as allied air power and artillery reduced Berlin to flaming
rubble, and then pulverized that rubble, Adolf Hitler
stood deep down in his bunker overlooking a pristine
architectural model. It was based on Hitler’s own designs for a
German National Art Museum to be built in his hometown of Linz,
Austria. It is well known that Hitler was a failed painter, rejected by the Vienna Academy of the Arts at the age of 18. What is less widely
known is that he was also an aspiring architect, and in addition to
his watercolor painting, he would spend hours drafting designs
for new public buildings and civic works.1 Hitler’s dream project
was an art museum in Linz that was to be the most impressive in
all of Germany and even the center of kultur in the world, whose monumental structure he would design and whose collection he
would himself select. He updated the plans after the annexation of
Austria and a visit to the art treasures of Italy in 1938.
As a poverty-stricken young man living at a Vienna hostel,
Hitler had spent so much time poring over architectural plans that,
when he toured a conquered Paris in the predawn hours of June 23,
1940, the Führer was able to identify obscure modifications in the
design of the Paris Opera, such as a small antechamber eliminated
during renovations. As the German armies advanced across Europe,
Hitler personal y drew up the catalogue of thousands of artworks
to be purchased or seized for his museum at Linz, including works
by Leonardo DaVinci, Rembrandt, Jacob Jordaens, Vermeer, and
1 Peter Cohen, The Architecture of Doom (First Run Features, 1991). This is the source for most of the opening material on Nazism and Aesthetics.
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Rubens. At the same time he organized exhibitions of ‘degenerate’
art across Germany, to put artists on notice that works of this kind
would no longer be tolerated. Sculptors such as Arno Breker and
Josef Thorak were seen as something more than ‘mere artists’, they
were to convey the image of a new type of man whose creation was
the goal of Nazism. Hitler had even chosen to cap his inaugural
speech as Chancellor with this reflection on the recent German
acquisition of the classical sculpture of the Discus Thrower:
Let us perceive how splendid man’s beauty once was, and how
we may speak of ‘progress’ when we have not only achieved such
success, but even surpassed it. May we find here a measure of
the tasks which confront us in our time. May we strive as one for
beauty and elevation, so that our race and our art withstand the
judgment of millennia.
Indeed, his artistic vision was on a millennial scale. Hitler saw
architect Albert Speer as something of a soul mate, confiding to
Speer that he took vicarious pleasure in Speer’s work since he had
always wanted to be an architect. Speer’s first task was building a new Reich’s Chancellery, based on Hitler’s own designs, to be followed
by monumental projects in forty cities. Together with Speer, and in
accordance with his millennial vision, Hitler adopted something
known as the “ruins principle” to govern these titanic building
projects. Specific construction methods and design principles
would be employed in order to cause the buildings to col apse
into picturesque and awe-inspiring ruins like those of Greece and
Rome. It is noteworthy, that when the Germans invaded Greece,
Hitler gave express orders forbidding the bombing of Athens and
demanding that his soldiers sustain any losses necessary to take
the Greek capital without damage to classical ruins and cultural
treasures. The most dramatic implementation of the ruins principle
was at the Nuremberg Ral y Grounds and Zeppelin field, where
16.5 square kilometers were covered with travertine and granite.
The arena could hold millions of people and its centerpiece was a
360-meter long tribune based on the Altar at Pergamon. Already in 341
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1930, three years before becoming Chancellor and at a time when his
political career was far from certain, Hitler envisioned Nuremberg
as hallowed ground: “If here, in the distant future, archaeologists
should delve the Earth and strike granite beneath, let them stand
bareheaded before the glorious revelation of an idea that shook the
world.”
From the very evening that he took power in 1933 until the war
broke out in 1939, Hitler devoted the largest single block of his time to working with Speer on architectural designs for monumental
building projects in the new Reich. On June 14, 1938 he announced
that Berlin was to be reconstructed into a new city, Welthauptstadt Germania – a “World Capital” which would eclipse Paris, whose
beauty Hitler so admired, and would be comparable only to Ancient
Egypt, Babylon, or Rome at its zenith. It was to feature a triumphal
arch twice the scale of the one in Paris, and a domed Great Hall at
the terminus of its central avenue that would be the largest assembly
hall in the world, some 17 times as big as St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, with seats for 180,000 people. There would be an opening in the
dome for heaven’s light to shine down on the party faithful.
Speer’s model of Germania was based largely on sketches
that Hitler himself had made as early as 1925, when the Weimer
government saw him only as a fringe domestic terrorist. Although
they publicly announced the general plans for Germania, Hitler and Speer kept most of the details secret. This is because anyone with
access to them would have quickly realized that the plans called
for a large-scale destruction of the extant city of Berlin that was
not the type of destruction one would assign to a demolition crew.
Its prerequisite was devastation of a kind wrought only by aerial
bombardment.
In his youth, Hitler would go with Auguste Kubicek to see
Wagner’s Operas. Too poor to afford seat tickets, they would stand
through the entire performance. His personal favorite was a lesser-
known opera called Rienzi: Der Letzte der Tribunen, which Wagner had based on a novel by Lord Bulwer-Lytton who also wrote Vril:
The Coming Race. It is about a medieval Italian populist who aimed 342
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to reestablish the Roman Republic of antiquity. While the people
at first support Rienzi in a struggle against the nobility, eventual y he is betrayed both by them and the Church, and he takes a last
stand in battle with his most faithful followers, as his capital crashes and burns around him. In his memoirs, Kubicek relates that Hitler
was overwhelmed by Rienzi and would speak of executing similar operas that would eclipse even those of Wagner. The two friends
began to write an opera together. Later, as he rose to power, Hitler
befriended Wagner’s wife Winifred. Whenever he would watch
Gotterdammerung together with her, during the fiery col apse that is the drama’s final scene he would reach for her hand in the darkness
of their theater box and kiss it with devotion.
Hitler and Speer were not the only ‘failed’ artists in the Nazi
regime. The single most apt characterization of the leadership of the
Third Re
ich is that it consisted of men who had been aspiring artists
of one kind or another. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s Minister of
Propaganda, who briefly succeeded Hitler as Chancellor, had written
a novel as well as some plays, and he occasional y composed poetry.
Goebbels held a doctorate in romantic drama from Heidelberg
University. Alfred Rosenberg, the party ideologist, was a painter
who also entertained literary ambitions. Baldur von Schirach, the
leader of the Hitler Youth, was one of the Reich’s foremost poets. In
1933, Von Schirach penned this verse based on Hitler’s own words,
which are obviously inspired by the tragic plot of Rienzi: “I will be true, though all have forsaken me, I’ll bear my banner ever to defeat.
Upon my tongue a madman’s words awaken, yet if I fall this banner
will be taken, to be in death my glorious winding sheet.” Hitler saw
his youthful experience of Wagner’s Rienzi as “that hour it all began.”
There is nothing more powerful than Art. This is the insight
that all of these morbidly fascinating vignettes have been driving at.
What it means to say that there is nothing more powerful is that
the aesthetic experience, both of the genius and of others captivated
by her, is irreducible. Past a certain point, it resists rational analysis because it is, quite literal y, incomprehensible. Art is about forging an intimate, partly unconscious, relationship with that abyssal
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dimension of existence which encompasses all and which cannot
be encompassed by any machination. The Abyssal encountered
by the artistic genius can, however, become the wel spring of an
extraordinary power that, depending upon how its generative or
destructive force is channeled, ultimately proves decisive for the rise and fall of civilizations. Political organization and technoscientific development are subordinate expressions of aesthetic activity in
the highest sense. The power of Art remains determinative of their
destiny, occulted in a dimension beyond their control.
I.
If the advent of Modernity involves an alteration of temporality,
a profound change in our experience of time brought about by
technological mediation, then it real y came into its own during the
French Revolution. The attempt of the French revolutionaries to
completely uproot traditional modes of life and to rebuild the world
on an entirely rational – i.e. non-historical – ground is epitomized
by their replacement of the Christian calendar with a new calendar
where the revolution was zero hour. They were attempting to restart
time, a notion implicit in the German word for the Modern age:
Neuzeit or “New Time.” This is what horrified conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke and provoked such a vitriolic response
from them.2 By contrast, Modern ism emerges with the increasingly apparent failure of this project. Once large numbers of ordinary
people began to experience time not as “ever new” but as a continual
decline or decay from a projected utopia – from a tomorrow that
seemed ever more distant rather than ever more imminent – various
movements against this decadence began among the intellectual and
artistic vanguard of modern societies.3
2 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmil an, 2007), 50–51.
3 Ibid., 52–53.
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This response to the crisis of the modern world began among
intellectuals and artists prior to 1914 but was not widely received by society at large until after the catastrophes of the First World War
and the Flu Pandemic.4 During the First World War, many young
men and women began to believe that the destruction around them
was a purgation and that they were about to witness the dawning
of a new postmodern age.5 The devastation wrought by the war,
including the attendant overthrow of three absolutist regimes and a
powerful monarchy, as well as a worldwide influenza pandemic that
claimed the lives of 100 million people, had opened up an ontological
void that needed to be filled.6 This is the mood that allowed Oswald
Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a two-volume scholastic work, to become an international bestseller.7
It is also, ultimately, what fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, Hitler reflects that: “Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough school of my life.”8 It was there that
he suffered four years of extreme material hardship, as reflected by
the chapter in Mein Kampf entitled “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna”, where Hitler writes: “in this period there took shape
within me a world picture and a philosophy ( Weltanshauung) which became the granite foundation of all my acts.”9 Turn of the century
Vienna was the scene of radical experimentation in every cultural
sphere. It was home to Arnold Schoenberg, Otto Wagner, Adolf
Loos, Josef Hoffmann, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil,
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Weininger,
Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.10
Under conditions of extreme stress, such as subjection
to economic col apse, natural catastrophes, plagues, foreign
4 Ibid., 117.
5 Ibid., 155.
6 Ibid., 162.
7 Ibid., 163.
8 Ibid., 279.
9 Ibid., 282.
10 Ibid., 280.
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occupation, displacement, and so forth, a fringe subculture
can become the basis for a revolutionary reorganization of the
broader society that had marginalized it.11 Indispensable to such
a development is a charismatic leader who is at once a visionary
artist, a prophet, and a teacher who is initial y viewed as a madman
by the broader society.12 Above al , the synthetic vision that such a
person has for transforming the world – which defies all disciplinary
boundaries – will seem not only utopian but also megalomaniacal
to the dispassionate academic; he will always appear to believe that
the world depends on him or rests on his shoulders.13 Yet this leader
will know what Guil aume Apollinaire wrote in his eulogy of Pablo
Picasso:
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of
nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe
would col apse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in
nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.
Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons,
no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give
way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
The countermovement to Modernity arose in those metropolitan
areas most deeply affected by modernization and by the
disil usionment with its promised utopia: Berlin, Vienna, Paris,
Prague, and New York.14 By 1940, the Third Reich encompassed the
first four of these five ultra-modernist cities. What was common to
the various avant-garde social movements of the time was the search
for some ideological basis for the progress of Western civilization other than the ahistorical Enlightenment rationalism of the French
Revolut
ion.15 Moreover, this reorientation of Modernity would aim,
11 Ibid., 104–105.
12 Ibid., 113–114.
13 Ibid., 115.
14 Ibid., 68.
15 Ibid., 52.
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by one means or another, to remedy the subject’s relationship to the
maelstrom of technological transformation so that this force would
be affirmatively appropriated rather than experienced as a source
of alienation.16 Final y, this would be accomplished not simply by
breaking with the past, as the French Revolutionaries had sought to
do, but by manufacturing mythic ‘historical’ traditions on the basis
of which alternative futures could be projected.17 In a word, these
visionaries were part of what I would call an Archeovanguard. Their vanguard futurism was rooted in an archaic, primordial past.
The SS was obsessed with Atlantis, believing it to be the
primordial Āryan homeland. In fact, the Nazi Party was only a
political action front established by an esoteric group known as the
“Atlantis Society.” In 1917 in Munich, Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf
founded the Thule Gesellschaft. Sebottendorf was an esotericist whose specialty was the Persian Sufi tradition. He was also a student
of the runic expert Guido von List, who was in turn influenced by the
theosophist Lanz von Liebenfels. List and Liebenfels appropriated
certain theosophical ideas of Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner in
order to forge their doctrine of “Ariosophy” or Āryanism.
This was a biopolitical movement in the deepest sense; its
intention was to replace both the traditional dogmas of revealed
religion and the outdated rationalistic ‘Enlightenment’ concepts of
liberal individualism with a new politics grounded on a vitalistic
cultivation of the “life force” of evolution. This Force was conceived along the lines of the psychical reinterpretation of Darwinian
evolution that had been forwarded by theosophists such as Blavatsky
and Steiner with their “root races” and so forth.18 The reconnecting-
forwards characteristic of this movement is an overcoming of decay
through a re-rooting in the merciless evolutionary force of life as they conceived of it.19 This vitalism was both futuristic in its technoscientism, as exemplified by Eugenics, and also primordial y pagan
16 Ibid., 56.
17 Ibid., 57.
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