Hitler's Artwork

[Hollywood]

What is the foundation of your belief? You know not only the names of those professors, you also know their race/religion? 

This was not my personal belief but what was stated on a program on Austrian TV a few years ago. I am only repeating what was reported in this program, so don't kill the messenger.

[lukeottevanger]

Just for the record - there are some theories that see Hitler's antisemitism as a reaction to 1) Alfred Roller (famous for working with Mahler on those great opera productions in Vienna), who didn't find Hitler's work good enough to merit entry to the academy, or to 2) doctor Bloch, the man in charge of the ailing Mrs Hitler, who subsequently died: in this view, Hitler would have blamed doctor Bloch for the death of his mother. Both Roller and Bloch were Jewish. (But after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Hitler gave orders to treat the doctor well...)

Another more-or-less-wacky theory, depending on your point of view (the further you get into the book, the more wacky it seems, to my mind!) Beginning from a startling and seemingly hard-to-argue-with premise, though:

[greg]

This was not my personal belief but what was stated on a program on Austrian TV a few years ago. I am only repeating what was reported in this program, so don't kill the messenger.

maybe it was my American history teacher who saw the program, too? It was about 3 or 4 years, ago, though......

(btw, in my opinion he was a great teacher, now that i think about it. Either that or I'm just biased towards history teachers because I love history.  )

Another more-or-less-wacky theory, depending on your point of view (the further you get into the book, the more wacky it seems, to my mind!) Beginning from a startling and seemingly hard-to-argue-with premise, though:

interesting.... but the article says there is little evidence that they even knew each other 


strange, today I was reading a brief bio of Bartok and it mentions a period of time in the Holocaust in Hungary. He had to answer a form sent out to everyone in the country, asking if they're "of German blood, racially related, or Aryan." But Hungarians are technically non-Indo-European, more like Finno-Ugric, so it left me thinking...... wait, if the whole country is non-Aryan, would Hitler have eventually killed all of them too, if he wasn't stopped? And then what? 

[Lethevich]

strange, today I was reading a brief bio of Bartok and it mentions a period of time in the Holocaust in Hungary. He had to answer a form sent out to everyone in the country, asking if they're "of German blood, racially related, or Aryan." But Hungarians are technically non-Indo-European, more like Finno-Ugric, so it left me thinking...... wait, if the whole country is non-Aryan, would Hitler have eventually killed all of them too, if he wasn't stopped? And then what? 

There's a fair chance. I mean, Poles were ethnically/genetically almost identical to Germans at the time of WW2 and probably now, but don't let logic get in the way of your genocides...

[greg]

There's a fair chance. I mean, Poles were ethnically/genetically almost identical to Germans at the time of WW2 and probably now, but don't let logic get in the way of your genocides...

probably in the end having the Aryans be the only superior race was just a cover for his true plan- get the Germans to fight off the whole world, then eventually gather his remaining army, nuke them, and then be the last man alive. And then everyone in the world would be descended from him.

The biggest fault in his plan would be that he'd have to get more than the the Germans to do the battling. But HIS allies weren't big enough..

ok, enough of that 

[lukeottevanger]

interesting.... but the article says there is little evidence that they even knew each other 

It seems to me very likely that they would have known each other - it would have been highly improbable that they didn't, given the size of the school. We know for a fact that they were both there at the same time, in any case, and that they were both, in their different ways, shall we say 'exceptional personalities'. I think those who assert that Cornish provides no evidence that they knew each other protest just a little too much, a little too desperately, because they don't like what he goes on to suggest - and I myself don't have much time for what he goes on to say either. But at least on this matter his work seems to me to be statistically pretty well founded. There is no document in which either mentions knowing the other at school, true, but Cornish attempts to prove by sifting through the records of the other Jewish students at the school that Wittgenstein is the only one who fits the description of the 'Jewish boy' mentioned in Mein Kampf. It's an interesting line if nothing else....

[Lethevich]

Hitler followed his principles to the end: not being a true aryan, he exterminated himself.

[head-case]

Hitler followed his principles to the end: not being a true aryan, he exterminated himself.

Oddly enough, if he was seeking true Aryans he should have gone to India, which is where they came from.

[Josquin des Prez]

Oddly enough, if he was seeking true Aryans he should have gone to India, which is where they came from.

You mean thats where they came to.

[Josquin des Prez]

And then what? 

The Chinese, of course. And then, Mars.

[M forever]

Just for the record - there are some theories that see Hitler's antisemitism as a reaction to 1) Alfred Roller (famous for working with Mahler on those great opera productions in Vienna), who didn't find Hitler's work good enough to merit entry to the academy, or to 2) doctor Bloch, the man in charge of the ailing Mrs Hitler, who subsequently died: in this view, Hitler would have blamed doctor Bloch for the death of his mother. Both Roller and Bloch were Jewish. (But after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Hitler gave orders to treat the doctor well...)

I think both theories too easy, too much cause-and-effect. People are more complex than that. Hitler certainly was.

Indeed. There is no point in trying to find a simple explanation for why Hitler was an anti-semite. Or what would have happened/not happened if that assumed "trigger event" had not taken place. I am not even so sure that Hitler *was* that much of an anti-semite.

Yes, you read correctly. The more I learn about him, the less convinced I am that his anti-semitism, or indeed anything he preached with foam around the mouth, was actually rooted in some kind of deep inner conviction. He was just first and foremost an opportunist, a lost soul, a deeply disturbed nobody and underachiever, somebody who looked for an important role that he could play, any role, and he finally found that in playing the "savior of the German people" and then the "Fuehrer" in the political chaos of post-WWI Germany. All of which was really just an act. I don't think he actually believed too much in the ideological bullshit cocktail he and his friends were offering, but he found that that mix of simplistic and populist exaggerations and commonplaces gained them a lot of attention from the desperate and confused masses in that chaos and turmoil of the post-WWI years.

The way Hitler found to that ideology is highly characteristic: Since he had had no real life before the war, he had no life to return to after it. So he stayed enlisted and was actually an elected representant of his military unit during the shortlived Bavarian Council Republic which is sometimes referred to as Bavarian Soviet Republic because that is what the word "soviet" means: council. The idea was obviously based on the then very young Soviet Union, representation through elected councils. He may even have been a supporter of the socialist Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eichner who was assassinated and in whose funeral procession he took part - and Eichner was Jewish.

After the failure of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the establishment of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was employed by right wing army intelligence circles to spy and report on small subversive political organizations. So he went to a meeting of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party) and apparently, he got into a heated discussion there with some of the party members and they were impressed by his rhetorical skills and invited him to join. And the basic concept of the DAP which was later renamed to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party)=NSDAP="Nazis" made sense to him, so he adopted it.

That basic concept is reflected in the banner of the party which everyone knows but few understand what it actually stands for:



The red background stands for socialism=wellfare for the working masses. The white circle stands for conservatism (see also "the Reds" and "the Whites" in revolutionary Russia). The swastika stands for "Aryanism" or the idea of the unity of the people based on their alleged racial purity and superiority as Indo-European people. The "message" of this symbol is that while at that time, most people saw socialism and conservativism as absolutely irreconcileable political extremes - which was actually the reality of the time with its very heated debates and often violent clashes between left and right wing groups - because left wing views said that equality and social justice could only be brought about by getting read of the social stratification and therefore, the traditional class system, and right wing views wanted to conserve the "good values" of traditional society - anyway, while most people saw these "right" and "left" wing ideas as absolutely irreconcileable, the DAP and then NSDAP argued that both socialist and conservativist goals could be achieved under the guiding principle of the unity of the people as the primary interest. In order to achieve that, it needed to be defined what "the people" actually are, and who "the people's enemies" are. And, of course, the #1 candidates for that role were, once again, "the Jews".

Despite all the elaborate "racial" explanations, the simple and brutal truth is that Jews were assigned the role of scapegoat in that situation for the same reasons they had been used as targets for centuries: because they were a distinct, but fairly small and weak group of people who could be easily identified, set aside, and then blamed for everything.

The reality is that Germany at that time and also later wasn't united or even waiting to be united behind the Nazis or similar extreme right wing groups at all. On the contrary, the political spectrum was extremely wide and diverse and that is why it was so difficult for people in the Weimar Republic to find a common direction. In addition to that, traditional class and other differences were still were significant. Society was very compartmentalized. The old aristocratic upper class, the higher, middle and lower middle class, the lower working class, Catholics, Protestants, all these groups were just as separated from each other as from the German Jews, no matter if these were upper or lower class. If you were a, say, Bavarian Catholic working class member during that period, you would definitely not have that much to do with Jews, no matter if they were upper or lower class (and not all Jews were "rich"), and probably not have much sympathy for them either. But you wouldn't have that much to do with and more sympathy either for, say, the Protestant bourgeoise upper middle class people.

In addition to that, Germany was also geo-politically and culturally more diverse than most other countries. While most countries have one major epicentre of politics and power, and maybe a few side-centers, if at all, and the rest of the country is more or less deep province, Germany had dozens of political and cultural centers.

It was just very difficult to get all that under one hat in that time of deep crisis, and simpistic populist ideas found wider audiences than complicated and hard to understand concepts - just like it is in the political world of today, no matter where you live.

Every ideology needs an "enemy" and what made the Jews such a great target and scapegoat at the time was that while upper, middle, and lower class didn't really like each other, socialists didn't like conservative people and the other way around, Protestants didn't like Catholics, simply because they were different and separate classes of people, they all had in common that they didn't like the Jews. Or at least, even if they didn't care, that they could dislike them instead of each other.

Plus, there were actually not that many Jews in Germany at the time - about 600,000, less than 1% of the population, so they were a small and weak group. Ironically though, Jews were more integrated in Germany than anywhere else, so they had more opportunities and a better status than basically in any other countries. There were even Jewish generals in the Prussian army - unthinkable in any other country at the time.

Anyway, so while "anti-semitism" may have been "in the air" at that time, many other things were "in the air", the huge gaps between social and other classes of people made , so the basic concept of the NSDAP for how to get most of them under one umbrella was, from a populist point of view, actually very smart.

It appears that what interested Hitler in all that was not necessarily the ideological content, but the political/propagandist potential. Even when in power, Hitler was more interested in acting the "Fuehrer" and parading around in uniforms which, mostly unsuccessfully, tried to hide his fat ass, than in actual political work. Other people readily fulfilled those roles.

That is where the "3rd Reich" developed its own dynamic. Precisely because the "Fuehrer" (="the leader") didn't really lead that much but preferred to stay up late and go to the opera house or watch movies, mostly Hollywood musicals, with his inner circle and then sleep in, the regime developed its own uncontrollable dynamic in which some people simply took possession of certain subjects because it meant that they gained influence and importance.

In the meantime, the vast majority of Germans was obviously unimpressed by the anti-Jewish propaganda, they still went to Jewish shops even though "good Germans" were not supposed to go there, so some people in the regime decided to crank up the propaganda. Even the infamous "Reichskristallnacht" was not a "spontaneous" action of "the people" in general against Jews. It was orchestrated by Goebbels and his circle. Interestingly, Hitler thought that Goebbels had overstepped there. Overall, it seems that he didn't really care about the whole "Jewish question" at all, except when it was practical for political reasons to agitate against Jews. There are whole years in which he never even mentioned the "Jewish world conspiracy".

In my personal view, overall, he seems to have been more like a deluded opportunist than a fanatic really convinced of what he preached. Which may even be worse.

Oddly enough, if he was seeking true Aryans he should have gone to India, which is where they came from.

They did! They mounted extensive expeditions to Northern India and Tibet to look for descendants of the "original Aryans". But the term "Aryan" does not necessarily only refer to the Indo-Iranians who actually referred to themselves as "Aryans", it was assumed that that was what the "original" Proto-Indo-Europeans referred to themselves, too.

[greg]

It seems to me very likely that they would have known each other - it would have been highly improbable that they didn't, given the size of the school. We know for a fact that they were both there at the same time, in any case, and that they were both, in their different ways, shall we say 'exceptional personalities'. I think those who assert that Cornish provides no evidence that they knew each other protest just a little too much, a little too desperately, because they don't like what he goes on to suggest - and I myself don't have much time for what he goes on to say either. But at least on this matter his work seems to me to be statistically pretty well founded. There is no document in which either mentions knowing the other at school, true, but Cornish attempts to prove by sifting through the records of the other Jewish students at the school that Wittgenstein is the only one who fits the description of the 'Jewish boy' mentioned in Mein Kampf. It's an interesting line if nothing else....

Ah, ok, i see 

That basic concept is reflected in the banner of the party which everyone knows but few understand what it actually stands for:

I also remember my history teacher mentioning that he found the shape of the swastika at some site of ancient ruins that he often visited. Maybe everyone knows this already, though?....


nice post, btw. Like reading through a whole book with no boring parts, but the main themes only, in a way. 

[eyeresist]

There is no point in trying to find a simple explanation for why Hitler was an anti-semite. Or what would have happened/not happened if that assumed "trigger event" had not taken place. I am not even so sure that Hitler *was* that much of an anti-semite.

Yes, you read correctly. The more I learn about him, the less convinced I am that his anti-semitism, or indeed anything he preached with foam around the mouth, was actually rooted in some kind of deep inner conviction. He was just first and foremost an opportunist, a lost soul, a deeply disturbed nobody and underachiever, somebody who looked for an important role that he could play, any role, and he finally found that in playing the "savior of the German people" and then the "Fuehrer" in the political chaos of post-WWI Germany.

I think this may be true. Finding a cause for Hitler's Jew-hatred is misguided, seeing as such attitudes were (and perhaps are) common in Austria. Hitler, being a schlub, latched onto a popular attitude and sought to increase his standing in others' eyes (and therefore his own) by being stronger and purer in his attitude than anyone else. You'll observe this in other social groups sometimes: the overlooked wretch who seeks to improve his standing by becoming an exemplar of the group's world view, whether it be via racism, religion, or supporting the local sports team.

In addition to that, Germany was also geo-politically and culturally more diverse than most other countries. While most countries have one major epicentre of politics and power, and maybe a few side-centers, if at all, and the rest of the country is more or less deep province...

That may be true of France, and a number of smaller countries, but I'm not sure how true this is of Europe in general. But it may be correct, as you have suggested, that Germans felt deeper allegiance to their local capitals and culture than to the relatively recently created pan-Germanic identity.

Anyway, so while "anti-semitism" may have been "in the air" at that time, many other things were "in the air", the huge gaps between social and other classes of people made , so the basic concept of the NSDAP for how to get most of them under one umbrella was, from a populist point of view, actually very smart.

I recall in high school history, our teacher would make the point that by pursuing his racist ideology, Hitler depleted his country of valuable intellectual resources, many of whom would otherwise have been glad to work for the nationalist cause. In that case, the more obvious unifying cause for the Nazis would have been resistance to the post-war oppression of the French and British. However, being under the watchful eye, as Germany then was, such a movement might well have proved abortive. Antisemitism, on the other hand, was seen by the Allies as a fairly harmless social movement. It proved to be a Trojan horse, of course.

[M forever]

That may be true of France, and a number of smaller countries, but I'm not sure how true this is of Europe in general.

It is very true for basically all countries or cultural regions in Europe, except for Germany and Italy both of which have many local centres of culture rather than just one and both of which were actually divided into many smaller states and unified only relatively late at roughly the same time. It is no coincidence that both countries also produced fascist regimes at around the same time. Germany and Italy have a whole lot more in common and in parallel than most people realize.

I recall in high school history, our teacher would make the point that by pursuing his racist ideology, Hitler depleted his country of valuable intellectual resources, many of whom would otherwise have been glad to work for the nationalist cause. In that case, the more obvious unifying cause for the Nazis would have been resistance to the post-war oppression of the French and British. However, being under the watchful eye, as Germany then was, such a movement might well have proved abortive. Antisemitism, on the other hand, was seen by the Allies as a fairly harmless social movement.

Sounds interesting, but, unfortunately, that's nonsense. The Nazis never made a secret out of that they would get back for WWI and what happened afterwards, no matter if the allies watched or not. Their point was, why should Germany, a country with a fairly large population (actually the 2nd largest in Europe, after Russia) and the potentially strongest economy in Europe be kicked around by actually weaker countries like Britain and France? That did make a lot of sense to a lot of people at the time. And the allies knew about that. That's why the general reaction from other countries to the Nazis coming to power in 1933 was basically "oh shit".
You and a lot of other people don't understand that while anti-semitism was part of the ideology and propaganda, it didn't play such a big role. The people who supported the Nazis would have supported them for the same reasons without that - like the fascists did in Italy for who that played an even smaller role. They had completely other things in their mind. The anti-semitism part wasn't what most people were interested in, either way. That it escalated so dramatically later has other reasons. People often see history backwards in that respect, which is easy to understand seeing what drastic dimensions the holocaust later reached.

[eyeresist]

It is very true for basically all countries or cultural regions in Europe, except for Germany and Italy both of which have many local centres of culture rather than just one ...

Hmm, well, reading back, I would agree with what you've said about regional centres of political and military power, but culturally it's not so cut and dried. Even Russia had Moscow and St Petersburg.

Sounds interesting, but, unfortunately, that's nonsense. The Nazis never made a secret out of that they would get back for WWI and what happened afterwards, no matter if the allies watched or not.

Basically true, though on the other hand Hitler managed to keep his "just one more demand" ploy going for a few years, with appeasers at least half-believing in his "perfectly reasonable territorial adjustments". Possibly anti-semitism did function as a sort of smoke screen, helping to confuse the issue by drawing attention to domestic policies rather than nationalist expansion.

[маразм1]

By the way, on the topic of Stalin vs. Hitler.  Let me share something my relative experienced.
She was captured by the Germans and was sent to a German camp.  While in Germany, she says that the guards were flirting with her and other girls from Russia.  They even got passes to go into the city; which I still find incredibly unbelievable.  This was close to the end of the war.  Then the war ended, and Russians rescued them.  They were put on a train, and brought back.  However, soon they found out that rather than being truly "rescued", they were going to a Russian prison camp.  She stayed there for 5 years!  You know how this was justified?  Simple!  It was treason!  Treason, because they failed to resist!

[greg]

By the way, on the topic of Stalin vs. Hitler.  Let me share something my relative experienced.
She was captured by the Germans and was sent to a German camp.  While in Germany, she says that the guards were flirting with her and other girls from Russia.  They even got passes to go into the city; which I still find incredibly unbelievable.  This was close to the end of the war.  Then the war ended, and Russians rescued them.  They were put on a train, and brought back.  However, soon they found out that rather than being truly "rescued", they were going to a Russian prison camp.  She stayed there for 5 years!  You know how this was justified?  Simple!  It was treason!  Treason, because they failed to resist!

did she ever get out?

[lukeottevanger]

I guess the phrase 'she stayed there 5 years' and the talk of her in the present tense suggests that she did.