So begins a hilarious and scathing inquest. Stage One of the trial of the nose consists of Gerlich’s painstaking efforts to ensure that he has arraigned the right nose for analysis. The nose on the Hitler head in the Negro-wedding composite seems so “peculiar,” so insistently non-Aryan, that, as a judicious-minded student of racial science, he wants to ensure that this impression is not a mere accident of camera angle in that one particular photo. And so, he says, he will turn for further comparative nosology to the array of Hitler nose images that appear in a then-famous book of photographs of Hitler called The Hitler Nobody Knows.
The sly subtext of this entire judicial inquest into Hitler’s nose, of course, is an exercise in satiric metonymy, the figure of speech in which a part substitutes for the whole. The effort to understand, classify, and explain (ridicule) the anomaly of Hitler’s nose is really the attempt to explain (ridicule) the anomaly of Hitler himself. Which is why his initial resort to The Hitler Nobody Knows is so apropos, because the book was central to Hitler’s extremely shrewd, extremely well-controlled effort to manipulate his image—specifically, his physical appearance—to turn his notoriously non-Nordic-looking foreignness, his much-remarked-upon strangeness, into assets to his charisma.
It’s often forgotten how closely Hitler guarded the dissemination of his physical image, particularly in the early stages of his career. Dramatic illustration of the degree to which obfuscation was practiced can be found in a rather remarkable sidebar to a story in a 1923 issue of American Monthly, a sidebar entitled “What Does Hitler Look Like?” It’s remarkable because it was illustrated with an array of Hitlers: fat Hitlers, thin Hitlers, blond Hitlers, bald Hitlers, bearded Hitlers, every Hitler but the actual Hitler. The premise of the article—which was written in a disingenuously naïve tone and which seemed to be willingly complicit in Hitler’s manipulative strategy—was to depict Hitler in the spirit of “that damned elusive Pimpernel.” Mysterious, daring, a man of so many disguises (because he was so controversial and made so many enemies) that his baffled opponents could not decide on what Hitler looked like, much less what the dashing rogue was up to. And so the story quoted various alleged misleading descriptions of him in the German and the world press and then illustrated these conjectures: blond Hitler, fat Hitler, and so on.
And, in fact, while it’s true Hitler exposed himself to public view in street rallies and beer-hall assemblies, places where perhaps he felt confident of the personal mind-clouding charisma, the power of Führerkontakt, to make his physical appearance irrelevant, he was extremely careful from the beginning to limit and control any photographic mass reproduction of his image. From the very earliest moments of his emergence, he strictly limited the number of people who could take his picture to exactly one: his trusted acolyte Heinrich Hoffmann. No outsiders, no insiders were allowed to photograph Hitler other than Hoffmann. And even Hoffmann was almost never permitted “candid” unrehearsed shots. As a recent museum exhibit of Hoffmann’s outtakes demonstrates, Hitler carefully rehearsed, edited, studied, and crafted the few poses he would permit the world to see.
Even after the “What does Hitler look like?” period of deliberate obfuscation (ostensibly for security reasons), unauthorized photographs of Hitler, certainly unauthorized close-ups, were almost nonexistent, so much so that few have disputed Munich photojournalist Tim Gidal’s contention that he took the only unauthorized candid shot of Hitler in existence.
The year was 1929, and Gidal, who went on to become a pioneering photojournalist for Life, was then the photographer for the Munich Illustrated News. I’d tracked Gidal down to a suburb in Jerusalem where, at ninety, he’d recently had a one-man show and a retrospective of his work published. We had a fruitful conversation about the world of anti-Hitler Munich journalists in the twenties—it was Gidal, in fact, who not only recalled Gerlich but alerted me to the existence of the Mongolian-blood attack on Hitler. Indeed, Gerlich had occasionally joined Gidal at his newspaper’s Stammtisch at the Café Heck, a place also frequented by Hitler. And it was in the garden of the Café Heck that Gidal had taken his unique photo of Hitler unguarded. He showed me the photo; there is something not only unfamiliar but disturbing about it. It shows Hitler conferring with three stout figures at a garden table beneath a leafy shade tree. With their backs to us, it’s hard to identify the others; one looks like a banker, two of them have tanklike military builds and brutal crew cuts. (The thick neck of one of them suggests it might be SA Commander Ernst Roehm.) Hitler gazes out, chin in hand, looking pensive, tentative, as if in the midst of crafting a thought, when he catches sight of Gidal and his camera, glances up with a dawning troubled awareness that he’d been caught. It’s a troubling image. One is tempted to say that this rather than any image by Heinrich Hoffmann is “the Hitler Nobody Knows,” the Hitler no one is permitted to see. It’s disturbing because that tentative, half-formed quality of surprise and curiosity on Hitler’s face makes him look more “human” than we are comfortable with. The pictures Hitler authorized Hoffmann to release almost all tended to project what Hanfstaengl called Hitler’s “Napoleonic” mode, which gave him an air (at least in retrospect) of somewhat ridiculous martial pretentiousness. Gidal’s picture reaffirms that Hitler is most frightening now when he seems in any way human, tentative, seems even slightly like one of us. Which in Gidal’s stolen Café Heck shot he does.
Perhaps that was the calculation behind the release of The Hitler Nobody Knows. At a certain point in the early thirties when Hitler had emerged from post-putsch disgrace and ridicule to become a major figure in German politics, the calculus of image control changed. The aura of mystery that worked for him was threatened by the rumors of alienness, of a nicht natürlich persona that undermined his newly prominent public role. A decision was made to permit a kind of authorized candor, photos of officially licensed informality to demonstrate there was nothing abnormal about the man. And so The Hitler Nobody Knows showed him engaged in “normal” gemütlichkeit pursuits, friendly interchanges with fellow citizens, relaxing in casual Bavarian (as opposed to militaristic) garb. The title—The Hitler Nobody Knows—played upon the air of mystery, seeming to promise disclosure of secrets, to reveal a Hitler that Hitler didn’t want revealed. When, in fact, it was an authorized unauthorized Hitler, carefully calculated to “disclose” the secret that there was no (shameful) secret.
While release of more photographic images would inevitably make people more aware of how short he fell of the Nordic racial ideal he was espousing so furiously, by that time he’d created such an aura of mystery about himself that the revelation of a non-Nordic physiognomy had less impact than the revelation that Hitler was otherwise relatively “normal” looking, that he engaged in normal-seeming German activities.
Gerlich is pressing upon the sensitivity with which the Hitler image had been managed in his arch reference to the supposedly “real” Hitler revealed in the Hoffmann book. But Gerlich solemnly pretends to take seriously the claim of The Hitler Nobody Knows to depict the unguarded truth because he has his own satiric agenda. He turns Hoffmann’s book into a treatise on “The Nose Nobody Knows” and submits to the jury four smiling images of Hitler from the Hoffmann book.
“Here, then,” he says, “we find a series of photographs that differ significantly” from the snarling image of Hitler’s head atop the body of the Negro groom. Different poses, yes, he points out, but the same “peculiar nose,” which proves that the one in his bridal composite was not an accident of camera angle but “his real nose.”
Now that the authenticity of the specimen has been verified, Gerlich, the inquiring scientist, brings in a fellow scientist to consult on its peculiarities: “We now present two illustrations of persons with Nordic noses, from Racial Characteristics of the German People by Dr. Hans F. Günther, who, as is well known, has been named professor of racial research at the University of Jena by the Thuringian National Socialist Minister Frick.”
Frick was famous then for being the first Nazi t
o become a cabinet minister in one of the states that made up the Weimar Republic. Günther was in the forefront of the “racial scientists” who purported to give academic coloration to Nazi racism, an avatar of the discredited quackery of nineteenth-century racial theorists Hitler admired, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Günther then will be Gerlich’s “expert witness” in the trial of Hitler’s nose.
“The racial research of these scientists,” Gerlich gravely tells us, “informs us that the nose of a Nordic Aryan human being has a small bridge and a small base.” He then submits to the court “two illustrations of persons with Nordic noses,” two photographs of Aryan individuals with their small-bridged, small-based noses.
Triumphantly, he invites us to compare the Hitler noses with the Nordic noses, helpfully pointing out that “the noses of the Ostic [Eastern] and Mongolian type are based widely, have flat bridges and, in general, have a little break in their bridge that puts the end of the nose a little bit forward and higher.” Hitler’s nose, he needn’t add, fits the latter description—a description by Hitler’s own racial theorists of Oriental noses—far better than it fits the description of the more delicate bridges and bases of the Nordic nose.
Relentlessly, Gerlich presses his case. Look again at Hitler’s nose, he urges the reader. Notice the resemblance to one of Günther’s examples of the Slavonic or Bohemian-type nose. The Slavic type, he points out, “was formed by the intermingling after the Hun invasion of Mongols with original Slav bloodstock.”
Now Gerlich’s off to the races, taking wicked delight in rubbing his readers’ noses in the ugly truth about Hitler’s nose. What follows is a detailed demonstration, in the quack rhetoric of Hitler’s own racial scientist, that Hitler’s nose is not only at best Slavonic rather than Nordic, but Slavonic in a very special way: Slavonic in a way that reflects the Mongolian invasions of Europe by Attila the Hun’s hordes. Hitler’s nose, then, is not even compatible with pure, albeit “inferior,” Slav stock, but with the mongrel, mixed-blood Slav types who are the bastard offspring of the rape of Slav women by invading Mongol horsemen.
“The war-strategy of those times,” Gerlich the mock pedant writes, “made it customary for the victorious armies to have sex with the women and girls of the defeated peoples. . . . We have to suppose that in the home region of Hitler’s family foreign, no Nordic blood remained.”
Helpfully, Gerlich reminds us that his sustained attention to the minutiae of nose forms is justifiable because, “according to the racial science of Günther” and thus Hitler himself, the nose is the “most important symptom of the racial descent of a person.” And so, yes, the nose stands for the man, metonymically and racially, but one also has to wonder if there is not a kind of sly comic displacement going on here as well in which—as it does in Tristram Shandy’s long mock-scientific disquisition on the differences between long- and short-nosed people—there is some salacious displacement of one body part for another. In the same way, one wonders if in Gerlich’s “scholarly” attribution of Mongolian blood to Hitler there is also a kind of displacement going on—a subtextual allusion to Hitler’s more widely rumored “Jewish blood.”
But overtly at least, Gerlich has a different kind of displacement in mind: the shift from the question of whether Hitler has a Nordic nose to the one of whether he has a Nordic soul. The nose analysis is mainly malicious fun (although it anticipates an important strain of Hitler-explanation theory, the one that focuses on the aesthetic-eugenic origins of racial anti-Semitism). But Gerlich’s inquest into the question of whether Hitler has a Nordic soul is deadly serious.
He begins by citing the other avatar of Nazi racial science, Alfred Rosenberg, who decreed that the worldview (Weltanschauung) of an individual is a consequence of his race and blood. Gerlich then proceeds to work backward to examine the Hitlerian worldview to determine just what racial-blood composition gave birth to it. It should be emphasized that, in pursuing this line, Gerlich is not accepting the validity of Rosenberg’s race-based theory any more than he’s accepting Günther’s nose-based classification system; rather, he’s using these crackpot theories to hoist Hitler by his own petard.
What Gerlich does first is define what he believes to be the true, primal meaning of the Germanic soul—or at least what he somewhat wishfully defines as the German soul: “We are in the fortunate position through having the law books of the old Germans available of knowing exactly their conceptions, which have long since been expressed in the phrase ‘Germanic common liberties.’”
He expands upon the concept of these liberties by observing that it is the characteristic of the true old Germans that “they didn’t even give total obedience to their own leader or king. And, in fact, in times of peace, the king actually is the servant of the wishes of the people.” He cites the words of the racial-science quack Günther on the nature of ancient Aryan-Germanic freedom: “To be free means for the German or Nordic individual living according to his own individual judgment; [he displays] a passion for intellectual liberty and his own independent belief . . . a bluff independence” that led to Germany becoming a stronghold of Protestantism in Catholic Europe.
This Germanic conception of the relationship between leader and people is, Gerlich then slyly asserts, “the absolute opposite of the Asiatic-despotic conception. Even in times of war, the Germanic duke didn’t have the power of life or death but is still completely indebted to the will of the people. He never has a role comparable to the one of the Asiatic-despotic emperor—or in the terminology of today, the dictator.”
Who could he be thinking of? Who fits the definition of the “Asiatic-despotic” soul, the one that stands in sharp contrast to the true Germanic one?
“Adolf Hitler,” he says, “explains that in his political movement there is only one will and that’s his. . . . He never has to explain what he does . . . his followers have to carry out his commands without any information. . . . The contrast between the real Nordic ideal and the one of Hitler cannot be expressed any more dramatically. Hitler’s attitude is absolutely un-Nordic and un-Germanic. It is, racially, pure Mongolian” (emphasis added).
It should come as no surprise that in the capstone of Gerlich’s parody of racial science, Hitler has a Mongolian weltanschauung; after all, he has a Mongolian nose, Mongolian blood, and the great theorist Rosenberg himself has proclaimed that the soul is a “consequence” of the blood. Hitler’s Mongolian attitude is “prefigured by the great Mongolian leaders Genghis Khan and Tamerlane,” Gerlich argues in a more serious vein. “It is Mongolian absolute despotism that is expressed in Hitler’s attitude and that can be explained by the fact that this man is a typical bastard who has mainly non-Nordic blood in his veins.” Framing his conclusion in the creepy blood rhetoric of the newly hatched vampire-horror-film genre, he declares: “With Adolf Hitler, the Mongolian blood that has migrated here for two thousand years is making an effort to take over the power of the state and the people.”
The Nazi movement itself betrays its “mongolian essence,” Gerlich declares, in its “Asiatic” idol worship of its leader. And, finally, he directs the reader’s attention to a portrait of Stalin he reproduces in the text following the comparative-nose photos. Stalin, Hitler’s Bolshevik Antichrist, nonetheless, Gerlich says, shares with Hitler both Asiatic features and an Asiatic soul, ruling Russia as a Khan-like despot. Hitler has more in common with his Marxist archenemy physically—and philosophically in his worldview—than with true Germanic ideals, Gerlich concludes.
In using this satiric conceit to redefine Hitler, in using Hitler’s ridiculous “racial science” to prove Hitler was not Aryan but Mongolian in blood and weltanschauung, Gerlich risks being misinterpreted as somehow endorsing the hierarchy of values of the “racial scientists” and merely placing Hitler lower on the racial hierarchy than Hitler would place himself. In fact, of course, Gerlich’s endorsing a very different hierarchy of values—one that places liberty, autonomy, and independent thought above all else—beliefs that
could be held by anybody of any race regardless of “blood”—and is trying to redefine the Germanic ideal as that ideal, not some pathetic nonsense about nose shape.
And in a follow-up article in the next week’s issue of Der Gerade Weg, he makes his antiracialist stance explicit. In it, he discusses the violent reaction to the Mongolian-blood issue. Nazi thugs stoned his apartment building, and some Hitler-sympathizing readers expressed particular outrage at the pairing of Hitler and the Negro bride.
“We can’t,” Gerlich replies, speaking for his paper’s Catholic editors,
understand how people who call themselves righteous Catholics could feel upset by the juxtaposition of Hitler and a Negro woman. What exactly bothers you, dear ladies and gentlemen? Didn’t you learn, in the first principles of our religion’s catechism, not only that all men have their souls bestowed on them by God but also that we are all descendants of one father and one mother, children of Adam and Eve? According to our own Catholic principles, Negroes are our brothers and sisters even by blood? It is totally impossible for those of us with Catholic worldviews to “degrade” a Central European like Adolf Hitler by pairing him with a Negro woman. A Negro woman isn’t a person of inferior race. . . . We regard a Negro woman as our sister in blood [emphasis added].
It is acerbic, arch, acidulous, designed to further offend Hitler sympathizers by demanding they admit that their religious principles require them to hold Hitler on the same level as a woman they, in their racist mind-set, believe inferior—thus pitting their religion against their racism. It could just be a rhetorical tactic, this assertion of the spiritual (and blood) kinship of blacks and Germans. But I can’t help sensing that on Gerlich’s part there is something that rings true and seems heartfelt: A genuine, not rhetorical, religious belief in true human brotherhood and the irrelevance of race lies beneath his contempt for Hitler and his “racial science.”
Explaining Hitler Page 31
