Hitler's Face: The Biography of an Image (review)

Helen's face, according to Homer, launched a thousand ships. What of Hitler's face? Surely there was no face in the twentieth century so characterized by devotion and hatred, majesty and caricature, than his. It appeared on postage stamps and posters, paintings and sculptures, in books and magazines, in films and photographs. In Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, it was divine; in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, farcical. Even today, more than 60 years after his death, his visage holds arresting power. Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and other murderous dictators of the twentieth century, have faded into visual stagnation. Yet Hitler's face remains fluid, regularly appearing in new forms. How could one not particularly striking face carry so many meanings? That is the question this brief book sets out to answer. It is a biography not of Hitler, but of Hitler's face.

Claudia Schmölders grounds her analysis (first published in Germany in 2000) in material that will be new to most American readers, a review of the remarkable outburst of German scholarship and pseudoscholarship on facial essences: "no epoch devoted itself so fully to questions of physical appearance and effect as did the period between 1918 and 1945" (3). During this time, there were many books with titles like Erna Lendvai-Dircksen's Das deutsche Volksgesich (The Face of the German People) as well as a fascination with portraits, photographs, and death masks. The various portrayals of Hitler's face thus had roots, roots that gave meanings then that are largely forgotten today. Schmölders touches on other aspects of Hitler's physicality as well, such as his hands—when Karl Jaspers asked Martin Heidegger in 1933 how an uneducated man like Hitler could rule Germany, the response was: "Education is irrelevant, just look at his wonderful hands!" (46)—his handwriting, and his voice, but these are peripheral to her central interest.

She traces changes in the way Hitler was portrayed. Before 1923, he forbade photographs, making possible a page of 11 caricatures in the satirical weekly Simplicissimus titled "What does Hitler look like?" one of which portrayed the "fascinating eyes" that were so often noted by those who met him. Thereafter, led by Heinrich Hoffmann, the first of thousands of photographs began appearing. Initially, Hitler appeared youthful, captivating. By 1932, he was sufficiently known so that a vivid election poster could show his disembodied head on a black background, the only text being "HITLER." His face alone was the party. In the 1930s, he became the powerful leader, usually shown from below, though several popular books showed him "behind the scenes" in supposedly relaxed settings. Hoffmann made his fortune by releasing volume after volume of photographs that sold hundreds of thousands, even millions, of copies. With the war, Hitler became the stern, infallible commander of Germany's fate. As a common poster had it, "Adolf Hitler is victory," and he looked like he was. Posters and paintings became more common than photographs, as Hitler's deteriorating physical condition made photographs and films less satisfactory.

That was one side. But Hitler's face was also made for contempt and caricature. A chapter titled "Shock Pictures 1939–1945" looks at what Hitler's enemies did with the image. The peculiar mustache, his unnatural poses, his evil, begged to be mocked and skewered. Even Donald Duck got into the act in a 1943 cartoon titled Der Fuehrer's Face. Before 1933, most caricatures were amusing, but not particularly penetrating. The Nazis even published a book titled Hitler in the Caricature of the World that included many both from before and after 1933. Hitler's image was so powerful that attempts to caricature it could only backfire, they thought. There were exceptions, such as Erwin Blumenfield's vivid 1933 image of Hitler's decaying face (155).

The final chapter, titled "Picturing Horror 1945–1949," looks at what happened to...