Hitler as Political Artist

Theatrical Impresario & Rock Star

by Peter G. Clark

Hitler as Political Artist
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Hitler as Political Artist

Theatrical Impresario & Rock Star

by Peter G. Clark

Published Oct 06, 2022
679 Pages
Genre: HISTORY / Europe / Germany



 

Book Details

“What Hitler was able to do to a crowd in 2-1/2 hours will never be repeated in 10,000 years!” — Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s early confidant “Hitler was one of the first great rock stars. He was no politician; he was a great media artist. How he worked his audience! ... The world will never see anything like that again. He made an entire country a stage show.” — David Bowie, British rock legend

As a young man in Vienna, Adolf Hitler was sleeping on park benches in 1909, just a real “Nowhere Man” making all his “Nowhere Plans” and who would soon haunt homeless shelters while trying to hawk his unimaginative and banal paintings. Yet in 1933, this mommy’s boy and self-centered dilettante was appointed Chancellor of Germany after discovering his artistic-political calling as a charismatic orator and stage actor in the 1920s — and then dazzled Germans and foreigners alike with the color and pageantry of the Nuremberg rallies and other grand spectacles in the 1930s. As a virtuoso in the art of presenting dramatic performances, Hitler inspired the same type of emotional ecstasy that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley aroused from their frenzied fans. Even after clearly revealing the monstrous side of his murderous character in World War II by exterminating Jews and Slavs by the millions before committing suicide on April 30, 1945, he still emerged from the ashes and rubble of the Third Reich to seduce later generations. To the present generation, he has morphed from a murderous villain into a comical figure on many Internet platforms, particularly the hundreds of humorous YouTube parodies of his fanatical ranting and raving. This book examines Hitler’s extraordinary political-artistic talents to explain his nearly unfathomable rise from a homeless nobody into the most influential and demonic creature on the vast stage of modern history.

 

About the Author

Peter G. Clark

Peter G. Clark received his Ph.D. in History and Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught for 25 years in the University of California at San Diego’s Extension Program and also was a sportswriter and copy editor in Oakland and then San Diego. He has given many seminars at Cal and UCSD on Hitler and the Third Reich. His literary interests (and classes taught) range from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to the Russian masters (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev) and to the enigmatic Kafka. All these literary icons make repeated appearances in this book in an effort to comprehend the Hitlerian world from different perspectives. The author also disagrees with those historians who label ordinary Germans as anti-Semitic. On the contrary, ordinary Germans were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Jews and abhorred the anti-Jewish violence directed against them by Nazi thugs. And Hitler mentioned that time and again.

Also by Peter G. Clark

Mama's Boy
Mama's Boy (eBook Edition)