Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  Now that he had the House of German Art at his disposal, Hitler repeatedly took the opportunity until the outbreak of war to make programmatic statements on matters of art and culture. In July 1938 and 1939 he again opened the Great German Art Exhibition in person, in September 1937 and 1938 he gave his ‘culture speech’ at the Party Congress, and on 22 January 1938 in the House of German Art he opened the first Architecture and Crafts Exhibition, which then went on to be held annually. As early as December 1938 he spoke in the run-up to the second exhibition.

  Even though he repeatedly attacked modern art in these speeches, in 1938 he saw himself as particularly under pressure to justify in detail the campaign against ‘Degenerate Art’ begun the previous year. In view of the criticism levelled not only abroad but also in artistic circles in Germany at the ruthless ‘purging’ of German museums, he did not wish to appear a cultural barbarian.61 Once again he used convoluted explanations to indicate that he was in no way satisfied with the level of what was on display. His aim was rather to maintain ‘a nation’s broad artistic heritage on a solid and respectable foundation’ so that ‘true geniuses can then emerge’.62

  However, one year later, as is shown by his speech at the third Great German Art Exhibition in 1939, there had been no progress beyond a ‘respectable general standard’. What was needed was ‘the application of more stringent criteria from one exhibition to the next and the selection of the outstanding work from the generally competent products’.63 In saying this Hitler was pinning his hopes on the idea that the new Nazi art would one day be capable of connecting aesthetically with the nineteenth century,64 with the art he himself particularly admired and of which he claimed to be a good judge and a connoisseur.65 If we look more closely at Hitler’s preferences in this field the biographical links and the political and ideological premises of his understanding of art become clear. In addition to the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, Hitler’s favourites included the ‘German-Romans’ Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach as well as a whole series of later Romantic and genre painters. He thus particularly admired Moritz von Schwind (whose work he most likely knew from his days in Linz and Vienna)66 and he enjoyed Carl Spitzweg’s small-town idylls, Eduard Grützner’s carousing monks, and Franz Defregger’s scenes of peasant life. He was also very taken with the Munich landscape painter Carl Rottmann and with Rudolf von Alt, whose views of the city of Vienna had at one time served as Hitler’s models for his own watercolours.67 He also admired the great Munich portrait painters Friedrich August von Kaulbach and Franz von Lenbach, Hans Makart, whose prestige paintings had contributed to Vienna’s artistic life in the period when the Ringstrasse was built, and Adolph Menzel, above all for his historical depictions of Frederick the Great, whom Hitler revered.

  It is not difficult to discern in this selection the influence of the taste predominant in Vienna and even more so in Munich at the turn of the century. In Munich, for example, the Schack Gallery, which Hitler knew well and which came to play an important role in his museum plans, housed works by Böcklin, Feuerbach, Lenbach, Rottmann, Schwind, and Spitzweg.68 In addition to these Viennese and Munich influences the great ‘Exhibition of the Century’ of 1906 in the Berlin National Gallery, in which German painting from the first half of the nineteenth century was rediscovered and made available to a wide public as an important phase in the development of German art, had left a deep impression on him. At the time popular art journals of the kind Hitler read carried extensive articles on this exhibition.69 From Hitler’s point of view the artists he favoured distinguished themselves through the fact that they had worked before or outside Modernism in art and that they had not been produced by the academies of art that he so hated (although in a number of cases he was wrong about this). Instead he assumed that for the most part the artists he admired had either pursued their own path as unrecognized geniuses in the face of opposition or had only achieved the fame they deserved after their deaths. The points of contact with his own perception of himself as a man of genius who was prevented by adverse circumstances from pursuing an artistic career but who had brought his ‘artistic’ abilities – imagination and intuition – into politics, are only too obvious.

  Hitler built up a collection of paintings of his own mirroring these preferences. The way these pictures were hung in his various official and private residences betrays a strong awareness of display and effect. The pictures in his Munich flat reflected completely his personal taste in art, while any visitor was likely to imagine he was seeing the collection (which stopped at the end of the nineteenth century) of a wealthy Munich citizen. The Prinzregentenplatz was home to Böcklin’s dramatic ‘Battle of the Centaurs’, which depicts an elemental and barbaric struggle between two blond and three dark centaurs, Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck in the uniform of a cuirassier, a portrait of Richard Wagner, Feuerbach’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, also a Brueghel, a country scene by Defregger, two Grützners, Böcklin’s ‘Spring Dance’, several Spitwegs, and a portrait of Geli by Ziegler.70

  In the imposing Great Hall at the Berghof the positioning of the paintings was based on matching prominent nineteenth-century works with their models, old Italian masters – a combination that was designed to demonstrate to visitors their host’s expert knowledge of art history.71 Feuerbach’s portrait of a woman, ‘Nanna’, was there (most likely chosen by Hitler at least in part because of the obvious similarity to Geli), also Schwind’s ‘The Arts in the Service of Religion’, ‘Venus’ by Titian’s pupil Paris Bordone, Bordone’s ‘Lady with an Apple’ (which replaced ‘Nanna’ in 1938), a number of works by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the most important Italian painter of ruins in the eighteenth century, which pleased Hitler by showing how buildings could have ‘value as ruins’, and a Madonna tondo from the sixteenth century. Two portraits of Hitler’s parents by an amateur artist completed the display. In Hitler’s office at the Berghof there was a portrait of Field-Marshal von Moltke by Lenbach, while in the entrance halls there were two Bismarck portraits by the same painter.

  In the Führer building in Munich the paintings were mainly on loan from the Schack Gallery and the Bavarian State Collection. Adolf Ziegler’s triptych ‘The Four Elements’, an attempt to find images for Nazi ideology, was one of the few contemporary pictures from Hitler’s own collection that he had put up in a significant location in the Party headquarters. The pictures in Hitler’s office offered a visual lesson in politics and history: once again a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach, a picture by Menzel of Frederick the Great, and Defregger’s ‘From the Wars of Liberation 1809’, a scene from the Tyrol uprising, and also a Spitzweg.72

  In the Reich Chancellery Hitler was keen to add dignity to his immediate working environment by adding portraits of historical figures. His office was graced by a full-length portrait from the state collection of Bismarck, an earlier incumbent; in the drawing room there was an oval, contemporary portrait of Frederick the Great in old age that Hitler had acquired and which he kept by him up to 1945, wherever he was living. In addition, in 1935 he acquired portraits by Lenbach of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Friedrich III for the office. In the function rooms in the Reich Chancellery there were three works whose somewhat obscure symbolism inevitably attracted the attention of visitors. The dining room was dominated by Friedrich August Kaulbach’s ‘Triumph of Music’ from Hitler’s private collection. For the large reception room created in 1935 Hitler chose Feuerbach’s ‘Plato’s Feast’, a painting three metres by six in size on loan from the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe. In 1936 he acquired Böcklin’s ominous painting ‘Island of the Dead’, which hung over the fireplace in the reception hall.73

  In the new Reich Chancellery, inaugurated in Berlin in 1939, Speer put together a collection of paintings consisting mainly of loans from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The tapestries and paintings, ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and predominantly based on classical themes, were designed to underline the claim of the ‘Greater German Empire’ to hist
orical greatness.74

  When the Anschluss in February 1938 brought Austria into the German Reich, Hitler was in a position to consider realizing the plans we know he had pursued since the 1920s for an important gallery of nineteenth century German painting in Linz.75 While on a journey to Italy in May 1938, he made extended visits to museums and these may well have given him the decisive impetus to turn these plans into reality. He regarded his own collection as the basis for the Linz project, which naturally called for a new building, and so he extended it significantly. He issued an instruction securing for himself first refusal on the confiscated Jewish art collections in Austria and made use of this prerogative via an expert on Hess’s staff.76

  As a result of his visit on 18 June 1938 to the Dresden State Art Gallery with its superb collection of Old Masters, Hitler enlarged considerably his plans for a museum in Linz. The very same day he issued a confidential instruction reserving for himself the decision on how works confiscated from their Jewish owners would be dealt with. He used this instrument primarily to secure Old Masters for the Linz museum. The first floor of this building was now to house a collection of European Masters up to the end of the eighteenth century, while the second floor would contain German art of the nineteenth century. He reinstated Hans Posse, the longstanding director of the Dresden Gallery, who a short time before had been pensioned off after disputes with the Nazis in Saxony, in his former post and charged him with the task of setting up the ‘Führer’s Museum’, as the project was called, in Linz.77 Hitler did not envisage a large-scale, world-class museum. Instead the Linz gallery was to be regarded as an important addition to the existing range of museums in what was now the Greater German Reich and as the generous gift of a passionate and knowledgeable collector. He was confident that posterity would turn a blind eye to the fact that his passion as a collector rested on criminal impulses.

  ‘The Third Reich’s Master Builder’

  Given the fact that even he was not truly convinced by the works of the artists in his Reich, Hitler used his frequent speeches on culture (for example his addresses to the Party Rally in 1935 and 1936) to highlight Nazi achievements in the field of architecture and to emphasize how excellent and unique they were.78 ‘Never in German history were greater and nobler buildings planned, begun, and completed than in our time’, he declared at the 1937 Party Rally. They should not be ‘thought of as designed to last to 1940, not even to 2000, but rather they shall reach up like the cathedrals of our past into future millennia.’79

  In fact, 1937 was the year in which he gave renewed and decisive impetus to Nazism’s great architectural projects, some of which had been initiated in 1933. In doing so, Hitler was not only emphasizing his role in cultural politics but was aiming as ‘Master Builder of the Third Reich’80 to give expression through imposing building projects to his ambitions for Germany as a great power in this decisive phase of his plans for expansion. His aesthetic model for realizing these plans was the classical world, for to his mind this era, by contrast with the gloomy mysticism of Christianity, stood out by virtue of its ‘clarity, greatness, and monumentality’.81 In his view, this approach was called for if only because of his conviction that the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons, the real ‘founders of culture’, all belonged to the same Aryan ‘original race’ and it alone was capable of ‘immortal’ achievements.82 This attitude was at the root of Hitler’s preference for classicizing architecture. Yet unlike Karl Friedrich Schinkel,83 whom he considered exemplary, Hitler pursued an idea of classicism determined solely by the desire to use architecture as an embodiment of power. The style he favoured as dictator and prescribed to his architects, such as Troost and Speer, looked out of proportion, and oversized, in other words it conveyed the impression of an impoverished and gloomy classicism that almost seemed a caricature of its classical ‘models’.

  Hitler’s main building project, the large-scale remodelling of Berlin, had not, however, proceeded in the previous years on the scale and at the pace he required. Because of persistent problems with the city administration and his difficult relationship with its head, Julius Lippert, Hitler came up with the idea in 1936 of creating a new body to be responsible for the development. He had probably given the first commission by March 1936 to Albert Speer.84

  In his 1937 speech to the Reichstag marking 30 January, Hitler announced that Speer had been appointed General Buildings Inspector for the Reich capital; it was to be his responsibility ‘to bring into the chaotic Berlin sprawl those magnificent clean lines that will do justice to the spirit of the National Socialist movement and the essence of the Reich capital’. Twenty years were envisaged for the execution of the plans. Speer, who was given extraordinary powers, was not subordinate to any ministry or regional authority but was answerable to Hitler alone.85 Within one year these powers were increased by law and extended to other cities also, Hitler expressly reserving the right to determine which cities should be included during what period in Speer’s redevelopment programme.86

  At the end of April 1938 Hitler announced in the Munich press how he envisaged the redevelopment of the ‘Capital of the Movement’. By constructing a new railway station three kilometres to the west of its previous location, space would be created where the platforms and tracks had been for a ‘a street of truly monumental buildings’, as the official press release put it. These prestigious new buildings would lead up to a ‘monument to the Movement’ at least 175 metres high. In addition there were plans for the Party offices to be extended in the Maxvorstadt district and for a complete overhaul of the traffic arrangements.87 The memoirs of the architect Hermann Giesler reveal that since November 1938 Hitler had been discussing the plans for Munich in great detail.88 At the end of December he officially included the city in the redevelopment programme and appointed Giesler as ‘Director of Works’ with overall responsibility.89

  At an early stage Hitler already had plans to redevelop Hamburg, the second largest city in the Reich.90 When visiting the city in June 1935, he appears to have ordered a viaduct to be built. In June 1936 he showed a preliminary sketch to Fritz Todt, who was responsible for planning, and in July 1939 the basic outline of the redevelopment plan had been established. Essentially it amounted to creating a north–south axis in Altona with prestigious buildings ending at the River Elbe in a tower 250 metres high that would be the Gau headquarters of the NSDAP.91

  At the turn of 1938/39 Hitler charged the Munich professor Roderich Fick with taking forward the plans to redevelop Linz, thus realizing the architectural fantasies that the teenage Hitler had produced for his home town. From the autumn of 1940 onwards Fick was increasingly in competition with Giesler, whose planning for Munich had in the meantime won him Hitler’s special trust. For that reason Hitler gave him more and more responsibility for the Linz project.92

  Finally, in February 1939 Hitler included the Gau capitals Augsburg, Bayreuth, Breslau, Dresden, Graz, and Würzburg in the redevelopment plans.93 At the beginning of 1941 Speer could already count twenty-seven towns and cities that Hitler had designated by decree as ‘cities to be restructured’.94 The redesigned provincial city centres adhered to a standard format; the Gau headquarters, a large hall for meetings, and a free-standing bell tower were to be grouped in the centre round a ‘Gau forum’, a parade ground. In Weimar this arrangement had been in existence since 1936 and it served as the model for planning (which usually got no further) in other cities. The new parade ground was located as a rule at the end of a broad approach road with additional monumental buildings. In this way a symbol of the new order would develop alongside the historic city centre.95 In the later 1930s NSDAP local politicians and town planners were already also beginning to apply this model (parade ground, Party offices, axis road) to county towns and smaller communities.96 Nazism’s architecture of domination was to cover the Reich. Furthermore, Hitler made the remodelling of even provincial towns a personal concern of his, intervening in the planning and contributing sketches.97

  In the spri
ng of 1937 building work began in Berlin on the first large prestige project embarked on in anticipation of the extensive redevelopment plans, namely the New Reich Chancellery, Hitler’s monumental official seat.98 Since moving into Wilhelmstrasse Hitler had been extremely unhappy with his official residence, which fell far short of his expectations of grandeur. In an article he published in 1939 in the journal Art in the Third Reich concerning the building of the New Reich Chancellery, he complained that the historic Chancellery had been in a sorry state, while the modern extension created between 1928 and 1930 looked like ‘a warehouse or a municipal fire station’.99 As early as autumn 1933 Speer had begun extensive alterations, in part based on Troost’s plans, to the various parts of the building used by Hitler for official business, for state occasions, and as his private apartments. After he also assumed the office of Reich President in 1934, an annexe was added for receptions and in 1935 a balcony on the street side, for which Hitler himself had supplied a sketch.

  In July 1935 Hitler then proposed that the new building be constructed along Vossstrasse, in other words built onto the old Chancellery building on the west side.100 A preliminary sketch from that year exists with essential features of the new building, although not yet on the scale it acquired later.101 At the start of 1936 Speer, on instructions from Hitler, began to make concrete plans that in turn were approved stage by stage by Hitler personally.102 Although originally the work was scheduled not to begin until 1939, in October 1936 Hitler decided to bring it forward. It was to be completed in phases over three or four years. Hitler’s decision to provide himself with an impressive official residence was thus strikingly aligned with his decisions to implement the Four-Year Plan.103