Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (2 page)

Hitler preferred to look rather than touch, and he also enjoyed the pornography his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann made available to him. Ernest Pope claimed Hitler frequently visited
The
Merry Widow
, in which an American actress played the lead. ‘I have seen Hitler nudge his
Gauleiter
and smirk when Dorothy does her famous backbending number in the spotlight.’ Hitler watched through opera glasses and sometimes had command performances for his private benefit.
11

What is clear is that Hitler was unable to have a normal
relationship
with women. It seems almost too clichéd to suggest that the man who delighted in the sadistic torture of his enemies and had not an ounce of compassion for those he sent to their deaths was also a voyeur and a masochist in need of punishment from pretty girls.

If it is true what Zeisler claimed about Renate Müller being coerced into inflicting pain upon Hitler, it would appear to shed light on her death. What is also apparent is that she had been seeing Hitler for around two years because Zeisler, who had
effectively
pimped for Hitler by sending her to him, left Germany in 1935, two years before she died, although she might have ended her association with Hitler, or attempted to, during or before 1937. But whether she killed herself because she was literally driven insane by being forced to indulge in his S&M games, or because she had to be done away with to keep her from going public with revelations of her bizarre association with him – in Hitler’s Germany
super-injunctions
were usually imposed with deadly force – her death can also be theoretically linked to Hitler because of the history of Hitler’s women committing or attempting suicide, or even murder. But what was it about Hitler that did this to the women closest to him?

He was deranged – that is without question. To be drawn into close proximity with him in any kind of emotional or physical way must have caused people who were vulnerable or dependent upon him in some way to lose their sense of normality and even become severely unbalanced. He certainly was not sexually conventional, and, by inflicting sexual activities so extreme upon others as he appeared to do to Renate Müller – and must have done to others – he must have contributed to them being driven to the edge of their
own limits of normality and sanity. There also remains the
possibility
that some of these women, knowing of his sexual deviances, were a threat to him, and murder can’t be completely discounted, especially in the case of Renate Müller.

In Hitler’s cult of celebrity, as in showbusiness anywhere in the world, celebrity and sex went hand in hand. But in his case, celebrity also went hand in hand with terror and death. His cult of celebrity was like a vortex into which anyone wanting success in their chosen field, whether it was drama or music, painting or
writing
, was sucked without mercy. It’s known that Hollywood can be cruel, but Hitler’s cult of celebrity was devastating for all, including Hitler himself. It was as though he couldn’t control it or himself; he was driven by one overwhelming and unhinged desire – to get to the top.

O
ne evening in the autumn of 1905, in Linz, the third biggest city in Austria, sixteen-year-old Adolf Hitler met August Kubizek, older by nine months. Their friendship was formed by their mutual love of music and opera, and, dressed in their finest clothes, they went almost every evening together to the opera or the theatre. As well as sharing a love for the opera, they also shared an ambition to be famous; Kubizek dreamed of becoming a great musician. Hitler had come to Linz in the hope of being accepted for a place at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts.

When it came to pop music, the teenage Adolf Hitler was a fan of the operettas of Johann Straus and Franz Lehár, and in later years he would enjoy Liszt, Brahms, Beethoven and Bruckner,
12
but he considered Richard Wagner to be the supreme artist, a genius, someone to emulate.
13
Hitler was simply wild about Wagner.

Kubizek and Hitler saw operas by the Italian masters Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini, and the works of Puccini and Verdi, but Hitler considered the music inferior in every way because they were not German. ‘For him, a second-rate Wagner was a hundred times better than a first-class Verdi,’ said Kubizek, who did not agree but always gave in to Hitler’s insistence that they forgo Verdi at the Court Opera to see Wagner at the more lowbrow Popular Opera House. ‘When it was a matter of a Wagner performance,’ wrote Kubizek, ‘Adolf would stand no contradiction.’
14

In death, Richard Wagner remained the most popular composer of the era, and Hitler was just one of thousands who flocked to hear the works of the master of Bayreuth performed at the Hofoper in Vienna during the early years of the twentieth century. Hitler and Kubizek went to all of Wagner’s operas that were performed at
the Court Opera in Linz, one of the best opera houses in Europe. During Hitler’s time in Vienna, from 1905 to 1913, Wagner’s operas were performed at the Court Opera no fewer than 426 times.
15

When one day Hitler and Kubizek heard a piece by Verdi being played by a street organ-grinder, Hitler told his friend, ‘There you have your Verdi. Can you imagine Lohengrin’s Grail narration on a barrel organ?’
16
Wagner’s
Lohengrin
was the first opera Hitler ever saw, and he had been caught up in the saga of the mysterious knight of the grail sent to rescue the condemned maiden Elsa, only to be ultimately betrayed by her.
Lohengrin
always remained one of his favourite Wagner operas.
17

Seeing a Wagner opera was not just a visit to the theatre for Hitler but ‘the opportunity of being transported into that extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that escape into a mystical dream-world,’ said Kubizek.
18
Hitler recalled, ‘When I hear Wagner, it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.’
19
American journalist Frederick Oechsner, after meeting Hitler years later, reported that when Hitler listened to Wagner’s music, he saw ‘grimaces of pain and pleasure contort his face, his brows knit, his eyes close, his mouth contract tightly’.
20

It was not merely the music that inspired and shaped Hitler. He was aroused by the drama of the opera, and by the heroes he dreamed of becoming. To be able to identify with a hero of drama, whether in opera, books or films, has always been a factor in successful creative and artistic works, from Homer to Harry Potter. To create an identity between an audience and a James Bond or a Shirley Valentine or a Billy Elliot is part of what makes drama work on its most basic level, by drawing an audience into its story and compelling them to suspend disbelief. But Hitler became
increasingly
unable to break off from that disbelief when the curtain fell, and very quickly he came to believe that it really could all become reality and that Wagner was telling him he had some predestined role to play in the future.

Wagner conjured up the sounds and images of Germanic myth, of gods and of the monumental struggle for deliverance and
salvation, of death and triumph. Wagner’s heroes – Siegfried, Rienzi, Stolzing and Tannhäuser – were all outsiders in conflict with the unbending status quo governed by tradition. Hitler was enthralled by the themes common to Wagner, sacrifice, betrayal, redemption and heroic death. Wagner’s heroes overcame all adversity to achieve greatness, and that appealed to Hitler, who fantasised that he could live like a Wagnerian hero,
21
but more than that, he wanted to become a
new
Wagner; that is, a supreme artistic and philosophical genius, which was his view of Wagner.

When Wagner’s first masterwork,
Rienzi, der Letze der Tribunen
(
Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes
), was performed in Linz, either in 1905 or 1906, the two friends went to see it. It proved to be a
turning
point in the life of the young artist.
Rienzi
, set in medieval Rome, tells of a tribune who defeats the nobles attempting to raise a rebellion against the people’s power. The Church turns against him and he is forced to make a final stand in the capitol, which the people burn down around him.

Hitler was carried away by the sounds and sights portrayed in
Rienzi
. As though delivered of a personal and divine revelation through the musical genius of Wagner, he left the theatre in a state of near ecstasy and led Kubizek up the slopes of Freinberg, a
mountain
outside Linz, there to expound on the significance of what they had just seen. And, as if he had been charged to fulfil some kind of Wagnerian prophecy, Hitler told Kubizek ‘in grandiose, compelling images’ what his own future and that of his people was to be.

While scholars, historians and biographers dispute some of the details in Kubizek’s account, something unusual and pertinent to history certainly happened that night in Linz which set Hitler on the long as yet unforeseeable journey that would result in acts of unspeakable evil and the deaths of millions.

Part of the problem with Hitler was his inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. When he and Kubizek bought a lottery ticket, Hitler immediately began planning the fine house he would build for himself and Kubizek on the bank of the Danube with
the winnings. He spent weeks deciding on the decor and
choosing
furniture, and deciding their life of leisure would include a middle-aged female housekeeper; then when he didn’t win, he flew into a fury, unable to comprehend his failure to hold the winning number.
22
Although he didn’t win the lottery prize, he never gave up his dream of living in luxury and being known the world over. It didn’t really matter to him what he was known
for
.

In the early twentieth century, fame could not be won on TV talent shows, or by living for several weeks in a televised house, or by kissing-and-telling, or by being a politician or a footballer, or just by being famous for being famous. In the twenty-first century, celebrity culture has become the obsession of the age, but the cult of celebrity that the Nazis seeded and grew began with Hitler himself. Yet in the beginning Hitler had nothing going for him but his own fantasies, fed by Wagner’s music.

All music has the potential to affect the emotions; to bring memories to the surface, stirring up both nostalgia and experiences best forgotten; to inspire artistic endeavours. When film director Quentin Tarantino listened to music from spaghetti Westerns as a youth, he envisioned new scenes, new plots to go with the music, resulting in films such as the two
Kill Bill
movies. Film music, like the opera, is designed to affect the senses, which is why some film actors like to have music played before and even during the filming of a scene. When making
Once Upon a Time in America
, Robert de Niro liked to hear Ennio Morricone’s music, already scored and recorded, played over the scene to help him find the mood and tone of the moment to affect his performance.

Film composers are also heavily influenced by Wagner. Ennio Morricone repeated
Ride of the Valkyries
in
My Name Is Nobody
, and Hans Zimmer sampled and emulated Wagner in his
Gladiator
score, especially in scenes which reminded him of moments from
Triumph of the Will
, Leni Riefenstahl’s spectacular film of the 1934 Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters.

The art of film scoring evolved directly from Wagner’s use of
leitmotivs by which individual characters have their own themes, a contrivance used precisely because of its subtle emotional effect on an audience. Critic Theodor Adorno wrote that Wagnerian
leitmotiv
‘leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotiv is to announce heroes or situation so as to allow the
audience
to orient itself more easily.’
23
It was Wagner’s use of leitmotivs which made his music so powerful, evocative and influential, on composers and listeners alike.

Music can also create fanaticism. During the late 1940s girls screamed, cried, swooned and fainted in sexual ecstasy at the sight and sound of Frank Sinatra. In the 1960s it happened all over again with the Beatles. Fans of singers, bands and musical artists of every kind can often respond with extreme fanaticism to the works of those they idolise. They come to know everything there is to know about their idols. They have images of their idols to worship. For many, it becomes almost a religion, a fact not lost on someone who observed this phenomenon from the closest vantage point: ‘For some reason celebrities of a certain kind are treated as messiahs whether they like it or not; people encapsulate them in myths that touch their deepest yearnings and needs,’ wrote Marlon Brando.
24

Hitler said, ‘For me, Wagner is something godly, and his music is my religion. I go to his concerts as others go to church.’
25
Wagner literally became a religious experience for Hitler.
26
But even such extreme devotion does not necessarily turn the most fanatical of admirers into a Hitler. Yet that’s what happened to young Adolf.

He knew just about everything there was to know about Wagner’s life and work, and he boasted that he had read everything the master had written,
27
which included all of Wagner’s anti-Semitic articles. Wagner hid behind a pseudonym when he wrote his first anti-Semitic essay, ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’
28
(originally translated as ‘Judaism in Music’ but better known as ‘Jewishness in Music’). In the article, he attacked Jewish contemporaries Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, and claimed Jews were a destructive and alien aspect in German culture – Germans ‘felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them’.
He argued that Jews had no connection to the German spirit and so Jewish musicians were only capable of producing shallow music intended only to achieve financial success rather than be a genuine work of art. ‘Only one thing can redeem [Jews] from the burden of your curse,’ he wrote. ‘The redemption of
Ahasverus
– total destruction.’
29

Not everyone saw anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas, but that was because he disguised it well, so he wouldn’t offend his Jewish patrons or the Jewish conductors and performers. When he reprinted ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’ in a pamphlet with an extended introduction under his own name in 1866, it led to public protests at the first performances of
Die Meistersinger
in Vienna and Mannheim when the character of Beckmesser was recognised as a mocking depiction of a Jew.
30

Wagner never explicitly identified Beckmesser or any other
character
in any of his operas as being Jewish, but Wagner intended to create certain characters as Jewish representations, such as Klingsor in
Parsifal
and Mime in the
Ring
, a fact not lost on some of his peers. Gustav Mahler, Wagner’s Jewish contemporary and admirer, wrote, ‘No doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews with all their characteristic traits – petty intelligence and greed – the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested; but for God’s sake it must not be exaggerated and overdone.’
31

Hitler understood the racist overtones and was particularly inspired by the message of
Parsifal
, Wagner’s last opera and
arguably
his most racist. Hitler believed that by stripping away all the ‘Christian embroidery and Good Friday mystification’, the drama’s true context is revealed: Wagner does not praise Christian beliefs, but ‘pure noble blood’. To Hermann Rauschning – who was close to Hitler during his rise to power, especially the years 1932–1934 – he explained, ‘The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood.’ Corrupted blood was racial impurity. Hitler went on, ‘I have the most intimate familiarity with Wagner’s mental processes. At every stage of my life I come back to him … If we strip
Parsifal
of every poetic element, we learn from it that selection
and renewal are possible only amid the continuous tension of a lasting struggle.’
32

Hitler’s analysis corresponds with the interpretation of Paul Lawrence Rose, who wrote of the manifestations of Wagner’s racial ideology. ‘Wagner intended
Parsifal
to be a profound religious parable about how the whole essence of European humanity had been poisoned by alien, inhuman, Jewish values. It is an allegory of the Judaisation of Christianity and of Germany – and of
purifying
redemption.’ He wrote that
Parsifal
‘preached the new doctrine of racial purity… In Wagner’s mind, this redeeming purity was infringed by Jews.’
33
No wonder Hitler proclaimed that he made his religion from
Parsifal
.
34

Wagner had many Jewish friends and colleagues, and he even described his friendship with the French Jew Samuel Lehrs as ‘one of the most beautiful friendships of my life.’
35
Yet Wagner was influenced by the writings of racialist Arthur de Gobineau, whose
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
he read in 1880;
36
in his own writings of his final years Wagner reflected Gobineau’s theory that Western society was doomed, being of miscegenation between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races.