Hitler's Aesthetics: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Art and Fascism

Abstract

Mankind has a natural drive to discover beauty. How rich the world will be for him who uses his senses. Furthermore, nature has instilled in everyone the desire to share with others everything beautiful that one encounters. The beautiful should reign over humans; the beautiful itself wants to retain its power. —Adolf Hitler, 1941 (quoted in Spotts, 2003, p. 119) Beauty, the formal aspect of idealization, can embody the finest and most transcendent values in human aesthetic experience (Hagman, 2002), but beauty can also be perverse and in some instances it can serve the needs of evil. This paper will examine the dark side of beauty. We will see how beauty can become grotesque and ultimately be destroyed when it is forced to fulfill the needs of the most terrible of self-disorders. In his book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics Frederic Spotts (2003) argued that our image of Hitler as a monster is incomplete. He asserted that historians have failed to appreciate the place of Hitler’s aesthetics in our understanding of his motives and aims. Spotts pointed out that the young Hitler pursued a career as an artist for a number of years, until professional failure and the opportunity for political success offered him the narcissistic gratification through demagoguery that he so longed for from the arts. Once in power, it was Hitler’s obsession with aesthetic matters that dominated his passion for culture and disguised his hatred and aggression. Monomaniacal, he pursued the destruction of Western culture in his quest to remake and mold the aesthetic landscape according to his own idealized and grandiose self-image. In the face of his own self-disintegration, this passion for a depersonalized and inhuman beauty became