Hitler's Table Talk

7°3
3l8
13th June 1943, evening
Dangers of over-centralisation of cultural life—The future
of technology—The French painters—The great artistic
achievements of the nineteenth century were German—
Architecture in Berlin and Munich.
I am very nervous lest, one day when I am no longer here,
someone should get the idea of centralising in Berlin a series of
museums for the artistic masterpieces of the Reich, for military
trophies and weapons and for examples of German industrial
and scientific genius. This would give a completely erroneous
conception of the unified state, and the worst of it would be
that the initiator would certainly claim that in so doing he was
following the conceptions "of our late Fuehrer". In point of
fact we should, on the contrary, pursue a policy of judicious
decentralisation. The Deutsches Museum in Munich, with its
twenty-three kilometres of exhibits of all kinds, amply fulfils the
purely national need, and it would be disastrous if somebody
said we must have a museum in Berlin with forty-five kilometres
of exhibits!
In the Military Museum which I intend to found in Linz, I
wish to devote one section to the science of fortification, from
the earliest times down to the days of the Maginot Line and
the West Wall. Exact models will be necessary in order to
arouse the interest of young people. One of the great attractions
of the Deutsches Museum in Munich is the presence of a large
number of perfectly constructed working models, which visitors
can manipulate themselves. It is not just by chance that so many
of the young people of the inland town of Munich have answered
the call of the sea.
We must start from the viewpoint that technical science today
stands at the threshold of its development. Motorisation is
now only taking its first few hesitant steps. Many centuries
passed before human energy was replaced by animal energy,
and it will equally be many centuries before motorisation
reaches its full perfection.
I cannot make up my mind to buy a picture by a French