The Hitler Revival: Myth v.Truth

THE spring of 1973 has brought a worldwide revival of interest in a mustachioed, vegetarian nonsmoker. An artist and architect, he was a firm believer in astrology and, though a speed freak, surrounded himself with people who preferred cocaine and morphine. His appeal to youth was legendary: he could hold an auditorium spellbound for hours with a vocal solo. He died underground, committing suicide in protest against a social climate that he found oppressive.

All the same, Adolf Hitler's presence never vanishes. His career is still the fundamental trauma of the century, the wound through which our shared humanity leaks. Yet it is a disconcerting thought that grandparents are alive today who were not born when World War II broke out. Since it ended, Hitler's life has furnished material for a thousand historical theses. But of late it has moved into the twin fields of memoir and entertainment. Since Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich was published in 1970, one might suppose that everyone who had anything to do with the Fuehrer, from general to cook, had been signed up for paperback. Five new volumes of Hitleriana have recently come out in English, and a brace of feature-length films--with more to come --have been readied. Morbid curiosity again? Not quite. Each is instructive in its own way. The first to be released in the U.S.--it opened last week in New York--is Hitler: The Last Ten Days, a retelling of what must be the best-known suicide since Cleopatra's. Sir Alec Guinness is the star.

Guinness's performance is obviously based on a close reading of the sources. The habits are ticked off one by one, amid the slow disintegration of personality: the stiff, corseted movements, the crescendos of temper, the harsh, mesmeric voice grinding out its long postprandial diatribes against traitors, smokers and meat eaters. The words rebound from the elephant-colored walls of the bunker as once they had echoed down the parade grounds of the Third Reich. Hitler's pallid hand, shaking from Dr. Morell's amphetamine capsules, spoons dollops of Schlag onto a slab of chocolate cake. The movie is the world's most overdocumented Grand Guignol, the phantom of history's opera at bay in the foundations of the Fuhrer's falling theater.

And that is precisely the trouble with the film. Perhaps any dramatic version, no matter how well acted or researched, must end as an opera about an opera, Goedtterddmmerung at two removes. We know about the myth of Hitler. It has saturated our culture. Our stock image of murderous power is not Stalin quietly chewing a pipe, but Hitler noisily chewing a carpet. The details slip; not so many people nowadays know or care who Baldur von Schirach was or what the Roehm putsch signified. But the broad trajectory of Hitler's career, let alone its grisly climax in the bunker, is still as familiar and very nearly as mythic to Westerners as the deeds of Antichrist were to men in the Middle Ages.

This is not, of course, an accident. Hitler himself would have approved the mythic stature (if not the odium) that posterity has accorded him: his entire life was conceived as a prodigious drama -- "Qualis artifex pereo!" as Nero is supposed to have said ("What an artist dies with me!"). Even the name of his superstate, the Tausendjahrige Reich, or Thousand-Year Reich, was derived from prophetic myths about the Christian millennium: a time when, after a cosmic battle between Christ and Antichrist, the forces of evil are locked away forever, the dialectic of history is abolished, and a reign of permanent, static harmony prevails over the earth. So it happens that who ever plays Hitler in a movie, or how well, is not of much more than aesthetic consequence -- no more, say, than the comparisons between one Siegfried and another. The role is always greater than its actors, and its nightmarish content has become somewhat abstract. Nor will the rise of some future Hitler be discouraged by the belief that the Fuehrer was a demon. The demonic, in human affairs, is generally an oversimplification. With Hitler, it is also a refuge. We do not like to diminish ourselves by admitting him to our species; so we take his own delusions at face value, and tend to suppose that he was not human, but an embodiment of some elemental will of history. The only corrective is to see him for what he was: a man.

If the present revival of interest in Hitler signifies anything beyond kinky fashion and souvenir hunting -- the sort of impulse that, for years, has retained the jackboot and Hakenkreuz as essential furniture in the theater of sado masochistic imagination -- it means that a degree of impatience with the demonic image has set in. What concerns the modern audience, and made Speer's memoir the bestseller it deservedly was, is not Hitler's myth but his documentary truth. What, beginning with his humanness, did he have in common with the people around us and with ourselves? What on earth was he like?

No movie can fully answer that question, but any film that can give a partial reply, in documentary terms, seems automatically destined for success. The only candidate for honors among the revival flicks is a remarkable documentary called Swastika. Produced by 36-year-old Englishman Sanford Lieberson (Performance) and directed by a 23-year-old Australian newcomer named Philippe Mora, it began as a research job on the copious surviving archives of Nazi film after Lieberson bought the rights to Speer's Inside the Third Reich. But what altered the film makers' intentions was the discovery, by Film Historian Lutz Becker, of Hitler's own home movies -- some five hours of Agfacolor stock, shot mainly by Eva Braun and her friends, of the Fuehrer and his court relaxing (if that is the word) in his mountain retreat at Obersalzberg. The film had been lying un noticed in the U.S. Marine archives in Washington since 1946. Only a fraction of it was usable, partly because Eva Braun had a dumb love of mountain views, and expended miles of film in slow, jiggly pans across the misty peaks. What remains is the only off-the-record view that exists of Hitler's home life, and it lends Swastika an extraordinary fascination.

Admittedly, the situation resembles the old Sherlock Holmes solution of a crime because of the curious behavior of the dog in the nighttime -- curious because the dog did nothing in the nighttime. The banality of this view of Hitler at ease is the message, as always with home movies. Most of Swastika consists of previously unused material from professional Nazi films, mainly propaganda and newsreel, tightly edited together so as to present the illusion that Mora had sent a documentary team 40 years back into the Reich. The home movies make it seem as though Andy Warhol tagged along too.

The Teuton waving his hairy green hat appreciatively at an Alp might be any German tourist, but -- you realize with a start -- it is Martin Bormann. There are scraps of conversation, no more. Hitler scans a speech manuscript through a large magnifying glass on the breezy terrace with Speer looking over his shoulder. He looks up. "Very interesting," the Fuehrer remarks, in a line straight out of Laugh-In. Hitler's doctor appears; he describes how he has come to suspect a link between smoking and lung cancer. "Disgusting," the patient snaps. Nobody is at ease with him. Goebbels, rigidly clasping an umbrella pole, hastily jettisons a cigarette stub when Hitler appears.

Such disconnected nuances reveal a truth that formal history can hardly capture, and they are in absolute contrast to the craft of acting. In the Guinness film, Eva Braun was played as a glamour puss, vaguely resembling Dominique Sanda. The real version was otherwise: a giggling, curly blonde Aryan squaw, smooching with a rabbit, proudly doing calisthenics on the beach of the Konigssee, or coquettishly persuading the Scourge of History to screen Gone With the Wind just once again because she loves Clark Gable. Allowing for variations of costume and language, these domestic scenes could be happening today, anywhere from San Diego to the Black Sea beaches. Hannah Arendt's famous phrase about the banality of evil acquires a fresh bloom.

It is brilliantly amplified in the "official" footage from which Mora has put together an impressionistic tour of the culture of Nazism. No other film has given so strong a sense of its pervasiveness, or the methodical detail with which it was grafted onto the twin German traditions of folk and high art. Goebbels' cameramen, filming the gnarled peasants at work or the shiny, hopeful faces of village children baking festive rolls in the shape of swastikas, were building on the most popular traditions of 19th century German genre painting--that volkisch sentiment that was Germany's equivalent to America's image of frontier virtue. One sequence says it all: a choir singing carols beneath a light-baubled Christmas tree in a village square. The camera tilts up, slowly and lovingly, to reveal a huge illuminated swastika on top of the tree, dispensing its generous light over the festival. Even today, one cannot laugh at this breathtaking kitsch. It is chilling; no level of folk culture could be impervious to the message. Such was the nature of cultural totalitarianism. Every image was skewed to point to the Fuehrer--but otherwise left intact.

The high-culture implications of Nazism are just as extraordinary. Since the Hitler revival has already multiplied the rare-book price of first editions of Mein Kampf, it cannot be long before the surviving fragments of official Nazi art swell the auction rooms. But most of the monuments perished under the bombs, or were blown up for target practice. None of the bronze Muscle Beach colossi designed by Hitler's favorite sculptor, a pupil of Maillol named Arno Breker, have survived; the plasters for them ran to over 100 ft. high, iceberg parodies of Michelangelo and Bernini. Such disappearances are no aesthetic loss, but they leave a gap in cultural history. We can only imagine but not experience the dimensions of Nazi gigantism. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, provides a fascinating example of what genius can produce in the complete absence of taste. The tradition to which Speer's projects belong--the immense stadia, the dome 16 times the volume of St. Peter's, the dwarfing colonnades--is only superficially that of classicism; he was the totalitarian heir to the idealist architects of the 18th century like Boullee and Ledoux, to whom architecture was a sustained metaphor. Speer's axial planning was determinism in action. His work was an inflatio ad absurdum of the idea that art should communicate directly with the people. Yet, in the grossly pragmatic terms that Hitler laid down, there is no movement in the art and architecture of modern democracy whose works so demonstrably turned on so many viewers. What Busby Berkeley could compete with the crushing, rectilinear choreography of a Nuernberg rally, or with its obsessive power over the mass mind? What light show today could rival Speer's "cathedral of light" at Zeppelin Field in 1934, with its 130 searchlight beams forming a vast nocturnal hall whose walls were 25,000 ft. high, with clouds drifting through them? The grotesque apotheosis of art deco as an embracing social style did not happen in New York or Paris but in Nazi Germany, with its finned and slab-sided eagles, its formalized athletes with ripple hair, its obsessively "classical" modernismus. Hitler's puritan vulgarity is the exact opposite of the libertarian luminate vulgarity of the other present And the Western "Hitler culture, but wave" -- one raised may not still il by political nostalgia but by a curiosity that shades into voyeurism -- may do just that. If we persist in treating the culture of Nazism as a plague hospital sealed in 1945, which cannot be entered and inspected without the certainty of infection, we only contribute to the myth. Myths do not die easily -- witness the cautious resurrection of Stalin -- and they cannot be laughed out of existence. Only if Hitler is anchored in human reality will he stay dead. If not, he will continue as he has been since 1945: a nightmare of history, from which we cannot wake.

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