'Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics' traces Führer's fascination with the arts

On Nov. 27, 1936, art criticism was banned in Nazi Germany. As Frederic Spotts, author of a chilling new study, "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics," points out, the reasoning went that art critics had had three years to come around to the Nazi view of art, hadn't done so, and would be henceforth restricted to "straightforward reporting and positive evaluation."

Such an abridgment of intellectual freedom pales into comparative insignificance once one learns the full story of Hitler and the arts.

Written with the erudition of a scholar and the page-turning power of a suspense novelist, Spotts' book systematically explains the Führer's relation to all the arts and seeks answers to this central question, as Spotts puts it: "How could (Hitler) combine a sincere devotion to the arts with totalitarian rule, warfare and racial genocide?"

One finishes this book with a great deal more information, filled with statistical and anecdotal detail, but still not entirely clear as to why such historically unprecedented state patronage of the arts all went so horribly wrong.

Spotts claims it was not just Hitler's failure as an artist as a young man or his inability to be accepted by the Vienna Academy of Art (he was rejected three times).

Maniacally undaunted, he went on to become an itinerant street-scene painter anyway. (As the new film "Max" points out, his first clients were Jewish.) Hitler's blind spot was "confusing aesthetic drive with aesthetic talent." He wanted so badly to be an artist that he believed he was one in everything he touched, including military strategy, which he likened to theater design and film direction.

Once Hitler's greater gift for histrionic oratory swept him to power in 1933, he began to indulge his megalomaniacal schemes on a grand scale.

Making culture the centerpiece of Nazi Germany allowed full display of his "compulsively ostentatious taste." The most dangerous dilettante the world has ever known, Hitler had a hands-on approach to musical performance, visual arts, theater set design, architecture and interior design.

All this began with wholesale firings of artists and musicians from art schools, concert halls and conservatories, followed by exile or imprisonment, and continued with an aggressive policy of massive state support in which architecture and visual arts emulated ancient Greece.

Music policy favored Wagner, Bruckner and Franz Léhar over Beethoven, Brahms and Kurt Weill.

Spotts is also the author of a history of the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, so his chapter on Hitler's obsession with Wagner is especially rich in startling anecdotes, starting with Hitler's love of the Wagner family. When a grandson graduated from high school, he received a convertible from the Führer.

In a discussion of official and forbidden composers, however, Spotts fails to note the tragic murders of Jewish composers such as Erwin Schulhoff, Gideon Klein, Hans Krasa and Pavel Haas. Besides listing known collaborators such as composer Richard Strauss and conductor Herbert von Karajan, unsuccessful collaborators whom the Nazis spurned are also mentioned.

The painters Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Vasily Kandinsky openly sought government ties, while two giants of modern American architecture, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, added swastika decorations to plans for building competitions they entered and failed to win. Both left for the U.S. soon after.

Lavish benefits were showered on approved artists and included military-service exemption, income-tax limits, generous pensions, stipends, special homes, public commissions, medals and occasional favors contrary to Hitler's racial philosophy. When Strauss (whom Hitler made president of the Reich Culture Chamber) wrote Hitler complaining of treatment received in grade school by his half-Jewish grandson, Hitler immediately intervened and the harassment soon stopped.

The famous "Degenerate Art" show that opened July 19, 1937, mounted to ridicule modernist art, was just the beginning of Hitler's campaign to destroy modernism and replace it with a new Nazi art. The largest blockbuster art exhibit in history up to that time, it was the last chance for Germans to see some of the most beautiful and advanced art of the era. "(Six-hundred and fifty) works by 112 'art stutterers' from thirty-two public museums (went) on display."

More than 2 million people saw the show during its 12-city tour. But Hitler's goal of destruction followed by the construction of a new Nazi art left him bitterly disappointed.

No new art that he really enjoyed ever emerged, nor did a new Nazi music to rival Wagner appear, despite vast compulsory corporate contributions to the arts and taxes secretly allocated.

Hitler castigated modernism as a "perversion of naturalism," an example of "primitivism" that "lacked national character." After the war was lost, however, postwar Germany re-embraced modernism in art and music and put into motion a resurrected avant-garde that outlived the Third Reich and Hitler's bloody iron hand of patronage.