Category: Aryan beauty

Photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann. Adolf Hitler introducing Myron’s Discobolus (Discus Thrower) during the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition of 1938 in Munich:

May none of you who visit this house fail to go to the Glyptothek, and may you then realise how wonderful man once was in his physical beauty and how we can only talk about progress when we not only achieve this beauty but, if possible, surpass it. But let the artists also judge how wonderful the eye and skill of that Greek Myron reveal themselves to us today, the Greek who created the work almost two and a half millennia ago, in front of whose Roman image we stand in deep admiration today. And may they all find from this a benchmark for the tasks and achievements of our own time. May they all strive for the beautiful and the sublime so that their people and art can also withstand the critical assessment of the millennia.(*)

Speech by Hitler on July 10, 1938 at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich, House of German Art, published in Völkischer Observer on 11 July 1938.

Few things bother me more in today’s racial right than the lack of these panegyrics to the physique of Aryans (‘…and how we can only talk about progress when we not only achieve this beauty but, if possible, surpass it’ —my emphasis, remember my crush on Mayfield Parrish’s painting!).

The Greco-Romans knew the metaphysics of the Aryan body perfectly well. Most Christians and neo-Christians today have forgotten it. Let us never forget that the first thing the Judeo-Christians did when conquering the Roman Empire was to destroy the statuary. How many better sculptures than the discus thrower were lost for eternity because of Christian takeover of the Empire?

To ignore these facts is to be a historical fool.

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(*) Mögen Sie alle, die Sie dieses Haus besuchen, nicht versäumen, in die Glyptothek zu gehen, und mögen Sie dann erkennen, wie herrlich schon einst der Mensch in seiner körperlichen Schönheit war und wie wir von Fortschritten nur dann reden dürfen, wenn wir diese Schönheit nicht nur erreichen, sondern wenn möglich noch übertreffen. Mögen aber auch die Künstler daran ermessen, wie wunderbar sich das Auge und das Können jenes Griechen Myron uns heute offenbaren, jenes Griechen, der vor fast 2 1/2 Jahrtausenden das Werk schuf, vor dessen römischen Abbild wir heute in tiefer Bewunderung stehen.