Hitler's Table Talk

37O HITLER THE CONNOISSEUR OF ART
torpedo. In an affair of this nature, every negotiator, every
speaker runs the same danger. I've experienced it myself at
Weimar in 1926, and I've seen with what precautions, and
how artfully, one must proceed when one intends to tell the
public the opposite of what it expects from you.
As for the Indian masses, in any case one thing is certain,
that it doesn't want to have anything more to do with the
English.
I've often had occasion, during recent years, to immerse
myself in collections of the review Die Kunst.
It's striking to observe that in 1910 our artistic level was still
extraordinarily high. Since that time, alas! our decadence
has merely become accentuated. In the field of painting, for
example, it's enough to recall the lamentable daubs that people
have tried to foist, in the name of art, on the German people.
This was quite especially the case during the Weimar Republic,
and that clearly demonstrated the disastrous influence of the
Jews in matters of art. The cream of the jest was the incredible
impudence with which the Jew set about it! With the help
of phony art critics, and with one Jew bidding against
another, they finally suggested to the people—which naturally
believes everything that's printed—a conception of art according
to which the worst rubbish in painting became the expression
of the height of artistic accomplishment. The ten thousand
of the élite themselves, despite their pretensions on the intellectual
level, let themselves be diddled, and swallowed all the
humbug. The culminating hoax—and we now have proof of it,
thanks to the seizure of Jewish property—is that, with the
money they fraudulently acquired by selling trash, the Jews
were able to buy, at wretched prices, the works of value they
had so cleverly depreciated. Every time an inventory catches
my eye of a requisition carried out on an important Jew, I see
that genuine artistic treasures are listed there. It's a blessing
of Providence that National Socialism, by seizing power in
1933, was able to put an end to this imposture.
When I visit an exhibition, I never fail to have all the daubs
pitilessly withdrawn from it. It will be admitted that whoever
visits the House of German Art to-day will not find any work