Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

“A fascinating contribution to our understanding of Hitler’s complex, chaotic, and catastrophic personality, and a compelling study of Hitler’s artistic policies in the Third Reich.”-Foreign AffairsFeaturing a new introduction by the author. 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).