Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

Rating:
Summary: A must read book
Review: Absolutely compelling. No other writer can dissect the great paradox as much as Spotts. Hitler, being an artist whose role was to create, killed and annihilated Jews for the sake of Aryan supremacy. Hitler psychologically manipulated people by showing massive shows and major productions (with all the lighting effects) similar to all the processions and religious practices done by the church. People looked up to him as if they were experiencing epiphany.

Hitler was a great fan of the arts. He loved the opera, theater and spent most of his time on how Berlin could be a perfect city for all his architectural ambitions. He was a product of all his artistic frustrations that stemmed when he was rejected in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He commissioned people to take care of Munich so that it would be the center of the arts and remove the title from its Vienese rival. Certainly, avoiding anything that is modern and jewish.

Spotts took a lot of references especially from Mein Kampf. This book is a must read to understand the psychology why Hitler succumbed to his own good intentions and to his end.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: An amazing read. I have read a lot about Mr.Hitler and the National Socialist Movement, and I have see references to Mr. Hitler's artistic bends. However to see all of it in a single book..AMAZING. Nothing can take away the horror of 1933-1944 in Germany and Europe, but to think that the whole purpose, in the eyes of the dictator was to create beauty. Adolf Hitler wanted to create a world of absolute German neo-classical art and society. In and of itself, not a bad goal, but not an achieveable goal, and espscially in the way it was attempted!
An amazing new angle at the often flat and one sided person of Adolf Hitler.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: An amazing read. I have read a lot about Mr.Hitler and the National Socialist Movement, and I have see references to Mr. Hitler's artistic bends. However to see all of it in a single book..AMAZING. Nothing can take away the horror of 1933-1944 in Germany and Europe, but to think that the whole purpose, in the eyes of the dictator was to create beauty. Adolf Hitler wanted to create a world of absolute German neo-classical art and society. In and of itself, not a bad goal, but not an achieveable goal, and espscially in the way it was attempted!
An amazing new angle at the often flat and one sided person of Adolf Hitler.

Rating:
Summary: Cyanide Capsules Are Available At The Door...
Review: Do we really need another book about "Der Fuhrer"? Surprisingly, if the book is this one, the answer is yes. Because this book looks at Hitler from a different angle- one that is pretty much unknown to the layperson: this book is about the "sensitive," "artistic," and "cultivated" Hitler. As you might expect when using such words in connection with Hitler, contradictions abound. The man who could weep while listening to the music of Wagner is the same man who, the moment he came to power, fired or drove into exile musicians and artists he didn't approve of: Jews, Bolsheviks, Modernists, etc. On the other hand, if he liked you personally and thought you were talented, he would sometimes look the other way- he supported, or at least didn't harass, several people who were Jewish or who disagreed with him politically. Some of you may have winced when I used the word "cultivated" in connection with Hitler. But, consider the following: he was very well read (and had a tremendous, possibly photographic, memory); he was a competent, though unimaginative, artist- he could draw and paint as well as your average art school student (and he was completely self-taught); he knew a tremendous amount about the operas of Wagner, and was a good judge of opera singers; he was knowledgeable about architecture, could make architectural sketches, and could intelligently discuss technical aspects of the craft, etc. Having said that, we must remember the flip-side- Hitler was very narrowminded. His love of art was pretty much limited to 19th century German Romantics and some of the painters of the Italian Renaissance. He thought all modern art- which for him started with the Impressionists- was trash, and decadent to boot. He loved opera, but only Wagner and Puccini. He didn't much care for other music- he wasn't really enthusiastic about Beethoven, Mozart, etc. He couldn't stand Brahms, although he eventually did develop a taste for Bruckner. He thought modern music, with its dissonances and atonality, was horrible. In architecture, he admired the Greeks and Romans- but in his building plans for the Third Reich everything had to be magnified to colossal size to awe people. Glass and steel structures left him cold, although he grudgingly realized he'd have to agree to build skyscrapers if only to show that National Socialist Germany could outdo America. Surprisingly, Hitler generally liked his culture "neat." He didn't want political messages- he wanted high-quality, beautiful, soul-elevating art/music/sculpture. Of course, he would tell you what qualified as high-quality, beautiful, and soul-elevating. It may seem odd, but Hitler was embarrassed by the crudity of his Nazi cronies. The vast majority of them had no interest in art, music and sculpture. They'd be dragged, although only silently kicking and screaming, to Bayreuth for the yearly dose of Wagner. They'd fall asleep and start to snore. No wonder the Little Corporal preferred the company of artists, musicians and sculptors. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the man who wanted "art" with no political content- "art" that elevated people and helped them to get away from the problems, big and small, of everyday life, succeeded in politicizing culture to an unprecedented degree. This book is a brilliant achievement by Mr. Spotts. It forces us to look at Hitler not as a ranting, foaming-at-the-mouth, caricature, but as a fellow human being with, dare I say it, some positive qualities. Yes, the devil is given his due.....but Mr. Spotts never forgets who or what he is dealing with. Why did I give this review the title I did? Mr. Spotts mentions that it was agreed that, when the end of the "Thousand Year Reich" was at hand, the Berlin Philharmonic would add Bruckner's Fourth Symphony to the programme. On the night of April 13th, 1945, the symphony was finally played. As people filed out of the concert hall afterwards, Hitler Youth were in the lobby, hawking cyanide capsules to interested takers. Poor Bruckner probably turned over in his grave.

Rating:
Summary: A revelation. A very important book.
Review: I had never previously read books that dealt with Hitler or World War II before reading this one. Like every other Baby Boomer, I've seen enough films and TV shows to write my own WWII movie that most people would probably find credible. What we know of the war is about the fighting, the arrests of those pronounced "undesirable" by the Nazis, children denouncing their parents to the authorities, the concentration camps, etc. The Germany that Hitler presented to his people was a forward-looking state of culture and enlightenment, the acme of modern civilization. People want to believe the best about themselves. Hitler had an instinctive sense of theatre, a passion for ritual, and the desire to make everyone in the entire world subservient to him, as well as the power to squelch all opposition. In some ways, he was visionary. The Volkswagen was mostly his idea. (It was created to justify his building of the Autobahn, which is still one of the wonders of modern Germany.) But he wanted everyone to have HIS taste. Only his taste was acceptable. Everything else was either kitsch or decadent. Disagreement meant losing one's job in most cases or, in some extreme cases, a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. Of course, the most troubling aspect of Hitler was how he could have gotten so many people to go along with him. For me this book explains it. I think this is an important book that made me see things from a different perspective. Parts of the book made me drop my jaw. "Awesome" is an overused word, but it really is the applicable term here. The author made me extremely interested in a subject that basically had little appeal for me. I want to do a lot more reading about this subject now. Spotts' book is a knockout. It gets five stars from me.

Rating:
Summary: A revelation. A very important book.
Review: I had never previously read books that dealt with Hitler or World War II before reading this one. Like every other Baby Boomer, I've seen enough films and TV shows to write my own WWII movie that most people would probably find credible. What we know of the war is about the fighting, the arrests of those pronounced "undesirable" by the Nazis, children denouncing their parents to the authorities, the concentration camps, etc. The Germany that Hitler presented to his people was a forward-looking state of culture and enlightenment, the acme of modern civilization. People want to believe the best about themselves. Hitler had an instinctive sense of theatre, a passion for ritual, and the desire to make everyone in the entire world subservient to him, as well as the power to squelch all opposition. In some ways, he was visionary. The Volkswagen was mostly his idea. (It was created to justify his building of the Autobahn, which is still one of the wonders of modern Germany.) But he wanted everyone to have HIS taste. Only his taste was acceptable. Everything else was either kitsch or decadent. Disagreement meant losing one's job in most cases or, in some extreme cases, a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. Of course, the most troubling aspect of Hitler was how he could have gotten so many people to go along with him. For me this book explains it. I think this is an important book that made me see things from a different perspective. Parts of the book made me drop my jaw. "Awesome" is an overused word, but it really is the applicable term here. The author made me extremely interested in a subject that basically had little appeal for me. I want to do a lot more reading about this subject now. Spotts' book is a knockout. It gets five stars from me.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating but off-putting
Review: Spotts has written an important book that initially seems to be a contribution to an understanding of how the power of aesthetics strengthened the strange fascination exerted by Adolf Hitler over the Germans in the 1930s. Indeed, the book goes a long way towards correcting dismissive interpretations of Hitler the aesthete as a mere painter of poor quality watercolours.

The material in this book is fascinating and disturbing, and yet there is something unsettling about the book itself. Somehow, the book seems to disengage Hitler's aesthetics from his murderous insanity as if the two aspects of his personality were totally unrelated; what begins as a discussion of how aesthetics contributed to Hitler's ability to overmaster an entire nation and lead that nation on an epic rampage of murder and destruction turns into something else.

There is a curious absence of perspective in Spotts' discussion of Hitler's aesthetic interests. Partly this is because of the narrow focus of the book on aesthetics, which is fair enough, even if, over hundreds of pages, this approach starts to make Hitler seem like simply a bit of a petulant aesthete, not unlike a Renaissance Prince. But there is more to it than this.

It wasn't until page 332, for example, that Spotts explicitly contrasted Hitler's aesthetic activity with a direct reference to his inhuman politics: "At the very time he was doing away with democracy and civil liberties, establishing concentration camps, crushing trade unions, instituting anti-Semitic policies and so on . . . " (Spotts' casual "and so on" is part of the problem . . . )

Perhaps Spotts simply hasn't thought very deeply about his subject matter. Despite an extended and fascinating discussion of Hitler's architectural influences and goals, for example, Spotts doesn't contrast the irony of Hitler's lust to build huge granite edifices intended to preserve his memory for a thousand years with the shabby, hastily-built wooden barracks and barbed wire fences of the concentration camps that will, indeed, make his name infamous as long as human memory persists.

And yet the data that Spotts has uncovered and presented is almost unfailingly fascinating. The first sections "The Reluctant Dictator", "The Artful Leader", and "The Artist of Destruction" are all fascinating, and the account does recover after the two strangely offkey sections on music "The Perfect Wagnerite" and "The Music Master". The last section "The Master Builder" is better balanced with the relevant context of Hitler's sinister political crimes.

Given the quality of the analysis, and the richness of the information that Spotts presents, it seems increasingly odd that an author who presents such an original and detailed perspective on Hitler's aesthetic interests never attempts to reconcile his aesthetic interests with his staggering crimes. The failure to establish and consistently maintain a broader perspective on Hitler's inhumanity makes the book an uncertain authority on the very power of aesthetics which is its subject.

Earlier on, Spotts describes the dismissals of Jewish artists, composers, critics, conductors, the hounding out of Germany of other artistic figures whom the Nazis considered politically unreliable, and the plundering of (mostly Jewish) art collections found in conquered countries, and he describes how a few bad Nazis were permitted to perform because Hitler approved of them as artists, while a few good Nazis had their careers blighted by Hitler's aesthetic repugnance. Yawning behind these quibbling examples--which Spotts foregrounds with an emphasis that makes it appear that aesthetics may have had some humanising influence on Hitler--is the vast abyss of Auschwitz.

The nadir of the book is Spotts's discussion of Wagner, and this seems to be the key to the troublingly erratic moral compass of the book: Spotts is obviously a Wagner partisan, having written a book about the Bayreuth Festival. His flat conclusion at the end of that chapter "Hitler's Wagner was an opera composer, not a political mentor" is contradicted by Spotts' comment that Hitler was so moved by the flames and destruction of the "Goetterdaemmerung" that he kissed Frau Wagner's hand (page 235). He contradicts himself again in the curiously limp afterward when he observes that the Wagner opera Rienzi "did indeed foretell Hitler's destiny" (page 401). Spotts also falls into, at best, extremely poor taste in the Wagner chapter, when he summarises Hitler's musical taste by parodying the famous chapter on love in I Corinthians 13: "So, in the course of [Hitler's] life, there were Wagner, Bruckner and Lehar, these three; but at the end, the greatest of these was Lehar." (page 263). Spotts actually seems to be trying to make the point that Wagner's music inspired Hitler when he was triumphantly dealing out destruction and death across Europe, but that once the tide turned he couldn't bear any longer the music that had inspired him in his early dreams of homicidal glory. The problem for Spotts is that he is simultaneously advancing the thesis that Wagner's music had nothing to do with Hitler's policies, and so he evades this contradiction by bringing his Wagner chapter to a dashing close--throwing dust into the reader's eyes with this ghastly bit of antic wit about "Wagner, Bruckner and Lehar" evidently in the hope that the reader doesn't think too deeply, either.

By all means buy this book--it is fascinating and takes the analysis of Hitler's artistic interests well beyond the "Hitler as lousy watercolourist" theme--but be aware that important context is missing in the analysis, and be prepared to read more widely to address this deficiency. Spotts' compelling revelations of Hitler's aesthetic interests, which have been dismissed for 50 years partly because they seem incompatible with his crimes, now force us to attempt to understand how Hitler could also have had an authentic artistic sensibility. The world has dealt with this paradox by pretending that the artistic sensibility didn't exist; Spotts, to his credit, has closed off this option once and for all, but in his own wrestling with this paradox, he seems to have de-emphasised Hitler's crimes.

Rating:
Summary: State of the arts under Nazism
Review: This is a thoroughly researched, and horribly fascinating, guide through the cultural interests and pretensions, and later the cultural policies, of Adolph Hitler. Spotts takes us through Hitler's mix of boundless ambition and lack of talent in the visual arts, through his interest in music, and his fascination with architecture. He outlines Hitler's attempt, once he'd gained power, to create a compliant community of artists in his nightmarish Reich, his efforts to get artists to produce what he wanted: the carefully controlled art-in-the-service-of-the-state, populist and uplifting, that Plato stipulated was the only kind of art that could be admitted into his Republic. (Was Plato a precursor of Nazism? Absolutely. An influence? Probably not.)

Though, as with any murderous tyrant, it pleased Hitler to grant indulgences. He allowed some artists in the Third Reich to get away with defiance that would have had anyone else killed. But these indulgences, Spotts observes, were not enough to inspire many of the artists who remained in Germany with anything approximating courage. Musicians like Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler made huge accommodations and moral compromises with the Reich, relying on pathetically miniscule gestures to salve their consciences.

No-one who has not been in the same circumstances has the right to condemn them too easily, but at a time when extraordinary courage was called for they showed only human weakness. Though Strauss composed _A Hero's Life_ and Furtwängler conducted it, neither lived it. If we are tempted to believe that artists have special claims to virtue, or that interest in art is likely to lead a person towards virtue, then Spotts' book is an antidote for that sad illusion. Spotts is rightly hard on those artists who, like Karajan in particular, helped put a civilised gloss on Nazi barbarism.

It has been objected that to focus on the arts in the Third Reich instead of, say, the war in Russia or the Holocaust, is to trivialise the evil of Nazism. That view is mistaken. To focus on one part of a catastrophe where the horrors are more subtle is not to trivialise other, still more atrocious, aspects. Instead it is to show how its distinctive and chilling lack of humanity pervaded every aspect of Nazism. In focussing belated attention on the Third Reich's cultural politics, Spotts does not diminish our appreciation of the horror of fascism but enhances it.

Some information in Spotts' book may provide unwelcome news for vested intellectual interests. For example, Spotts exposes the rose-coloured portrait of Hitler in August Kubizek's _Adolf Hitler: Mein Judengfreund_ ("The Young Hitler I Knew"), showing it to be as fraudulent as the "Hitler" of Hermann Rauschning's imaginary dialogues. Hitler apologists have long clung onto "Kubizek's book", with - from their point of view - good reason given Kubizek's romanticisation of the young Hitler, but Spotts makes it clear that "Kubizek's" book was merely a ghostwritten hoax.

Another myth that is dying hard (though dying) is the one promoted by Köhler, Rose, Zelinsky et alia, claiming Hitler formed his political views and dreams out of composer Richard Wagner's operas and prose. Spotts shows that Hitler was indeed impressed at a young age by Wagner's opera _Rienzi_. But Hitler failed to note that in this early Wagnerian opera (Wagner himself dismissed _Rienzi_ as a "pecadillo of my youth") the Roman Tribune Rienzi becomes puffed up by the pride of his early successes, and is brought down by that unheeding arrogance. Rienzi fails to show compassion for those killed on either side, including his own, in Rome's brief civil war, preferring to spend his time and money on grand costumes and ceremonies, and he fails (eventually) to show mercy for those who fought against him. As a direct result of these failings he is overthrown by the Roman people: Wagner's actual message was obvious. It was Wagner's ill-luck that an evil lunatic, active a century after Wagner's opera was written, liked the sound his music made but failed to take note of his operas' meanings and messages.

But Hitler did eventually get Wagner's message, Spotts reveals, finding Wagner unpalatable after the defeat at Stalingrad brought home the lesson taught in Wagner's _Ring_ cycle: that pursuit of power destroys love and leads to moral degradation and downfall. From then Hitler could no longer bear to listen to Wagner, and in his last years turned instead to the schmaltzy operettas of Franz Lehar. There was no such person as "Wagner's Hitler", Spotts concludes; to Hitler, Wagner was only an opera composer. As an aside, Spotts noted that, Hitler excepted, the Nazi Party as a whole preferred Beethoven.

It would have been good to see more on the Reich's use of radio and film. Spotts hardly touches on Leni Riefenstahl's films, nor on films by other Nazi directors with similar amounts of artistic ambition, or pretension, but none of Riefenstahl's regrettable talent. The theatre under the Third Reich is also only barely covered. But in its central fields - music, painting and sculpture, and architecture including the abstract art of the autobahns - Spotts is comprehensive and authoritative.

Finally, it's important to note that Spotts is not being quite as ambitious as the book's blurb might suggest. Spotts does not "explain" Hitler, still less explain him away, by showing the extent of his artistic interests, and of his artistic disappointment. He writes only about one aspect of the great "catastrophe" (as Spotts called Hitler), but an aspect that contains considerable illumination on the whole.

Spotts provides a great deal of valuable information and insight on the arts in Hitler's Germany, with much that is (so far as I can tell) new and - mirabile dictu! - authoritative and reliable.

Cheers!

Laon

Rating:
Summary: A Tremendous Achievement
Review: This is the book that I wanted to write. That having been said, I think Mr. Spotts did a considerably better job of it that I ever could. It is impossible to begin to understand Adolf Hitler without understanding his aesthetic approach to the world as he wanted it to be. Usually, histories and biographies of Hitler dismiss his interest in art as either sub-bourgeois sentimentality or propaganda-oriented. This book is intelligent enough not to take either of these tacks, and as a result delivers an exhaustive and meaningful account of how Hitler was, ultimately, an artist who achieved political power.

I wrote an initial paper on the subject in college (imagine how popular that was), but my thesis centered primarily on Hitler's hopes for his art career and the psychological issues underlying his artistic preferences. This book addresses the former, but not the latter, I think quite rightly. What Spotts does, which I would never have been able to do, is exhaustively examine Hitler's work schedules and attendance at specific meetings and events, not to mention budget allocations. This establishes without question the priorities he put on various components of the arts, versus politics or even the business of fighting the war.

Spotts is mostly objective, or mildly condemnatory. This makes for a more focused read.

I think this is the only book I have ever seen on Amazon.com where all the reviews are five stars. It absolutely deserves it.

Rating:
Summary: Who Is Afraid of Adolf Hitler?
Review: When I lived in Germany 45 years ago I simply could not understand how those decent and civilized people had allowed themselves to be taken in by Hitler. And amazingly in our many conversations they freely admitted that they still believed, up to a point, that Hitler had been "good" for Germany!

Since then I have turned over a whole library trying to find an answer to that question. Three books go a long way toward explaining the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler: Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography; "Hitler's Table Talk" edited by John Toland; and now Frederic Spotts' "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics."

"Who is afraid of Adolf Hitler?" Frederic Spotts asks at the end of this extraordinarily revealing book. "Just about everyone," is his rhetorical response. Another question this book asks, tangentially, is "Who doesn't loathe Adolf Hitler?" Well, Hitler was personally responsible for the murder of millions of people and a war that destroyed Europe. All of this within living memory -- many of us were nurtured on the events of WWII. So how could any decent person admit to a shred of sympathy or even understanding for a monster like this Hitler? One would rather admit to sympathy for the Devil.

If you wish for any insight into a person's psychology, start with the music he likes and his taste in art. In this book Mr. Spotts makes the case that that these things were essential and central in Hitler's life and career and he does this convincingly. He also proves, to my satisfaction at least, that Adolf Hitler actually had some talent as a painter and an architect, not first-class by any means, but enough that he knew good stuff from trash and that he knew full well the "socialist" art produced during the Third Reich was trash. But one of the most revealing aspects of "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics" is what it reveals about us, the readers. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that much of the art and music and architecture Hitler liked, we like it too, and the stuff he didn't like, that turns us off also. Mr. Spotts concludes that Hitler's personality had many facets and the value of this book is that it forces us to look closely at them and open our eyes to the tiny glimmers of ourselves in there.