Hitler's Table Talk

704 THOUGHTS ON ART AND MUSIC
painter, because I am not sure of the dividing line between what
I understand and what I do not understand. I have the same
feeling when I look at paintings by Corinth and Trübner—to
mention only two of our German artists. These men started by
painting pictures of great merit, and then, urged on by pride,
they started to produce the most startling and extraordinary
works. In literature the Jew has already blazed the same
pernicious trail, and artists like Corinth and Trübner have
followed them. The result is the frightful daubs with which
they now inflict us.
In painting, the Italians were truly great from the fourteenth
century to the seventeenth; in the eighteenth century they
rested on their laurels, in the nineteenth their light began to
wane, and to-day Italian art is completely degenerate. All this
seems quite incomprehensible to me, but I suppose it is the law
of averages. In the nineteenth century the greatest masterpieces
in every branch were the works of us Germans. In the
same period the French, too, had some good artists, but they
all deteriorated in time.
When I think of the Paris Opera House, I cannot help feeling
that those of Dresden and Vienna are in a very different
category. The design itself of the Paris Opera is a work of
genius, but the execution, from the artistic point of view, is very
ordinary; and the interior is pretentious, overcrowded with
decoration and devoid of all artistic taste. We must make sure
that the new Opera House which we intend to build in Munich
surpasses everything, in every way, that has ever gone before it.
Munich of the nineteenth century has many characteristics in
common with the Berlin of Frederick the Great's days. Conceptions
were magnificently wide, but construction could not keep
pace, simply because the necessary money was not available.
In Frederick the Great's Berlin they were so short of funds that
it was possible to put statues only on the main plinth of a
monument. In Munich it is freely admitted that the houses of
the period were shoddily built. In the construction of the
Prinzregenten-Theater every possible economy was practised,
and the cost of construction, apart from interior decoration, was
under thirteen hundred thousand marks. In Berlin, at the same
time, the scale was more generous. The Reichstag—mon-