Because we believe in the eternity of this Reich, its works must also be eternal ones, that is… not conceived for the year 1940 and not for the year 2000; rather, they must tower like the cathedrals of our past into the millennia of the future.
And if God perhaps makes the poets and singers of today into fighters, he has at any rate given to the fighters the architects who will see to it that the success of this struggle finds its imperishable corroboration in the documents of a great and unique art. This country must not be a power without culture and must not have strength without beauty.
Through these enormous architectural works Hitler was also trying to satisfy his onetime dreams of being an artist. In a speech of the same period he declared that if the First World War “had not come he would… perhaps, yes even probably, have become one of the foremost architects, if not the foremost architect of Germany.” Now he became the foremost patron of architecture. Aided by a number of select architects, he conceived the reconstruction of many German cities with vast buildings and avenues, whose oppressive size, lack of grass, and archaizing elements of form added up to an impression of solemn and deadly vacuity. In 1936 he conceived the plan of converting Berlin into a world capital, “comparable only to ancient Egypt, Babylon, or Rome.” Within some fifteen years he wanted to transform the entire inner city into a single showy monument of imperial grandeur, with vast boulevards, gleaming gigantic blocks of buildings, the whole dominated by a domed assembly hall that was to be the highest in the world, almost 900 feet, with a capacity of 180,000 people. From the Führer’s platform in the interior, under a gilded eagle big as a house, he intended to address the nationalities of the Greater Germanic Reich, and to prescribe laws to a world prostrate before him. A grand avenue over three miles long was to link the building to a triumphal arch 240 feet high, the symbol of victories in battles and empire-building wars. And, year after year, Hitler raved at the height of the war, “a troop of Kirghizes will be led through the capital of the Reich so that they may fill their imaginations with the power and grandeur of its stone monuments.”
The so-called Führer’s Building was planned on a similar scale. It was to be a fortresslike palace in the heart of Berlin, covering 6 million square feet and containing, along with Hitler’s residence and offices, many reception rooms, colonnades, roof gardens, fountains and a theater. It is hardly surprising that when his favorite architect in later life came upon the old sketches again, he “was struck by the resemblance to a Cecil B. De Mille set.”53 In conceiving such architecture Hitler was in accord with the spirit of the age, from which otherwise he seemed so distant.
In drawing up comprehensive plans for rebuilding almost all the larger German cities Hitler was realizing his ideal of the artist-politician. Even in the midst of urgent government business he always found time for prolonged discussions with architects. At night when unable to sleep he would make drawings of ground plans or renderings of buildings; he often went through the so-called ministerial gardens behind the chancellery to Speer’s office, where he stood before a “model avenue” 90 feet long, illuminated by spotlights. Together with his younger associate he would wax enthusiastic over fantasy edifices that were destined never to be built. Among the buildings that were planned to give the city of Nuremberg “its future and therefore its eternal character” was a stadium for 400,000 spectators that was to be one of the most tremendous structures in history. There was to be an arena with stands seating 160,000 people, a processional avenue, and several convention halls—all clustered in a spacious “temple area.” Following a suggestion of Speer’s, Hitler devoted special attention to the materials used, so that even as ruins overgrown with ivy, the buildings would still testify to the greatness of his reign, as do the pyramids of Luxor to the power and glory of the pharaohs. At the cornerstone laying for the convention hall in Nuremberg he declared:
But if the Movement should ever fall silent, even after thousands of years this witness here will speak. In the midst of a sacred grove of age-old oaks the men of that time will admire in reverent astonishment this first giant among the buildings of the Third Reich.
But while architecture was his first love, he did not ignore the other arts. The youth enthralled by painting and music drama was still present in him. To be sure, he had decided that the artistic rank of an era was only the reflection of its political greatness. By this logic he regarded cultural productions as the real legitimation of his achievements as a statesman. The proud prophecies in the initial period of the Third Reich must be understood in this sense; the dawn of an “incredible blossoming of German art” or of a “new artistic renaissance of Aryan man” was predicted because it had to come. And Hitler was therefore all the more discountenanced when this Periclean dream of his refused to come true.54 Shutting himself off more and more from the world, he developed a pseudoromantic cult of what he called “the basic elements of life”: rich plowland, steel-helmeted heroism, peaks glistening with eternal snow, and vigorous laborers performing their work despite all obstacles. That this formula resulted in cultural atrophy was as obvious in literature as in the fine arts, even though the annual art shows, sometimes juried in part by Hitler himself, tried to cover up the prevailing dreariness by lavishly arranged celebrations. Hitler’s vituperation of “November art,” which took up a good deal of space in almost every one of his speeches on art, reveals the emphatic way in which he equated artistic and political standards. He would threaten the “cultural Neanderthalers” with custody in a mental hospital or prison; and he declared that he would annihilate those “international scribblings on art” which were nothing but “offscourings of brazen, shameless arrogance.” The exhibition of “degenerate art” organized in 1937 was partly a fulfillment of this threat.
In Hitler’s attitudes toward art we again encounter that phenomenon of early rigidity which characterizes all his mental and imaginative processes. His standards had remained unchanged since his days in Vienna, when he paid no heed to the artistic and intellectual upheavals of the period. Cool classicistic splendor on the one hand and pompous decadence on the other—Anselm von Feuerbach, for example, and Hans Makart—were his touchstones. With the resentments of the failed candidate for the academy, he raised his own taste into an absolute.
He also admired the Italian Renaissance and early baroque art; the majority of the pictures in the Berghof belonged to this period. His favorites were a half-length nude by Bordone, the pupil of Titian, and a large colored sketch by Tiepolo. On the other hand, he rejected the painters of the German Renaissance because of their austerity.55 As the pedantic faithfulness of his own water colors might suggest, he always favored craftsmanlike precision. He liked the early Lovis Corinth but regarded Corinth’s brilliant later work, created in a kind of ecstasy of old age, with pronounced irritation and banned him from the museums. Significantly, he also loved sentimental genre painting, like the winebibbing monks and fat tavernkeepers of Eduard Grützner. In his youth, he told his entourage, it had been his dream some day to be successful enough to be able to afford a genuine Grützner. Later, many works by this painter hung in his Munich apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse. Alongside them he put gentle, folksy idyls by Spitzweg, a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach, a park scene by Anselm von Feuerbach, and one of the many variations of Sin by Franz von Stuck. In the “Plan for a German National Gallery,” which he had sketched on the first page of his 1925 sketchbook, these same painters appear, together with names like Overbeck, Moritz von Schwind, Hans von Marees, Defregger, Böcklin, Piloty, Leibl, and, finally, Adolph von Menzel, to whom he assigned no fewer than five rooms in his gallery.56 He early set special agents to buying up all the important works of these artists. He was bent on keeping them for the museum that some day, after the accomplishment of his goals, he intended to set up in Linz, with himself as director.