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The Nazis probably took links between architecture and society more seriously than any regime that has ever been. Peter Blundell Jonesl suggests that the monuments of the Third Reich were intended to crush the citizen's sense of individuality, and that attempts to infer that, for instance, Speer's architecture was apolitical are disingenuous.
The cover of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, his admirable history of the twentieth century, shows Hitler as caricatured by Chaplin in that memorable scene in The Great Dictator when he plays with the globe.2 It was a clever choice, for without making Hitler the hero, it indicates the shadow that evil leader casts across our century, while it also recognises the power of film as the new and dominant medium of artistic expression. Curiously, the credit for the photo does not mention Chaplin at all, but a film made in the 1970s: Hitler, a film from Germany in which it was included as a quotation. This adds another layer of interpretation. The director of that film, Hans Jurgen Syberberg, was among the most courageous of those German artists in the last couple of decades who tried to face up squarely to the unacceptable past. His struggle is a reminder of the acute pain still felt by Germans in relation to their identity. In a radio interview, Syberberg spoke about the problem of Hitler having soiled everything he touched, and having touched so much.
Knowing Hitler's fondness for Wagner's music, for example, and understanding the way in which it seemed to encourage his sense of destiny, we can never listen to it again with quite the same innocence. Associations stick. T. S. Eliot was surely right when he pointed out that the addition of a new work of art changes the meanings of all those in the tradition to which it belongs. One does not even need a new work: a change of interpretation or even of context is enough.
Hitler held power for only 12 years and was dead before most of us were born, yet he looms large, for he changed the world so much. We are still reeling from the extent of the moral collapse, still shocked by how modern technology could so exaggerate the barbarism. What makes it...