Hitler At Home by Despina Stratigakos

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hitler At Home by Despina Stratigakos Lynn Parrish Hitler At Home By Despina Stratigakos. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. ix + 373 pp. In Hitler at Home, Despina Stratigakos chronicles the production of Adolf Hitler’s domesticity. This carefully constructed identity was intended to serve as the private counterpart to the public persona already established through the propagandistic works of, most notably, Leni Riefenstahl. While Riefenstahl had before her a preexisting monumental built environment in which to record her subject and his adoring legions, the same cannot be said with regard to Hitler’s domesticity. Stratigakos seeks to illuminate the process involved in crafting an idealized private persona for Hitler. To do this, she highlights the efforts of those responsible, namely, his long-time interior designer, Gerdy Troost, and his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffman. Through the combined efforts of Troost and Hoffman, a new domesticity was fabricated for Adolf Hitler, one that was in direct contrast to the very public identity of Nazi statesman created through the works of Riefenstahl. This “private Hitler” created by Troost and Hoffman was featured in a more subtle propaganda [End Page 112] campaign directed toward the German people, but also toward the wider international community. Despite Riefenstahl’s name recognition and obvious Nazi association, her work is not featured prominently in this book. In fact, it is only mentioned in passing, and always as a counterexample to demonstrate the amount of thought and effort that went into crafting Hitler’s domesticity. For 1935’s Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl confronted an extant architectural stage populated by hundreds of thousands of people engaged in adoration of “the titanic leader of a great and unified nation” through which she could convey Hitler’s “mastery and gravitas of a statesman.” Stratigakos further notes, “The effect of the film on the viewer relied on his or her identification with the unbroken mass that symbolized the newly united nation. The visualization of the mass and its performance required an architecture designed for monumentality and spectacle.” In contrast, Hitler’s private life was not so polished or ready for close public inspection; he had no established milieu from which to project correlating images of his domesticity. Since his early days in Vienna, Hitler had lived a rather Spartan and nomadic existence. He remained a renter until the 1933 purchase of his Alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg, Haus Wachenfeld (later to become known as the Berghof after various additions and Gerdy Troot’s interior design), and had no such stage from which to project his domestic existence. While he did maintain a Munich apartment on Prince Regent Square, initial attempts at interior decoration did not begin until 1935, again undertaken and overseen by Gerdy Troost, and those renovations didn’t reach their culmination until after he had purchased the building in its entirety in 1938. This created a very real dilemma because, while his public persona of statesman was already established and widely disseminated, Hitler’s unconventional private life, the anomalousness of which already was a source of concern for Reich propagandists, offered no cast of family characters or humanizing attributes to portray him as first man and father of his nation. Where Riefenstahl was charged with portraying the ideal Nazi statesman, Troost and Hoffman were concerned with the ideal German man. Troost’s interior spaces were evocative of the coziest of German homes—warm and comfortable, set in a color scheme of earth tones to accentuate the wooden decorative elements that predominated her designs—a direct contrast to the modernism favored by the Bauhaus, which Hitler had closed in 1933 for its degenerate nature. In fact, Troost’s designs didactically set the tone for what was, as determined and modeled by Hitler, considered to be the new, appropriate artistic expression within the Third Reich. Her crowning achievement was the [End Page 113] Berghof, which incorporated majestic Germanic landscape into the domestic sphere of Hitler’s favored retreat. Within this milieu of quintessential German domesticity, the public “was encouraged to image the thrill of the singular—not dissolving into the mass, but exiting from it . . . And it was the architecture of the Führer’s domesticity...