Hitler as Political Artist

Theatrical Impresario & Rock Star

Peter G. Clark

• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781977221001
• eBook ISBN: 9781977225559
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

"What Hitler was able to do to a crowd in 2-1/2 hours will never be repeated in 10, 000 years!"

—Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler's early confidant

"Hitler was one of the first great rock stars. He was no politician; he was a great media artist. How he worked his audience!... The world will never see anything like that again. He made an entire country a stage show."

—David Bowie, British rock legend

As a young man in Vienna, Adolf Hitler was sleeping on park benches in 1909, just a real "Nowhere Man" making all his "Nowhere Plans" and who would soon haunt homeless shelters while trying to hawk his unimaginative and banal paintings. Yet in 1933, this mommy's boy and self-centered dilettante was appointed Chancellor of Germany after discovering his artistic-political calling as a charismatic orator and stage actor in the 1920s—and then dazzled Germans and foreigners alike with the color and pageantry of the Nuremberg rallies and other grand spectacles in the 1930s. As a virtuoso in the art of presenting dramatic performances, Hitler inspired the same type of emotional ecstasy that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley aroused from their frenzied fans. Even after clearly revealing the monstrous side of his murderous character in World War II by exterminating Jews and Slavs by the millions before committing suicide on April 30, 1945, he still emerged from the ashes and rubble of the Third Reich to seduce later generations. To the present generation, he has morphed from a murderous villain into a comical figure on many Internet platforms, particularly the hundreds of humorous YouTube parodies of his fanatical ranting and raving. This book examines Hitler's extraordinary political-artistic talents to explain his nearly unfathomable rise from a homeless nobody into the most influential and demonic creature on the vast stage of modern history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Quotable 1
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1889-1918)
• Chapter 2: 1919: The Artist’s Erupting Anti-Semitism
• Chapter 3: The “King of Munich” & Weimar’s Renaissance (1918-1933)
• Chapter 4: The Artist, the Depression & Germany’s Fate (1929-1933)
• Chapter 5: The Political Artist in Power (1933-1939)
• Chapter 6: The Artist as Bismarckian Maestro (1933-1939)
• Chapter 7: The Artist as Napoleonic Warlord (1939-1945)
• Chapter 8: The Artist & 50 Million Deaths: No Hitler, No World War II
• Chapter 9: The Artist as Mass Murderer (1939-1945)
• Chapter 10: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust
• Chapter 11: Conspirators and Resisters to the Artist’s Rule
• Chapter 12: The Artist and the Churches
• Chapter 13: The Artist and his Teutonic Mafioso
• Chapter 14: The Artist, Other World Leaders & Utopias/Dystopias
• Chapter 15: The Artist as Modernist Revolutionary
• Chapter 16: The Artist and Four Literary Masters
• Chapter 17: Portrait of the Artist as a Human Being
• Chapter 18: The Artist and his Masks
• Chapter 19: The Artist’s Tableau in Perspective
• Chapter 20: “What Ifs?” and Further Reflections
• Chapter 21: The Artist as Cinematic Impresario & YouTube Pop Star
• Epilogue I: The Artist and his Modernist Peers
• Epilogue II: The Artist, the Sleuths and Shakespeare
• Epilogue III: The Artist, Historians and Mass Hysteria
• Epilogue IV: The Fog-Enshrouded Future & Terrible Simplifiers
• Epilogue V: The Holocaust, the Holodomor & “Uniqueness”
• Epilogue VI: Moral Relativism from the Left and Right
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Photo Credits
• Footnotes
• Select Bibliography