[I_Love_My_Husband]

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[Fiddlstix]

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[NormsRevenge]

The Boys from Brazil is on History Channel. Why all the fascination for all these years with the Third reich und der Fuehrer all the many years hence?

Clonaid = Boys from Brazil, ... Have a HaPPy New Year.

Good post. Yes, with a little help and encouragement, Adolf could have been a different and better person, but then, we wouldn;t have anyone to compare the Clintons too,then, would we. ;-)

[First Amendment]

Anyone who is interested in how Hitler "became Hitler" should without a doubt read "The Pink Swastika" by Scott Lively. He's got a website - http://www.abidingtruth.com/ and as far as I know that book plus others can be read from the website. The Pink Swastika has voluminous research and it is a shocker - Lively really gets into the philosophical background of Nazism. Obviously this movie doesn't get it at all. the liberals/homosexual acitivists have whitewashed Hitler's connections with the homosexual movements of early 20th century Germany.

Also, there is a German book that came out in 2001 called "Hidden Hitler" with apparent proof that Hitler himself was homosexual. If anyone knows where to get that book let us know!
I strongly urge anyone who wants to really get some background about Hitler and the Nazis to check out Lively's book.

[KellyAdmirer]

For some reason, young Hitler is a hot entertainment topic right now. Probably only putting society on a shrink's couch would answer the hidden question why.

[muleboy]

Many thanks for the post. I am really looking forward to seeing this movie. Considering Cusack's politics, I find it curious that he would explore the connections between art and politics.

I have a book of Hitler's artwork. He seemed quite talented to me, though his works were mostly of buildings. Quite accurate depictions yet distinctly lacking in action and life. Hitler seemed to be a classicist with unfortunate timing to be hawking his works in an avant garde age that shunned the ways and tastes of the past.

I thoroughly believe that had Hitler become a successful artist, he would have emerged as the Barbara Streisand of the 1920's and 30's, whose constant railings against the government policies would have amused millions and been dismissed without a second thought.

[ExpandNATO]

Provided the reviewer's summation of the Hitler and Max relationship is accurate, the action in the film can be summarized as.

Confused young war veteran fighting with various inner demons and the defeat of his country is reaching for some truth and beauty through painting.

The patron (Max) rejects this search, prodding Hitler to express his inner pain, providing such examples as a meat grinder (which has often been used as a metaphor for the totalitarian state) as part of a performance piece for Hitler to emulate. Tragically, Hitler follows Max's lead and creates the iconography of Nazism...

...and eventually, as we all should know, leads one of the most homicidal performance art pieces ever, which probably ground up Max as well.

[thatdewd]

To understand the young Hitler and Nazism as well, you have to study the source of Adolf's anti-semitism and the origin of the "Aryan" theology. Hitler, and those who rose to the top of the nazi heirarchy were followers of the Thule Society and similar mystical cults. Nazism was really a religion, with specific theological teachings. It was not just about "white" purism, it was an attempt to revive what Hitler and the others believed to be an ancient race with god-like powers, the Aryans. It was pure occultism, and the weirdest of the weird. All non-aryan peoples (that meant most whites, too), were a genetic threat to the re-emergence of ancient Aryan man, but the Jews especially presented a genetic problem because they carried the poison of their mono-theistic God in their blood. Hitler said this in numerous speeches. The occultic beliefs and teachings of the SS, the vanguard from which the Aryan would one day supposedly re-emerge, were especially bizarre, and completely religious in their nature. Amazing how history avoids this aspect of Hitler and nazism, choosing instead to merely pass it off as organized racism. It was much, much more than that. Hitler's early occultism was the most important factor in his pyschological makeup, and that of the other nazi leaders as well. I'm sure his frustration as an unsuccessful artist had an effect on him, but it was minor compared to other things.

[Petronski]

Adolf's time as a vagabond in Vienna, painting hopelessly bourgeois architectural still-lifes, learning to hate and struggling to get by, together with his traumatic observations about his mother's slow death from cancer while under treatment by a Jewish doctor--all of this would be far more interesting than the tripe 'Max' offers us. How galling to introduce a fictional character, when so much more could be learned from the actual events. Pathetic.

[sheik yerbouty]

Mad Max.

[OutsideTheBox]

Soooo...it would seem that Hitler's early days paralleled Gollum's, huh?

[pawdoggie]

The problem with imagining a Post-WWI Germany without a Hitler is that a charismatic German "Fuehrer" would surely have emerged from the chaos of the Weimar Republic. This Fuehrer might have been a Moscow-oriented Communist, a Monarchist, a proto-Nazi or an authoritarian military type, but (whatever else he was) he would surely have been bad news for Europe and the world. This alternate Fuehrer would not have suffered from Hitler's peculiar Sado-Masochism and megalomania, which caused him to disregard reflexively the best and brightest of his military, scientific, political and economic advisers.

[driftless]

As someone who is an admitted philistine, I find the tenuous connection the film critic is trying to make between modern art lovers and classicists unsettling. I think that modern art is garbage created by frauds as artistically untalented as Hitler. I've read plenty of books about Hitler, but I've never heard of this Roth character. I don't know if there was a Roth-type character in Hitler's past. Hitler's life was strange enough without having to invent things which may not have occurred. But if modern art could get crushed like Nazism, that would be two great evils eliminated.

[Pagey]

'Hitler Before the Führer'

Hmmm,the similarities to Hillary Rotten Clinton from 1969 to 2004,(8),(12) surely will be astronomical.

[weegee]

Make no mistake: the 30-year-old Hitler imagined by the film is a thoroughly disagreeable creep. As he skulks through the movie, radiating a clenched, clammy phosphorescence, he could be described (in therapeutic terms) as a humorless, obsessive-compulsive rageaholic with zero tolerance for frustration. He is the sort of killjoy who, when attending a social gathering, would be deemed intriguing for the first 20 minutes but quickly would wear out his welcome with his haranguing intensity, rigid certitude and lack of social grace.

Sounds like Brother Theodore (a man who ironically died the same week as Ed Big Daddy Roth and Joey Ramone).

Brother Theodore fled Hitler's Germany and reportedly got assistance entering America from Albert Einstein. He recorded dark spoken word "rants" in the 1950s and continued performing up to the end. He found new fame from repeated appearances on David Letterman's show.

[weegee]

The debates between Rothman and Hitler culminate with the movie's conceptual coup, in which Hitler comes up with the iconography of National Socialism, including the swastika, and proudly presents it to Rothman, who is impressed enough to proclaim that Hitler has made his crucial breakthrough. It's a novel idea: Nazism as the art project of a failed painter. Because that iconography has yet to be attached to a political and social movement, Max sees it only as a fantastically inventive work of kitsch, a grand theme park of the imagination that today might be labeled Hitlerworld.

The swastika was a good luck sign until Hitler appropriated it. It would be comparable to Radical Islamists using the Smiley Face to identify their movement (Religion of Peace TM).

There are those in recent years who have sought to "take back" the swastika.

Avagara Review: Can the Swastika be Re-sanctified?

Gentle Swastika by Man Woman

[weegee]

Despite his doubts about Hitler, Rothman generously agrees to take some of his paintings on consignment, but the potential customers he locates end up choosing Ernst over Hitler.

This rings somewhat hollow though. Dominique de Menil was a big patron of Max Ernst even though she and her husband were not initially fans of his work. As a result, they commissioned a portrait of Dominique. Patrons can be guided to sponsor artists by the art brokers and artists can compromise their own designs to appease a customer.

There is a portrait of the young Dominique de Menil painted by surrealist Max Ernst around 1934. The painting shows just her head, in three-quarter profile. Her short blond hair waves around her ears, her skin is pale and unlined, her eyes are focused on the distance, and an enigmatic smile plays about her small mouth. The head floats on a strange orange, red, and deep blue background, and ambiguous curled shapes hover around it; they look like edges of seashells or shards of crockery.

At the time the portrait was painted, Dominique de Menil was in her mid-twenties and newly married. She and John lived in an apartment in Paris. They were by no means art collectors; they were simply trying to decorate a large, empty wall in their dining room when a friend suggested that they ask Max Ernst to paint a mural for them. "We were told he did wonderful birds," she recalls. "When I saw the kinds of birds this fellow did, I hated them. But since he was expecting something from us, we suggested he paint a portrait of me. "

Mrs. de Menil sat for Ernst several times in his studio and later went to see the results. "I did not like the painting at all," she says. "I thought I looked very stiff." She left instructions for it to be delivered; when many months passed and the portrait did not arrive, she wasn't sorry.

(from Texas Monthly archive:What I Admire I Must Possess)

By the way, today the Menil Collection houses one of the largest private collections of Max Ernst paintings and statues (along with a very large collection of paintings by Rene Magritte, among others). There is more to the story on the "portrait". Decades later it did make its way back to her and is sometimes on exhibit at the museum.

As to Max Ernst, he had spent WWI in the trenches fighting a war he did not support. He painted while in the trenches to take his mind off the war.

Not all frustrated artists or combatants vent their anguish violently.