Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics »

Frederic Spotts has written four other books on European political and cultural affairs. His study of Bayreuth is acknowledged as the standard work on the subject. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics was written while Spotts was a visiting scholar at the Institute for International Affairs at Berkeley.

Spotts, a historian, has written a fascinating work that focuses on Hitler's policies for art and architecture and argues that art and aesthetics were central to his obscene vision and its execution. Among the topics are the planning of public events, architectural projects and the ideology that informed them, Hitler's own artistic training, analysis of Hitler's watercolors and drawings, his policies to appropriate art collections, music, and the autobahn. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The New Yorker

There is something refreshing about the deadpan tone that Spotts brings to his book on Hitler the artist. He has no grand theory to push, and pronounces his subject merely "interesting." At times, he takes understatement too far, as when he mentions the "occasional shrillness" of Hitler's oratory. But his study of the Führer's fascination with architecture, painting, sculpture, and music is for the most part elegantly composed and richly documented. Spotts says that Hitler was less of an idiot in these matters than biographers have implied, and that his dilettantish expertise made him all the more destructive; he could hypnotize a man such as Richard Strauss with his mastery of trivia. Still, Spotts never really confronts the horror at the center of his story: the fact that Hitler not only knew the arts but made a religion of them, and probably believed in nothing else.