Hitler's Table Talk

688 HITLER BUYING PAINTINGS
the destruction of the British Empire. In spite of everything, I
therefore think that we are psychologically right in continuing
to declare, now and in the future, that we are not fighting
against the British people, but against this ruling clique.
Remembering, no doubt, that in olden days the Princes of
the German Electorates caused themselves to be crowned by
the French, the present Pretender to the French throne
addressed me immediately after the armistice, saying that he was
prepared to conform in all things to German law. What a
spineless fool!
There are pictures which the eye of a peasant girl is not
capable of appreciating, just as there are peasant lads whom it
would be useless to take straight off to a performance of
Tristan. One of Britain's great sources of strength is that she
does not hesitate to give the people the things they understand
and like. In Germany the filthy Jews have succeeded in condemning
nearly everything that was healthy in art as junk and
trash. The later canvases of Makart are of no great value,
for by that time he was a mentally sick man. The Jews condemned
them, but that did not prevent them from praising to
the skies equally indifferent works—for the very reason that the
creators of them were mentally deranged. The blackguards
derided Piloty, Kaulbach and Keller! The first Buerkels I
bought cost me about three hundred marks apiece; but Buerkel,
of course, was a prolific painter, whose living depended on his
brush. The only artists to whom the damn Jews gave any
credit were Slevogt and Trübner in his later period—and, of
course, Leibl. I have the best collection of the works of Spitzweg
in the world, and they are worth anything from sixty to
eighty thousand marks each. I have also paid eighty thousand
marks for a Defregger. From one point of view, that is a lot of
money, but when one remembers that they were the sole pictures
of an epoch which would otherwise have never been per^
petuated pictorially, it is nothing. For photography, remember,
did not exist at that time. It is German painters who painted
the Campagna, not Italian; so it was in the days of Goethe, and
so it has always remained.
We must teach the British to appreciate not only the Germany
of the Goethe epoch, but also the mighty Germany of to-day!