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First Run Features has in its collection several films dealing with the Nazis, mostly documentaries, the variety of which give evidence to the continuing interest and fascination with one of modern history’s darkest moments. In this review I will look at three of these DVD’s, two documentaries, Architecture of Doom and The Eye of Vichy, and the fictional The Murderers are Among Us. In Architecture of Doom (1989 German version, 1991 English version) Swedish documentarian Peter Cohen makes a fascinating and compelling argument for the Nazi Third Reich as a perverted aesthetic program. There is no doubt that politics (Fascism) and ideology (racist) are what we think of with the Nazis, but, as Cohen argues, to fully understand and explain Nazism one can not disassociate the political from the aesthetic.
Cohen uses German newsreel footage, documentaries, photos, and newspaper clippings to carve a convincing argument. The central point which links together all the disparate historical clips and footage is that Hitler was driven by an obsession to model all aspects of German life on his own views of what constituted great art. The Nazi plan was in essence a ‘beautification’ of German society through violence. This ‘beautification’ through violence started with culture (avant-garde art), then moved to the social body (unwanted members of society, such as mental patients, gypsies, homosexuals, and the physically deformed), and culminated with a specific, all-around scapegoat, the Jews (racial, economic, moral).
It is no coincidence then, that so many of the Nazi hierarchy were failed artists, starting with Hitler, Goebbels, and Rosenberg. This vacuous, superficial equation of surface beauty and cleanliness with an idyll body politic was transferred onto art, medicine, and urban planning. According to Cohen there were three obsessions that drove Hitler’s quest for a new ‘aestheticised’ Germany: his home town Linz, the musical composer Wagner, and the age of Antiquity (Rome, Greece, Sparta).
The documentary moves chronologically, beginning with Hitler’s long running attack on modernism in art with the soon to be yearly 1933 exhibit “Degenerate Art.” According to Hitler, and backed by selected German art critics, these modern artworks, with their distorted facial features, elongated bodies, heightened and stylized colors, and skewed perspectives, reflected an image of depravity and insanity which, if left unchecked,...