respect for the rules of the game. He did not feel the scruples of the specialists and shrank from nothing he conceived. Above all, he intuitively knew how to initiate great projects but was unaware of the practical difficulties in carrying them through; he always saw everything as child's play or dependent only on an act of will, not even realizing the extent of his boldness. With his “layman's delight in decision making”
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he interfered, took over everywhere, formulated and carried out what others scarcely dared conceive. He had a dilettante's fear of admitting a mistake and the tyro's need to show off his knowledge of tonnages, calibers, and all kinds of statistical matters. His aesthetic preferences were also uninformed; they came down to his love of massiveness, his delight in tricks, surprises, and prestidigitator's effects. Significantly, he trusted inspiration more than he did thought and genius more than diligence.

He tried to cover up his dilettantism by utter lack of moderation, by making his amateurish projects so monumental that their amateurishness would be invisible. Magnitude justified everything, in buildings as well as in people. In this respect he was a man of the nineteenth century. He heavily concurred with Nietzsche's saying that a nation was nothing but nature's byway for producing a few important men. “Geniuses of the extraordinary type,” he remarked, with a side glance at himself, “can show no consideration for normal humanity.” Their superior insight, their higher mission, justified any harshness. Compared with the claims genius could make to greatness and historical fame, the sum of individuals amounted to no more than “planetary bacilli.”

These muddled images of genius, greatness, fame, mission, and cosmic struggle reveal a characteristic element of the Hitlerian imagination. He thought mythologically, not socially, and his modernity was permeated by archaic traits. The world and humanity, the intricate weft of interests, temperament, and energies, were thus reduced to a few antitheses to be grasped instinctively: friend and foe, good and evil, pure and impure, poor and rich, the radiant white knight against the horrid dragon crouched over the treasure. It is true that Hitler had objected to the “perverted title” of Rosenberg's principal work; National Socialism, he said, did not constitute the myth of the twentieth century against reason, but “the faith and the knowledge of the twentieth century against the myth of the nineteenth century.” But in fact Hitler was far closer to the party's philosopher than such comments would suggest. For Hitler's rationality was always limited to methodology and did not light up the gloomy corners of his anxieties and prejudices. His sober plans were based on a few mythological premises, and this close conjunction of coolness and wrongheadedness, Machiavellianism and black magic, rounds out the picture of the man.

A few crude assumptions, borrowed at random from the trashy tracts of whole generations of patriotic professors and pseudoprophets, had shaped the traditional German view of the country's history. It was all a matter of hereditary foes and enemies bent on encirclement. Hence the popularity of such notions as the stab in the back, Nibelungen loyalty, and the stark alternatives of victory or annihilation. National Socialism was not, it is true, quite so prone to the phenomenon of “seduction by history”
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that characterized Italian or French Fascism, and which is in fact among the fundamental traits of Fascist thinking in general. Hitler had no ideal era he could invoke. His use of history was passionate rejection; he would operate by invoking a distorted image of past weakness and dissension. Hitler derived just as powerful a force from castigating the past as did Mussolini from singing the praises of the Roman Empire. Hitler played on national feeling by recalling concepts like “Versailles” or the “period of the Weimar System.” Sure enough, a “language regulation” issued by Goebbels to local propaganda chiefs required that the period from 1918 to 1933 be always designated as “criminal.” History, Paul Valéry once remarked, is the most dangerous product ever brewed by the chemistry of the human brain; it makes nations dream or suffer, impels them to become megalomaniacal, bitter, vain, insufferable. The hatreds and passions of the nations during the first half of this century have been stirred by false history far more than by all the racist ideologies or by envy or desire for expansion.

It was necessary for Hitler to reject the past because there was no era in German history that he admired. His ideal world was classical antiquity: Athens, Sparta (“the most pronounced racial state in history”), the Roman Empire. He always felt closer to Caesar or Augustus than to the Teutonic freedom fighter Arminius; they, and not the illiterate inhabitants of the Teutonic forests, were for him among the “most glorious minds of all history,” whom he hoped to find again in the “Olympus... that I shall enter.”
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The downfall of those ancient dominions preoccupied him: “I often think about what destroyed the ancient world.” He made open fun of Himmler's antediluvian primitivism and reacted sarcastically to all the potsherd cult and Teutonic herbalism: “At the same period that our forebears were presumably making the stone troughs and clay pitchers that our archaeologists fuss so much about, an Acropolis was being built in Greece.”
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And elsewhere: “The Germanic tribes who remained in Holstein were still boors after two thousand years... on no higher a level of culture than the Maori [today].” Only the tribes that had migrated to the south had risen culturally, he said. “Our country was a wallow.... If anybody asks about our ancestors, we always have to refer to the Greeks.”
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