The fact that he came by the cult of Aryanism and anti-Semitism belatedly suggests that they developed as much in service to his artistic ambition as the other way around. Meanwhile, he needed a political line-a cause, an enemy-that would be more dynamic than pan-Germanism. It seems clear that Hitler employed artistic means-hypnotic oratory, moving spectacle, elegant design-not just to gain power but to wield it in the here and now. Without him, Fascism might well have succeeded in Germany, but nothing foreordained Nazism's blend of dash and malice, its brilliant technology, and skulking atavism. Nazism was a singular invention and Hitler was its indispensable author. Hitler's rise remains mysterious- if only as to the precise amount of dumb luck involved-but it makes unnerving sense when viewed in terms of an eager artist's capacity to assimilate, synthesize, and apply the influences of his time and place. In lengthening retrospect, it becomes harder to credit categorical distinctions between Nazi aesthetics and those of redoubtable modern movements in architecture and design, including the Bauhaus. Hitler despised them for their insults to classical ideals of human beauty and for what he called, in another context, "liberalistic concepts of the individual." But he embraced cleanly abstracted and geometric styles, which later informed his own design work (notably, the stunning Nazi flag) and his shrewd patronage of the gifted youngsters Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer. Secession artists would later enter the Nazi lists of degenerate art. In Mein Kampf, he recalled, "For hours, I could stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the parliament the whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' " Meanwhile, his adopted city fired his imagination. He accumulated humiliations on the way to becoming a god of revenge for the humiliated of Germany. Grandiose and rigidly puritanical, he was a figure of fun to many of his mates in Vienna's lower depths. As it turned out, he seems never to have consorted with anyone whose ego overmatched his own. With a letter of introduction to Roller, Hitler approached the great man's door three times without mustering the nerve to knock. The most exasperating missed opportunity was the possibility of working under the graphic artist and stage designer Alfred Roller, a member of the anti-academic Secession movement whose sets for the Vienna Court Opera's productions of Wagner, which were conducted by Mahler, foreshadowed Nazi theatricality. As with any drifting young life, Hitler's might have gone in a number of ways. Hitler's own stilted early efforts were the work of a provincial tyro who was ripe for instruction that he never received. He swore by Eduard von Grützner, a genre painter of jolly, drunken Bavarian monks. His taste in painting was-and remained-philistine. The young Hitler was wild for Wagnerian opera, stately architecture, and inventive graphic art and design. Hitler studied the spellbinding oratorical style of the city's widely beloved populist, anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger. He proved, however, an apt pupil of the city's rampant strains of anti-Semitism, which exploited popular resentment of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie that had arisen under Franz Josef I, the conservative but clement-and, effectively, the last-Hapsburg emperor. Although he was fanatically pan-German-caught up in visions of an expanded Germany, which would incorporate Austria-he had laudatory things to say about Jews at the time. Jews were among his companions and patrons. With help from a friend, he earned a meager living drawing postcard views of Vienna and selling them to tourists. Intent on becoming an artist, he twice failed the art academy's admission test his drawing skills were declared "unsatisfactory." A thin, sallow youth, he wasn't cut out for physical labor. He often slept in a squalid homeless shelter, if not under a bridge. He walked the same streets as Freud, Gustav Mahler, and Egon Schiele, but he did so as one of the city's faceless, teeming poor. Hitler was eighteen years old when, in 1908, he moved from Linz and took up residence in Vienna. Cosmopolitan Vienna incubated his peculiar genius as well as his hideous ideas. Adolf Hitler was an artist-a modern artist, at that-and Nazism was a movement shaped by his aesthetic sensibility.
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