Product Description

A starling reassessment of Hitler's aims and motivations, Frederic Spotts' Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics is an adroitly argued and highly original work that provides a key to fuller understanding of the Third Reich. Spotts convincingly demonstrates that contrary to the traditional view that Hitler had no life outside of politics, Hitler's interest in the arts was as intense as his racism-and that he used the arts to disguise the heinous crimes that were the means to fulfilling his ends. Hitler's vision of the Aryan superstate was 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.

Filled with evocative photographs and reproductions from Hitler's 1925 sketchbook, "Spotts's study of the Fuhrer's fascination with architecture, painting, sculpture, and music is ...elegantly composed and richly documented" (The New Yorker).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #699581 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-19
• Released on: 2003-01-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .2 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 420 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This latest addition to the genre of Hitler studies argues that the best way to understand the icon of evil is not as power-hungry politician, but rather as starving artist. Forever defined by his unrealized dream of becoming a great painter and permanently frustrated by his inability to make a living as a watercolorist, the art school reject eventually found an outlet in public speaking, the army, and megalomania. As dictator, Spotts argues, Hitler's aesthetic sensibility infused his politics with pageantry and defined his vision of a German empire in cultural terms: the triumph of German Romantic music and Neoclassical art and architecture, complete with enormous buildings designed for the ages. Spotts portrays Hitler the architect, the art sponsor and collector, the Wagner disciple, even the Autobahn builder, and shows them all to be inseparable from Hitler the racist, the fascist, and the genocidal maniac. We've seen all of these portraits before, but Spotts pulls all of these elements together in a fresh, concise, and ultimately convincing manner. Brendan Driscoll
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