You can also find the roots of the Third Reich. The Nazi flag and uniforms, the soaring eagles, the neoclassical outdoor theaters where he staged his riveting rallies–all these grew out of his drawings and watercolors of Vienna monuments and edifices. “If someone else had been found, I would never have gone into politics,” Hitler once told his staff, according to Spotts. “I would have become an artist.” But his painting was barely encouraged; politics became the tool of his artistic expression, and he used it to ravage Europe.
Hitler’s appreciation of art probably did not come from his parents. He grew up in Linz, Austria, where his father was a customs official and his mother, an uneducated housewife. Spotts concludes in his book that the family was “uncultured.” Young Adolf took singing and piano lessons, but had little other artistic training. As an adolescent, he saw Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin,” which Spotts describes as “a transcendent aesthetic experience that left [Hitler] Wagner’s prisoner for life.” Shortly after, Hitler told his classmates that he wanted to become a famous painter. He dropped out of school, and in 1907 applied for entry to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was rejected, and when he reapplied the following year, rejected again. Devastated and destitute, he started drawing pictures of Vienna’s monuments, which he sold to tourists for pocket change; he slept in cafes and homeless shelters and often went hungry. “This was the saddest period of my life,” he wrote in “Mein Kampf,” adding that it was then that he first felt an evil cruelty that “kills all pity.”
By all accounts, Hitler’s talent was limited. “His paintings are dead,” says Spotts. “You can’t read anything in them. There is none of the originality that he displayed in politics. He was a copyist.” (Many of his works were displayed for the first time in the United States last summer in “Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1906-1913” at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.) Hitler’s sister Paula told American officials after the war that she felt that his anti-Semitism was rooted in this period. “He was starving severely in Vienna,” she said, according to U.S. government documents, “and he believed that his failure in painting was only due to the fact that trade in works of art was in the Jewish hands.”
In 1914 Hitler joined the Bavarian infantry and served in World War I as a courier on the Western front. While in the trenches, he drew and painted what he saw around him: the soldiers, the wounded, the destruction. Though the figures were facile, this work is the most emotional of Hitler’s oeuvre. This is where Meyjes launches “Max,” a fictional account of Hitler’s life as an artist in Munich after the war. Australian actor Noah Taylor plays the bedraggled young Hitler, and John Cusack stars as Max Rothman, a debonair (and fictitious) Jewish art dealer who tries to guide him.
For Meyjes, the project took years to bring to fruition. Like many Europeans, he had long felt haunted by Hitler. “His shadow was everywhere,” says the 48-year-old screenwriter and director. “My mother never wanted to go to a buffet because she had to stand in line for food during the war. My father went to prisoner-of-war camp, and every time we passed one of those prisons in Holland, my father would say, ‘So-and-so was broken there.’ You were drenched by it.” A few years ago Meyjes came across the Speer quote and that “gave me a way into Hitler,” he says. “This guy was a bohemian, like we used to be.” Meyjes began researching Hitler’s views on art, and came across another powerful quote, this time by essayist Walter Benjamin: in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he wrote that esthetics in politics equals fascism and fascism always leads to war. From there, Meyjes says, “the movie fell into place.” Meyjes, who also wrote the film, compressed Hitler’s pre- and postwar experiences and then created the character Max Rothman based on several historical figures in Hitler’s life. Their pas de deux–Hitler touts his anti-Semitic views to Rothman as the art dealer urges him to express his true emotions in his art–foreshadows Hitler’s rise in politics, the war and the Holocaust.
Meyjes wisely chose not to show any of the horror to come. “Every time I tried to tell the future, the story would lose its power,” he says. Despite–or perhaps because of–that he had a difficult time securing financing for the film. Meyjes had Andras Hamori, a Hungarian Jew and Sidney Blumenthal–a journalist and former Clinton White House aide of Russian-Jewish descent–as producers, but he could not raise the $11 million budget. Originally, Meyjes had Steven Spielberg’s support, but the deal fell apart. “As head of the Shoah Foundation,” Meyjes says Spielberg told him, “I just can’t do it.” Other investors would schedule meetings with Meyjes and Hamori and then back out at the last minute. “People would say, ‘Make any movie you want but just not this one’,” Meyjes recalls. His first break came when Cusack agreed to play the role of Rothman; the actor was so devoted to the project that he waived his fee. Eventually, the European film company Pathe and the Film Council of Britain agreed to fund the project.
“Max” drew fire even before its first screening. In the United States, the controversial Jewish Defense League denounced it as “a psychic assault on Holocaust survivors and the entire Jewish community.” And –Abraham Foxman, chairman of the U.S. Anti-Defamation League, called it “trivializing and offensive.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd devoted a piece to it and other pending television projects on this subject, dubbing them “lifestyles of the Reich and Fascist.” Spotts had a similar experience; several major publishing houses passed on his book because of its subject matter before Overlook Press took it on. The book still doesn’t have a German publisher attached. “People look at Stalin and Mao and even Pol Pot in an objective way, but we still get hysterical about Hitler,” Spotts says. “That fear has caused us to shun looking at the ‘good side’ of Hitler. People will not accept it.”
Was there a “good” side? Hitler’s adoration of the arts had a much greater impact on the Third Reich than is generally recognized. As Spotts points out in his book, on the eve of the war in 1939, artists were exempt from military duty. As the war raged on, he ordered that all opera houses, theaters and museums remain open. “Art is the great mainstay of a people,” Hitler once wrote, “because it raises them above the petty cares of the moment and shows them that after all, their individual woes are not of such great importance.”
But Hitler, a classicist, loathed contemporary art and used his power to rid Germany of it. Upon becoming chancellor in 1933, he began to purge all German cultural institutions of Jewish and modernist works. He personally lashed out at modernism, calling its artists “criminals of world culture,” “destroyers of our art,” “incompetents, cheats and madmen” and “imbecile degenerates.” In 1937, at the urging of his minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler staged the Degenerate Art Show in Munich, in which he singled out modernist artists such as Egon Schiele, Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt as the cultural enemies of the state. Some of these artists stayed in Germany and simply stopped working. Others–such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann–went into exile.
Would that it had been different. Back in his young bohemian days, Hitler, armed with a letter of introduction, approached the door of Vienna Court Opera set director Alfred Roller three times–but never found the nerve to knock. “I think if Hitler had been taken up by Roller, he would have been very happily engaged as a stage designer,” says Spotts. “It would have been heaven for him.” Whether Spotts is right or not no longer really matters. Hitler turned toward hell, and never looked back.
