Main entry:

Spotts, Frederic.

Title & Author:

Hitler and the power of aesthetics / Frederic Spotts.

Publication:

Woodstock : Overlook Press, 2003.

Description:

xxii, 456 pages, 4 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 437-443) and index.
The Reluctant Dictator. The Bohemian Aesthete ; A Philosophy of Culture ; The Grand Paradox -- The Artful Leader. The Artist as Politician ; The Politician as Artist -- The Artist of Destruction. The New Germany and the New German ; Purification by Death -- The Failed Painter. The struggling Watercolourist ; Forgers and Collectors -- The Art Dictator. The Modernist Enemy ; The failure of National Socialist Realism ; The Art Collector -- The Perfect Wagnerite. Hitler's Wagner or Wagner's Hitler? ; 'Fuhrer of the Bayreuth Republic' -- The Music Master. The Rape of Euterpe ; The Music Patron ; Conductors and Composers -- The Master Builder. Immortality through Architecture ; Political Architecture ; Remodelling Germany ; Aesthetics and Transport.

Summary:

"In a remarkable synthesis of key scholarship and historical resources, Frederic Spotts portrays the "National Socialist revolution" as much less a social than a cultural revolution. Spotts maintains that Hitler viewed himself first and foremost as an artist, that his activities were largely directed to the promotion of the arts, and that his driving ambition was to create a supreme culture state, while at the same time using the arts to disguise the heinous crimes that were the means to fulfilling his ends." "Unlike the traditional biographical view that Hitler was an "unperson," who had no life outside politics, Spotts, author of the distinguished Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, shows that Hitler's interest in the arts was as intense as his racism. Spotts offers the first analysis of Hitler's own work as a painter as well as of his art collection - one Hitler intended to make the finest in the world. Spotts's argument is punctuated with evocative photographs and reproductions from Hitler's 1925 sketchbook." "Hitler's vision of the Aryan super-state was, as Spotts points out, to be expressed as much in art as in politics. Culture was not only the end to which power should aspire, but the means of achieving it. This fundamental assessment of Hitler's career and artistic life in the Third Reich boldly shows how the arts were at the center of his life and that he was at the center of the arts. He dissolved the line between art and politics and - through the notorious spectacles, parades, festivals, films, rallies, Wagner's operas and (late in life) Lehar's operettas, political theatrics, monumental architecture, even the autobahn and the Volkswagen - turned the entre German populace into participants in his National Socialist drama." "A revealing, detailed, and highly conceptual work, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics provides an additional key to an understanding of the Third Reich - in many ways the key to the first lock on the first door. It has, until now, been only noted in the more speculative psychological portraits, biographies, and straightforward histories of the Third Reich."--Jacket.

Resources:
Table of contents
Contributor biographical information
Publisher description

ISBN:

1585673455 (alk. paper)
9781585673452 (alk. paper)
9781590201787
1590201787

Subject:

Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945.
Hitler, Adolf 1889-1945
Hitler, Adolf.
BMBF-Statusseminar
National socialism and art.
Art and state Germany History 20th century.
Aesthetics, German 20th century.
Aesthetics, Austrian 20th century.
Nazisme et art.
Art Politique gouvernementale Allemagne Histoire 20e siècle.
Esthétique allemande 20e siècle.
Esthétique autrichienne 20e siècle.
Aesthetics, Austrian.
Aesthetics, German.
Art and state.
Cultural policy.
Kunst
Nationalsozialismus
Ästhetik
Art and state Germany 20th century.
Germany Cultural policy.
Germany.

Form/genre:

Biographies.
collective biographies.
History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 227048
Call No.: DD247.H5 S654 2003
Status: Available