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.55 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.56 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.57
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”58 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 s
aid, 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”59 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.”60 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.”61 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.”62
In addition to the classical lands, England was the country he admired and wanted to emulate. It had known how to combine national coherence, a sense of masterfulness, and the ability to think in terms of vast areas. England was the opposite of German cosmopolitanism, German faintheartedness, German narrowness. And finally—again the object of reluctant wonder as well as of unnamable anxieties—he admired the Jews. Their racial exclusiveness and purity seemed to him no less admirable than their sense of being a chosen people, their implacability and intelligence. Basically, he regarded them as something akin to negative supermen. Even Germanic nations of relatively pure racial strains were, he declared in his table talk, inferior to the Jews: if 5,000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions.63
Muddled and heterogeneous these ideal images might be, but out of them he constructed the idea of the “new man”: the type that combined Spartan hardness and simplicity, Roman ethos, British gentlemanly ways, and the racial morality of Jewry. Out of greed for power, patriotic devotion and fanaticism, out of persecutions and the miasma of the war, this racist phantasmagoria repeatedly arose: “Anyone who interprets National Socialism merely as a political movement knows almost nothing about it,” Hitler declared. “It is more than religion; it is the determination to create a new man.”
His sincerest and most solemn thought, the idea that compensated for all his anxieties and negations, his one positive concept, was this: to gather again the Aryan blood that had wasted itself on all the seductive Klingsor gardens of this world and to guard the precious grail for all time in the future, thus becoming invulnerable and master of the world. All the calculations of power tactics and all cynicism stopped short of this vision: “the new man.” As early as the spring of 1933 Hitler had seen to the issuance of the first laws, which were soon extended into a comprehensive catalogue of purposeful legislation partly aimed at putting an end to what he called racial decadence, partly at bringing about “the rebirth of the nation… by the deliberate breeding of a new man.” At the Nuremberg party rally of 1929 Hitler had declared in his concluding speech: “If Germany would have a million children annually and eliminate seven to eight hundred thousand of the weakest, the result in the end might be an increase in her energies.” Now the intellectual pimps of the regime took up such suggestions and codified them into a world-wide campaign against the “degenerate and the infected.” Racial philosopher Ernst Bergmann declared that he would gladly see “a million of the human sweepings of the big cities shoved aside.”64 Many actions to “safeguard the good blood” ran parallel to the anti-Semitic measures; they ranged from special laws regulating marriage and genetic hygiene to programs of sterilization and euthanasia.
Pedagogical measures supplemented the eugenic measures; for “an intellectual race is something more solid and more durable than a race itself,” Hitler commented. He supported this remark on the grounds of the “superiority of the mind over the flesh.” A novel educational system with National Political Educational Institutions, Adolf Hitler Schools, Order Castles (Ordensburgen), and special academies organized mainly by Rosenberg (which never got beyond their bare beginnings), were to school an elite selected on racial principles, and to prepare it for a variety of tasks. In one of his monologues to an intimate, Hitler described the new type of man, which was partly realized in the SS, with predatory, demonic features, “fearless and cruel”—so that he himself was frightened by the image he conjured up. Ideals of this sort can scarcely be called political. A totalitarian regime does not require demonism from its human tools but discipline. What is wanted is not the fearless man but the brutal one, a type whose aggression is trained and can be used for specific purposes. The ideal, then, is essentially a literary one, derived at some remove from Nietzsche’s “blond beast.” But Hitler was always prone to translate literature into reality. The model new man was terrifying in other ways also. Distinguished by rigid obedience and narrow idealism, he was not so much cruel as mechanically unmoved and perfectionistic, ready for anything, and upheld by that sense of superiority which is based on the “instinct to annihilate others,” as Hitler put it in one of his last recorded monologues, that of February 13, 1945.
But only the outlines of this vision emerged. Aryan racial substance and superiority could not be recovered so rapidly from the racially muddied material. “All of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood,” Hitler once admitted. And in fact his ideal betrays how much he suffered from his own impurity and frailty. He reckoned in long spans of time. In a speech of January, 1939, to a group of higher-ranking military men he spoke of a process lasting a hundred years. It would take that long before a majority of the German people possessed those characteristics with which the world could be conquered and ruled. He
did not doubt that this project would succeed. “A State,” he had long ago said in the concluding words of Mein Kampf, “which in the age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements, must some day become lord of the earth.”65
He himself did not have much time left. Both the desperate state of racial decadence and the consciousness of the shortness of a human life drove him forward. In spite of his fundamentally apathetic attitude, his life was marked by feverish unrest. A letter of his written in July, 1928, makes the point that he is now thirty-nine years old, so that “even at best” he has “barely twenty years available” for his “tremendous task.” The thought of premature death incessantly tormented him. “Time is pressing,” he said in February, 1934, and continued: “I do not have long enough to live…. I must lay the foundation on which others can build after me. I will not live long enough to see it completed.” He also feared assassination; some “criminal, an idiot” might eliminate him and thus prevent the accomplishment of his mission.
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