(4 of 4)
The high-culture implications of Nazism are just as extraordinary. Since the Hitler revival has already multiplied the rare-book price of first editions of Mein Kampf, it cannot be long before the surviving fragments of official Nazi art swell the auction rooms. But most of the monuments perished under the bombs, or were blown up for target practice. None of the bronze Muscle Beach colossi designed by Hitler's favorite sculptor, a pupil of Maillol named Arno Breker, have survived; the plasters for them ran to over 100 ft. high, iceberg parodies of Michelangelo and Bernini. Such disappearances are no aesthetic loss, but they leave a gap in cultural history. We can only imagine but not experience the dimensions of Nazi gigantism. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, provides a fascinating example of what genius can produce in the complete absence of taste. The tradition to which Speer's projects belong—the immense stadia, the dome 16 times the volume of St. Peter's, the dwarfing colonnades—is only superficially that of classicism; he was the totalitarian heir to the idealist architects of the 18th century like Boullee and Ledoux, to whom architecture was a sustained metaphor. Speer's axial planning was determinism in action. His work was an inflatio ad absurdum of the idea that art should communicate directly with the people. Yet, in the grossly pragmatic terms that Hitler laid down, there is no movement in the art and architecture of modern democracy whose works so demonstrably turned on so many viewers. What Busby Berkeley could compete with the crushing, rectilinear choreography of a Nürnberg rally, or with its obsessive power over the mass mind? What light show today could rival Speer's "cathedral of light" at Zeppelin Field in 1934, with its 130 searchlight beams forming a vast nocturnal hall whose walls were 25,000 ft. high, with clouds drifting through them? The grotesque apotheosis of art deco as an embracing social style did not happen in New York or Paris but in Nazi Germany, with its finned and slab-sided eagles, its formalized athletes with ripple hair, its obsessively "classical" modernismus. Hitler's puritan vulgarity is the exact opposite of the libertarian luminate vulgarity of the other present And the Western "Hitler culture, but wave" — one raised may not still il by political nostalgia but by a curiosity that shades into voyeurism — may do just that. If we persist in treating the culture of Nazism as a plague hospital sealed in 1945, which cannot be entered and inspected without the certainty of infection, we only contribute to the myth. Myths do not die easily — witness the cautious resurrection of Stalin — and they cannot be laughed out of existence. Only if Hitler is anchored in human reality will he stay dead. If not, he will continue as he has been since 1945: a nightmare of history, from which we cannot wake.