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89 5 Nazi Aesthetics in Historical Context JAMES E. YOUNG As is clear from the abundant literary and historical study of the victims’ diaries and memoirs, it is impossible to separate what might be called these works’ “aesthetic logic” from the victims’ very real historical and practical understanding of events as they unfolded. That is, the victims’ responses to contemporaneous events in the ghettos and camps were often shaped by how they may have literarily cast similar events the day before in letters, diaries, or chronicles . As the best new historical work on the Holocaust also makes clear, we can no longer divorce the Nazi-perpetrators’ representations of their victims from the actions taken on behalf of such representations, as repulsive as they may be. Finally, as a recent spate of fascinating new work on “Nazi aesthetics” has also made clear, we can no longer divorce the logic of such aesthetics from the history this logic would generate. Nevertheless, something in the study of Hitler still repels us. Whether it is our own traditional reflex to blot out the memory of our enemies (or to remember them as blotted out, as we do Haman and Amalek), or just the queasy sense that too much time spent in his company cannot be a good thing, I’m not sure. Or maybe we fear that by understanding Hitler and his Nazi cohort too well, by explaining them, we come perilously close to justifying and rationalizing their evil deeds—akin to asking “why” of the Nazis and receiving their own selfaggrandizing , exculpatory explanations in turn. For this writer, at least, it has always been easier to empathize with the victims of history than with the killers. As it turns out, it has also been easier to study the aesthetic responses of victims to their suffering than to explore the aesthetic preoccupations of the killers or the aesthetic principles on which the killers may have based their policies of war and mass murder. It is almost as if our own romantic notions of art and its transcendent link to beauty have led us to protect both art and beauty from the barbaric claims made on them by the Nazis, from the evil acts committed in their name. A “Nazi-aesthetic,” in this view, seems to be a veritable contradiction in terms. If “beauty is truth, and truth beauty,” as Keats would have it, then Nazis and art are mutually exclusive categories. But in fact, as historians like George Mosse, Peter Viereck, and Saul Friedländer (among others) have long known, the Nazis not only possessed a highly refined aesthetic sensibility but also atypically enacted their aesthetic at every level of politics and policy. Moreover, they not only believed themselves to be artists but were regarded by others at the time as artists, whose very ideology was founded in an essentially aesthetic logic. “Like it or not,” Thomas Mann wrote in his  essay “Brother Hitler,” “how can we fail to recognize in this phenomenon [of Hitler and his spell over the Germans] a sign of artistry?” As Frederic Spotts has pointed out in his riveting study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, quoting Peter Viereck’s  Metapolitics, “the artistic ambitions of Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, von Schirach, Funk, and Streicher were originally far deeper than their political ambitions and were integral parts of their personalities .” Spotts also notes that the late George Mosse lamented how belatedly he and other liberals came to understand that not only were these artistic ambitions part of their personalities, they were part and parcel of Nazi ideology. “We failed to see,” Mosse once wrote, “that the fascist aesthetic itself reflected the needs and hopes of contemporary society, that what we brushed aside as the so-called superstructure was in reality the means through which most people grasped the fascist message, transforming politics into a civic religion.” As such, this fascist aesthetic had earth-shattering consequences, which we now dismiss at the peril of our historical understanding. What, then, is this Nazi aesthetic, what kind of “art” came of it, and why do we concern ourselves with it now? The confluence in  of an exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art, “Prelude to a Nightmare,” and Frederic Spotts’s  volume made abundantly clear that not only did the Nazi aesthetic have several interpenetrating parts—including idealizations of purity, violence, and the human form—but, in fact, the resulting art encompassed much more than the kitsch statuary and...

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