The Book of Santa Claus Book

I grew up in the 60's and 70's, son of a WW2 veteran, like all the rest of my buddies. It was natural that I would become interested in World War Two and its sinister mastermind, Adolf Hitler. As a teenager I couldn't help but notice how cool the German tanks were - Tigers, Pathers, King Tigers! - compared to our beetle-like Shermans. But it went further than that, the German uniforms too were cool, as were their their machine pistols, their flags, their medals, their swords (swords!), and their parades and, well, it just seemed like a regime art-directed by a great artist. I didn't know at the time that dictatorships and totalitarian societies control everything and "art direct" their entire sphere of enfluence.

This book is a biography of Adolph Hitler from the point of view of his artistic obsessions. It is an astonishing book, in my opinion. I am a trained artist, graduated from art school, and I always knew that Hitler failed to get into art school. Twice. Those rejections changed the fate of the world. The man was obsessed with painting, sculpture, music, and - most importantly - architecture. He has the sensibility of an artist more than a general, men he referred to as "blockheads." This book goes through each obsession in detail: Wagner in music, 19th century romanticism in painting - in direct conflict with modernism, neo-classical architecture on a megalomaniacal scale.

The author provides great photographs that illustrate the book. He takes us through the mind of Hitler the artist/world dominator and it has the feel of a fantasy novel in places. We see Hitler in 1944, as the Russians are nearing the border, still obsessed with his plan to make Linz, Austria into the greatest cultural city in the world.

I have read dozens of military history books about World War Two and Hitler is hard to ignore, but he always comes across as a pure military man, if mad, in those books. Here, we find the other side - he viewed politics and war as a means to an end, the end being his construction of a new Germany, with architecture to found a 1000 year kingdom. It's all in this book. But so is his obsession with opera and opera houses, Greek sculpture reborn to glorify his racist views, and autobahns as an expression of power and a way to control the future (there were only 500,000 cars in Germany at the time!).

I highly recommend this book if you want to know more about the real Hitler, not just the crazed anti-semite and warmonger, here you find an equally crazed man, but motivated by artistic concerns as a means to truly remake society.