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In his account of Hitler's days as a young man in Vienna, Josef Greiner claimed in 1947 that his friend had immersed himself in the history and architecture of ancient Rome. Hitler was so fired in imagination that he would have left at once to see Rome, if his finances had permitted it.1 Greiner's book itself is built of fantasy; he likely never met the future Chancellor of Germany.2 Nonetheless, the anecdote does capture some essential truths about the ancient Rome of Adolf Hitler. Rome was an early, abiding interest, and one in which the city of Vienna played a crucial role.
Affection for Rome was not standard in German, let alone National Socialist, circles. Since Martin Luther's separation from the Church of Rome, many Germans had cultivated a sense of "otherness" from the Roman inheritance of Western Europe. For instance, the title verso of the second edition of Erasmus' New Testament (Basle 1519) displayed a woodcut of Arminius' victory at the Teutoburgerwald, featuring the scene described by Florus (Epitome 230.37), in which a triumphant German severs the tongue of a Roman lawyer with the words, "At last, viper, you have ceased to hiss" (tandem vipera sibilare desisti). The late eighteenth century brought the Romantic Movement, and its call for the recovery of the roots of German identity. An enduring monument of the era is the rusticated setting of the Arminius monument near Detmold, first sketched as a private construction in 1819 and completed in 1875 when Germany had been united under Prussia. And it was in this new Germany, eager to distance itself from the Habsburgs and their one-time claim to imperial Rome via the Holy Roman Empire, that such primitivizing monuments as the "Bismarck Towers" were erected in the years 1895-1914. In a conscious rejection of marble's classical resonance, the builders made these bulky towers of native stone such as granite, and usually sited them on hilltops, amid groves of oak trees, in a Romantic vision of a Germany untouched by Mediterranean civilization. Indeed, these towers often served as the base of bonfires, lit on pre-Christian holidays such as the eve of the summer solstice, as well as on Bismarck's birthday.3
Another relevant aspect of Romanticism is its exaltation of Greece over Rome....