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Hitler’s Art Theory
This is why Hitler declared that the liberation of art from its imprisonment
by an art criticism that argues in terms of pure theory would be the
main task of his policies on art—and he was committed to pursuing this battle
for liberation as ruthlessly as possible. He wanted to produce instead a heroic
art that possessed eternal value. One could admittedly say that this constant
emphasis on art’s eternal value was mere talk, merely rhetorical flourishes
meant to justify the regime’s atrocities. That view loses plausibility, however,
when one notes that Hitler used the same arguments to move the members
of his own party to sacrifice their immediate political goals in order to create
art that would have eternal value, asking them: “Can we allow ourselves to
sacrifice for art at a time when there is so much poverty, want, misery, and
despair everywhere around us” 4 The answer, of course, is “Yes, we can and
should”—and therefore Hitler denounced the lack of appreciation for art by
those members of the National Socialist Party who were not willing to mobilize
the means and forces of the Third Reich not just for the economy and
the army but for art as well. Because, so Hitler argued, the Third Reich could
exist eternally only if it were to produce art that possessed eternal value. And
there is no doubt that Hitler saw the perspective of eternity alone as a State’s
ultimate justification. Hence the production of art with eternal value was the
ultimate task of politics if politics hoped to pass the crucial test—the test of
eternity. The concept of eternity was thus the core of Hitler’s reflections on
heroic art—on art as a heroic act. The heroic was nothing other than a willingness
to live for eternal fame and to exist in eternity. The heroic act was
defined by its transcendence of immediate, temporal goals and was an eternal
role model for all time to come. Given its centrality and influence, it makes
sense for us to look at this concept of eternity in detail.
First of all, Hitler never spoke of eternity in the sense of the immortality
of the individual soul. The eternity of which Hitler spoke was a post-Christian
one, a thoroughly modern one in that it was a purely material, corporeal
eternity—an eternity of ruins, of the relics left behind by any civilization once
it has gone under. These material remains that outlast every civilization could
produce in later observers either fascination, astonishment, at the recognition
of the traces of a heroic, artistic, creative act, or simply tired disinterest. Thus
Hitler understood the eternal value of art as the impression that art makes
on a future observer. And it was this gaze of the future observer that Hitler
sought to please first and foremost—and from it Hitler expected to receive