Chapter 90 Chapter 15 "Such a Tiny Human Insect" (2)

Hitler, who was almost a dictator, was still a painter.For him, art and politics are inseparable.His first step in promoting Nazi art and architecture was to disband the Bauhaus organization.The group began at the end of the World Wars with the architect Varda Gropies as an experiment in the creation of a functional architecture through the combined use of painting, sculpture, industrial design and building arts.This school attracted some of Europe's most talented architects and painters (such as Klee, Kantinsky, Feininger, and Mondigrian, among others), and was the epitome of Modernism.Therefore, for Hitler, who belongs to the classical school and the romantic school, this is simply heinous.

The architect he admired most was Professor Paul Ludwig Troost. "I can no longer tolerate what I painted before that," Hitler later admitted to Speer, "how lucky I was to meet him!" His lovely wife privately said that "once he came to power and became the leader of the German people," he would make sure to visit her husband because his masterpieces were "bright, powerful, and elegant." (In his memoirs, Stein Pell said he often accompanied Hitler to Troost's studio and regarded the professor as his "second teacher." Their relationship, he said, "was very close." Mrs. Troost denied this. point. When I interviewed her in 1971, she said that Speer never met her husband, and that he was taken to the professor's studio in Munich only after her husband's death).

Perhaps the project that Hitler remembers most is the German Kunsthalle designed and built for Munich - the construction cost was donated by the public.Hitler himself attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the project in the autumn of 1933.Before the grand ceremony, tens of thousands of SA, SS and Hitler Youth marched along Prinsregentinstrasse to the construction site.Masons and workers in medieval costumes greet the Führer.After the orchestra played the "Poetry Concert" overture, Hitler made a speech, once again announcing his theory about Germany's cultural mission, and then gave Munich the elegant title of "Germany's artistic capital".A moment later, when he laid the foundation stone for the museum, people's hearts were half-cooled—he used a silver hammer, and the hammer broke due to excessive force.People were silent, because according to superstition the architect died when the hammer broke while laying the foundation.Goebbels tried to brush the matter off: "When the Führer swung his hammer, it was firm and powerful." In Hitler's view, this was no joke, because he believed it was a bad omen.Troost was also terrified, and within days he was hospitalized with angina.He died of pneumonia a few months later.

Mrs. Troost carried on her husband's business.Whenever he went to Munich, Hitler always went to her studio to see her.Their relationship goes far beyond architecture.She is a confident woman who speaks to the point.One day, when someone asked her what she thought of Speer, she turned to the Fuehrer and said that if Mr. Hitler asked her husband to design a building with a height of 100 meters, Professor Troust would think about it, and the next day he would give it to him. He replied that from the point of view of architecture and aesthetics, the building can only be 96 meters high. "But if you say to Speer, 'I need a building that's 100 meters high,' he'll immediately reply, 'My Fuhrer, 200 meters!' You'll say, 'I've got your eye on you'." Instead of being offended, Hitler laughed with everyone. “He was always laughing,” she recalls. “Hitler had a sense of humor, really — from the heart, not like Speer said, sarcasm.”

Frau Troost's attacks did not offend Hitler, much to the surprise of his aides.Arguing with her only thrilled him--except on one memorable occasion. In the summer of 1937, the German Kunsthalle was completed.To celebrate the completion of the museum, they plan to hold a large-scale art exhibition in the museum.The exhibits used were selected by the judges, including Mrs. Troost.A large number of modern paintings were selected.Hitler thought these were degenerate works, so, the day before the opening, he had a fierce quarrel with Mrs. Troost in the pavilion.She argues that the exhibits are good because they represent what is typical of German art.“These are all gray. Our grandmothers don’t accept these,” she said, pointing to a pile of rejected works. The color of the paintings has faded to dull yellow.Hitler pointed to a giant painting—a picture of a man playing a violin on a hill—and asked, why wasn't this selected? "Impossible to be included," she retorted, "too beautiful to be exhibited." She asked Hitler why he did not accept a certain painter until after the second blow?The quarrel grew bitter and the entourage recoiled.Hitler never raised his voice, but his attitude was cold and serious.She ignored these storm signals, saying she couldn't betray her artistic beliefs. "Since you do not approve our exhibits and have different opinions, I will withdraw from the jury immediately." The head of state said goodbye to her coldly, and handed over the task of selecting exhibits to the photographer Hoffman.A few weeks later, however, Hitler returned to the Troust workshop as if nothing had happened.

On the opening day of the exhibition on July 10, the streets and alleys of Munich were crowded with parades praising Germany's two thousand years of cultural history.A Teutonic warrior with a swastika pattern on his chest carried a huge red sun, while others carried a model of a large swastika tree wrapped in tin foil-according to legend, this is a cosmic tree that can connect heaven, earth and hell. together.Compared with the old-style exhibitions, this exhibition does not remind people of the past.The most modern paintings are those of painters such as Adolf Ziegler.Although there are many good works in the exhibits, especially the sculptures, most of them are whimsical or heroic works, either full of idyllic poetry or fantasy of farm life, with little description of the hardships of life in post-war Germany.

In a speech delivered that day, Hitler declared that the German Art Museum was designed and built for the art of the German people, not for international art.He said that the responsibility of the painter is not to linger on the past, or to distort or uglify. "In today's new era, new people should be created. Both men and women should be healthier and stronger; they should have new feelings about life and new joys." What have the decadent modernists created? "Deformed crooks or idiots; if you paint women, they are repulsive; if you paint men, they are more like beasts; if you paint children, they, if they live in the world, must be the curse of God. "If these "artists" really see things that way, "then one has to ask, where does your visual defect come from? If it is hereditary, then the Minister of the Interior is responsible for not allowing this serious If you don't believe in reality and impose your deceit on the nation, then it's a criminal case for the courts." He threatened to deprive people of sight flaws in the productive capacity of modernist artists, and to dispose of other artists as dangerous criminals.Nothing demonstrated his belief in the importance of art more than this.He included in this category the most prestigious artists in Germany, including Emil Nolde, the expressionist master who sympathized with National Socialism.At the same time, he had begun to suppress such painters.Thousands of works by Nord Barlach, Feininger, Klindt and Glotz have been confiscated; some foreign painters (such as Picasso, Madise, Van Go Braque and Qi Sanner) suffered the same fate.Some 730 such works were exhibited simultaneously in Munich as "degenerate art".These paintings were not only unframed, but hung on the wall indiscriminately, with crude and unreasonable remarks such as "this is how the morbid mind views nature" and "peasants in the eyes of the Jews".Part of the exhibition is devoted to the influence of black art.Another part is to clarify the ideology of Marxism, and another part is to exhibit the works of Jewish painters.

The exhibit also includes paintings by madmen, intended to show that the modernists produced something more haphazard.Two sketches of portraits created by Kokoska hang next to an Impressionist head painted by a lunatic. "These painters should be bundled with their work so that every German can spit in their faces," one visitor fumed.While similar malicious attacks abounded, the exhibition — which later toured the country — attracted two million visitors, despite an admission fee.That's four times the number of people who lined up to enter the German Kunsthalle to appreciate Hitler's concept of the best of German art.Admittedly, many of the two million people were lured there by indecent advertising.But there is no doubt that many visit for a last glimpse of the suppressed work of great art.