There is something refreshing about the deadpan tone that Spotts brings to his book on Hitler the artist. He has no grand theory to push, and pronounces his subject merely "interesting." At times, he takes understatement too far, as when he mentions the "occasional shrillness" of Hitler's oratory. But his study of the Führer's fascination with architecture, painting, sculpture, and music is for the most part elegantly composed and richly documented. Spotts says that Hitler was less of an idiot in these matters than biographers have implied, and that his dilettantish expertise made him all the more destructive; he could hypnotize a man such as Richard Strauss with his mastery of trivia. Still, Spotts never really confronts the horror at the center of his story: the fact that Hitler not only knew the arts but made a religion of them, and probably believed in nothing else.
There is something refreshing about the deadpan tone that Spotts brings to his book on Hitler the artist. He has no grand theory to push, and pronounces his subject merely "interesting." At times, he takes understatement too far, as when he mentions the "occasional shrillness" of Hitler's oratory. But his study of the Führer's fascination with architecture, painting, sculpture, and music is for the most part elegantly composed and richly documented. Spotts says that Hitler was less of an idiot in these matters than biographers have implied, and that his dilettantish expertise made him all the more destructive; he could hypnotize a man such as Richard Strauss with his mastery of trivia. Still, Spotts never really confronts the horror at the center of his story: the fact that Hitler not only knew the arts but made a religion of them, and probably believed in nothing else.
The opening paragraph and photo powerfully capture Spotts's argument: The Soviet army is soon to launch its final, devastating assault on Berlin; the British and the Americans are about to invade Germany from the west. And there sits Adolf Hitler, gazing longingly at a model of a rebuilt Linz, his hometown, which is slated to become a grandiose symbol of the Thousand-Year Reich. For Spotts, this proves what Hitler himself claimed: that he was at heart never a politician, but an artist. Spotts, who has written an acclaimed study of the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, tries to substantiate his thesis by providing a panorama of Hitler's artistic activities, including his failed career as a painter, the purge of Jews and others from the cultural sphere, and his personal patronage of artists, musicians and architects. According to Spotts, Hitler's essence is to be found in his desire to create an empire in which "true" German art could flourish as never before. Yet Spotts overlooks the fact that Hitler, in megalomaniacal fashion, also claimed mastery of engineering, history and military strategy. His primary focus was arguably not on art, but on the creation of a racial utopia. Art and politics were but two sides of the same, racially minted coin. Spotts provides a lively, encyclopedic account of Hitler and the arts, but a more comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime can be found in Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography, which will remain the standard work for many years to come. 100 b&w and 4 color illus. (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Grimly fascinating... A book that will rightly find its place among the central studies of Nazism....Invaluable.
Written with the erudition of a scholar and the page-turning power of a suspense novelist.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Extraordinary...opens an amazing and instructive window on to the Nazi era and Hitler himself.
A diplomat turned historian, Spotts offers a fascinating contribution to our understanding of Hitler's complex, chaotic, and catastrophic personality, and a compelling study of Hitler's artistic policies in the Third Reich. Hitler considered himself an artist first and a political leader and savior second. He was convinced the arts were important for, and should be used to affect, the people's culture. His talent for grand mise en scenes was of course connected to an admiration of Wagner that, Spotts tells us, was not shared among other Nazi leaders. Hitler's taste for grandiose (and ruinous) architecture, dislike of modern painting, passion for collecting artwork, ignorance of chamber music and indifference to symphonies, friendship with Albert Speer, and bad taste in sculpture, are all documented, along with his manipulation of artists and his role as art dictator. Spotts believes that if Hitler had been "like Mussolini, a cretinous philistine without interest in the arts, he would have been less destructive." One thing is certain: his interest in these domains exceeded his talents by far.
Unlike biographies of Adolf Hitler that focus on the ideological and humanitarian disaster wrought by his intense anti-Semitism, Spotts's book posits that the 13-year nightmare of the Third Reich was just as much a result of Hitler's artistic nature. Though other authors have touched on certain aspects of Hitler's artistic side-the dictator's obsession with monumental architecture or his grandiosity and love of Wagnerian opera-Spotts (Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival) has leapt with both feet into a full exploration of Der F hrer as artist. Spotts argues that Hitler's aesthetic nature compelled him to destroy society only to re-create it according to the image in his artist's eye and that the crusade against the Jews (and, indeed, all "degenerate" influences) was the result of what Hitler viewed as the destruction of German culture by the practitioners of what he referred to as "modernism." Hitler's art-the art of centuries past-envisioned nothing new. Spotts makes the point visually, with numerous photographs and drawings, many by Hitler himself. With scholarship and true artistry, Spotts has exposed this picture in a book that is accessible to the average reader but that will be of interest to academicians as well.-Michael F. Russo, Louisiana State Univ. Libs., Baton Rouge Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Former American diplomat and cultural historian Spotts takes seriously Adolf Hitler?s claim that he made an art of politics and a work of art of the Nazi state. "If I were to assess my work," Hitler remarked in 1941, sounding the two overarching motifs of his regime, "I would first emphasize that in the face of an uncomprehending world I succeeded in making the racial idea the basis of life, and second that I made culture the driving force in German greatness." Many historians have analyzed, to varying degrees of success, the role that Hitler?s supposed failure as an artist played in fueling his demonic rise to power. Spotts (Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, 1994, etc.), by contrast, notes that he actually did make a living, however unsplendid, as a painter and illustrator. More than that, and with considerable depth, the author shows Hitler orchestrating mass rallies as if staging them for the theater, designing battle flags and party standards, planning model cities that would serve as grand memorials to the German genius, drawing plans for a capital that would, he fully believed, last long after the memories of suffering and bloodshed had faded?the "thousand-year Reich" of his endlessly rehearsed speeches. The singer David Bowie once remarked without apparent irony that Hitler was "one of the first great rock stars"; Spotts lends considerable historical weight to this view and ably demonstrates that whatever else the F?hrer may have been, he was certainly an artist of a kind, dreaming of a retirement in the Italian countryside so that he could again take up painting. Moreover, Spotts argues, Hitler was one of the greatest patrons of the arts Europe had ever known (hepersonally exempted artists from the draft, a privilege accorded no other category of German citizen), even though his tastes were surely less than catholic. An illuminating view of the F?hrer?s nature and aims, well defended and very well illustrated.
"Grimly fascinating... A book that will rightly find its place among the central studies of Nazism....Invaluable."-The New York Times
"Written with the erudition of a scholar and the page-turning power of a suspense novelist." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Extraordinary...opens an amazing and instructive window on to the Nazi era and Hitler himself." -Financial Times
