A US exhibition, Prelude to a Nightmare, places Hitler's vision in an artistic context and shows how his aesthetic sensibility shaped Nazism, writes Anna Mundow
"Puny, pale and serious, what was most conspicuous about him were his mental rigidity, his inflexibility and inhibition, his fear of women and his inability to be merry and have a good time with others" - Brigitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna
"Even more than from hunger, he suffered from the lack of cleanliness, as he was almost pathologically sensitive about anything concerning the body" - August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew
Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in 1908, aged 18. His ambition was to become a painter, architect or set designer. But he lived in squalor for five years, producing dull watercolours and crude drawings that failed to earn him admission to the Academy of Fine Arts. "Perhaps had there been a less rigid professor judging the exams, the entire history of the 20th century would have been different," observes Deborah Rothschild, curator of Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler's Early Years in Vienna 1906 - 1913.
Conceived at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, a new and highly original exhibition has generated enormous interest and some controversy in the US and will almost certainly travel to Europe. (Rothschild is deluged with invitations but not yet committed to any tour.)
The interest is understandable. Prelude to a Nightmare brings together for the first time Hitler's own paintings, work by artists he revered and artists he despised and almost 300 exhibits ranging from film footage to theatrical designs - all intended to place Hitler's appalling vision in an artistic as well as a political context. "Adolf Hitler was an artist," Peter Schjeldahl wrote recently in the New Yorker. "A modern artist at that, and Nazism was a movement shaped by his aesthetic sensibility . . . Nazism, in a horrible way, was a programme to remodel the world according to a certain taste."
The controversy surrounding the exhibition was predictable; any treatment of Hitler invites it. Earlier this summer, for example, the CBS television network drew fire when it unveiled Young Hitler, its autumn mini-series based on the first part of Ian Kershaw's biography and starring Ewan McGregor in the title role. "We find it very distressing that people would spend talent, time and money to make this man human," complained Abraham Foxman, chairman of the Anti Defamation League.
That Hitler was - could only have been - human, is a moot point. Acknowledging that fact is the offence, one that Prelude to a Nightmare commits without apology.
"It was not necessary for us to go out to study the mass misery of the city," August Kubizek wrote of the Vienna he inhabited with his close friend, Adolf Hitler. "It was brought into our own home with its damp and crumbling walls, bug-infested furniture and unpleasant odour of kerosene . . . Adolf, homeless, rejected by the academy, without any chance of changing his miserable position, developed during this period an ever growing sense of rebellion."
The idea of Hitler the failed artist forging his resentment into megalomania is a familiar one. But Prelude to a Nightmare poses a less mechanical, more interesting theory: Hitler failed in Vienna, but he also learned. "Mankind needs an idol," he observed in a 1942 monologue. "Monarchy instituted something extremely useful: it artificially created the idol. All that fuss, the whole shebang, did make sense in a way."
Entering the exhibition, there is rare film footage of Vienna celebrating the 60th anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz Josef in 1908 with massive processions that inspired the Nazi extravaganzas staged by Hitler 30 years later.
"A mass rally is designed to switch off the thinking process," he once remarked. "Only then will people be ready to accept the magical simplifications before which resistance crumbles."
Paintings of the Vienna City Ball by Wilhelm Gause and images of the city's splendid boulevards, parks and museums contrast with rare photographs of the vegetable market and the backstreets that Hitler frequented and the socialist parades that he surely witnessed. Here also are some campaign posters and speeches of Vienna's populist, anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Luegner, whose charismatic oratorical style would be adapted by the Fuhrer.
To the young Hitler, however, politics was a secondary interest. The exhibition makes this point - one of its most tantalising - with extracts from Mein Kampf, from Kubizek's The Young Hitler I Knew, from other memoirs and, of course, with Hitler's drawings and paintings, which tease us with a glimpse of an alternative future in which the Austrian provincial might have become a workmanlike illustrator or at least a studio apprentice.
One missed opportunity in particular stands out. While living in Vienna, Hitler obtained a letter of introduction to Alfred Roller, the renowned graphic artist and stage designer who created sets for the Vienna Court Opera's productions of Wagner and who was a leading figure in the anti-academic Secessionist movement. If art was Hitler's obsession, Wagner was his passion; in 1906, during his first visit to the city, the 17-year-old Hitler heard Gustav Mahler conduct Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna Court Opera and later praised the maestro for interpreting Wagner "with a perfection that for its time literally shone".
Armed with his precious introduction, Hitler approached Roller's door three times but never found the nerve to knock. When the two met in 1934, the Nazi leader laughingly recalled his timidity. By then, of course, things had changed, a point tellingly made in the exhibition by a photograph of a Nazi night rally at Nuremberg in 1934 and a drawing of Roller's set design for Wagner's Rienzi in 1925, both employing light, fire, smoke and gigantic architecture to great effect.
The exhibition makes clever use of a Nazi design motif: red banners form a colonnade down the centre of the room, creating a lofty sense of near-grandeur in a very ordinary space. The only thing missing is the Swastika, a symbol whose origins and evolution are illustrated with Hitler's sketches for flags, standards and medals and with Guido von List's 1907 publication, The Secret of the Runes, which transformed the ancient sun-sign into a badge of Aryan purity. Also on display are insane writings on racial purity by von List's disciple, Lanz von Liebenfels, who was considered deranged by most who knew him - with the exception of Hitler, who attempted to transform art into an expression of Nazi racial policy.
One of the revelations of the exhibition is how bad that art was. Hitler's own work is mostly pathetic. Even now, more than 90 years later, it is embarrassing to view the three rural sketches that he submitted for the entrance examination to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts School of Painting in 1908. In Waterwheel, for example, the perspective is cockeyed and you can almost feel the clumsy pencil digging into the page. Mountain Chapel, a watercolour painted in 1909 as a commission secured for Hitler by the Jewish dealer, Samuel Morgenstern, is pretty if you like that kind of thing. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl even called it "rather nice".
Kitsch is the constant here. You see it in the subjects Hitler attempted and in the mawkish paintings he admired - Eduard Grutzner's chubby drunken monks or August Heyn's romantic farmhouse scenes. (Hitler, one suspects, would have loved Norman Rockwell's sentimental American illustrations.) You see full-blown bad taste in Reich-endorsed paintings such as Ivo Salinger's Double Nude (c. 1940), which depicts two perfect naked women in classical pose with rosy skin that resembles fibreglass, and in the gigantic sculptures that adorned Nazi processions and rallies.
Journalist Alan Moorehead was struck by the latter when he covered the 1936 Olympics: "The main driveway up to the stadium was lined with statues of the young demi-gods and goddesses of the new Nazi age: great bull-like young men with truculent sexual parts and huge-bellied women carrying sheaves of wheat. There they stood flexing their muscles and gazing with calm, animal strength away to the horizon." (A Late Education, Hamish Hamilton 1970.)
Equally revealing is the art that Hitler detested. Midway through the exhibition you suddenly come across what he termed "Degenerate Art": paintings by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka that even today are shocking in their subtlety and humanity. An exquisite pencil drawing by Gustav Klimt, Embracing Couple (1908), is the most eloquent and moving rebuttal of Nazism's monumental grossness.
The exhibition's central argument - that Nazism's aesthetics and much of its philosophy had its roots in imperial, avant-garde Vienna - is convincing and dramatically made. But Rothschild's conclusion that "Adolf Hitler lacked originality both as an artist and a thinker" seems wrongheaded and, more importantly, irrelevant. The exhibits themselves - tracing the progression from Viennese frippery to Nazi brutishness - contradict it.
"Indeed, the show leaves no doubt that Nazism was a singular invention and that Hitler was its indispensable author," writes Peter Schjeldahl. "Without him, fascism might well have succeeded in Germany, but nothing foreordained Nazism's blend of dash and malice, its brilliant technology and skulking atavism."
A prosaic still from a film taken in the Berlin bunker in April 1945 eerily suggests that, for Hitler, the dream of inhabiting one of Alfred Roller's Wagnerian stage sets may have been the defining quest all along. The photograph captures a puffy-eyed Führer just hours before his suicide sitting in front of the architect's model of his design for the cultural complex in the city of Linz, staring with rapt attention into its miniature buildings and parks.
Architect Hermann Giesler, who delivered the model in February 1945, later recalled: "No matter what time, whether during the day or at night . . . he was sitting in front of this model," studying it "as if it was a promised land into which we would gain entrance".
Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler's Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913 runs at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, until October 27th