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Tag: Adolf Hitler

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Catholic Church Christendom Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 96

the-real-hitler

 

27th February 1942, midday

On Christianity and Catholicism.
 

 

Even amongst those who claim to be good Catholics, very few really believe in this humbug. Only old women, who have given up everything because life has already withdrawn from them, go regularly to church. All that’s dead wood—and one shouldn’t waste one’s time in concerning oneself with such brains.

That little country girls and simple working men should be set dancing to that tune, that’s a thing that can be explained. But that intelligent men should make themselves accomplices to such superstitions, and that it’s because of these superstitions, and in the name of love, that hundreds of thousands of human beings have been exterminated in the course of history—that is something I cannot admit.

I shall never believe that what is founded on lies can endure forever. I believe in truth. I’m sure that, in the long run, truth must be victorious.

I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. In acting as I do, I’m very far from the wish to scandalise. But I rebel when I see the very idea of Providence flouted in this fashion. It’s a great satisfaction for me to feel myself totally foreign to that world.

I adopted a definite attitude on the 21st March 1933 when I refused to take part in the religious services, organised at Potsdam by the two Churches, for the inauguration of the new Reichstag.

As far as I’m concerned, I act according to my convictions. I don’t prevent anyone from praying silently, but I’ rebel against all blasphemy. So let nobody waste prayers on me that I shall not have asked for. If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will. But I owe nothing to the Church that traffics in the salvation of souls, and I find it really too cruel. I admit that one cannot impose one’s will by force, but I have a horror of people who enjoy inflicting sufferings on others’ bodies and tyranny upon others’ souls.

Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn’t, like who-ever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar.

What is important above all is that we should prevent a greater lie from replacing the lie that is disappearing. The world of Judaeo-Bolshevism must collapse.

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Heinrich Himmler Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 97

the-real-hitler

 

27th February 1942, evening

Slogans for the British.
 
 

I very well understand the emperors who were not tempted by the conquest of the East. These spaces had no roads, and no means of heating. Winter there lasted all the year round. It’s easy to say: “Blood and soil.” But for the particularism of the German princes, we’d have succeeded in Germanising the whole of Northern Italy. Racially, the West is to a great extent Germanic.

Himmler’s theory needs serious consideration. We pay far too much honour to Heinrich the Lion, for he helped in frustrating the policy of Barbarossa and Heinrich VI. If everyone had supported the emperors’ policy, what would we not have achieved? Supposing the expansion to the West had been pursued logically, we’d have a great Germanic empire stretching from Denmark to the Loire—and England would not have acquired the importance that is hers to-day.

The moment has come when propaganda can play an important rôle in our favour. It’s not a matter of attacking each Englishman individually to induce him to such and such a particular action. It’s a matter of a propaganda that sets forth undeniable facts, and consequently slogans that fall upon a soil well prepared to receive them. For example: “The British Empire is becoming more and more a colony of American Jews.”

On the organ of Westminster Abbey, the Internationale was played after the service. What can that mean, if not the fall of Christianity? It’s enough to compare the statements now being made in London with those issuing a year ago from Lisbon, to realise the change in the situation. It’s a turning-point in history.

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Music Richard Wagner Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 98

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 28th February-1st March 1942

The Bayreuth Festival 1925—Bayreuth and National Socialism—Rôle of Frau Wagner—Siegfried Wagner.

In 1925, the Bechsteins had invited me to stay with them in Bayreuth. They lived in a villa in the Liszt Strasse (I think this was the name of the street), within a few yards of Wahnfried. I had hesitated to go there, for I was afraid of thus increasing the difficulties of Siegfried Wagner, who was somewhat in the hands of the Jews.

I arrived in Bayreuth towards eleven o’clock in the evening. Lotte Bechstein was still up, but her relatives were in bed. Next morning, Frau Wagner came and brought me some flowers.

What a bustle there was in Bayreuth for the Festival! There exist a few photographs of that period, in which I figure, taken by Lotte Bechstein. I used to spend the day in leather shorts. In the evening, I would put on a dinner-jacket or tails to go to the opera. We made excursions by car into the Fichtelgebirge and into Franconian mountains.

Dietrich Eckart, who had been a critic in Bayreuth, had always told me of the extraordinary atmosphere prevailing there. At the first performance of Parsifal that I attended at Bayreuth, Cleving was still singing. What a stature, and what a magnificent voice! I’d already been present at performances of Parsifal in Munich. That same year, I was also present at the Ring and the Meistersinger. The fact that the Jew Schorr was allowed to sing the rôle of Wotan had the effect of a profanation on me. Why couldn’t they have got Rode from Munich? But there was Braun, an artiste of exceptional quality.

For years I was unable to attend the Festival, and I’d been very distressed about it. Frau Wagner also lamented my absence. She often urged me to come, by letter or by telephone. But I never passed through Bayreuth without paying her a visit.

It’s Frau Wagner’s merit to have created the link between Bayreuth and National Socialism. Siegfried was a personal friend of mine, but he was a political neutral. He couldn’t have been anything else, or the Jews would have ruined him.

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Table talks (commercial translation) Women

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 99

the-real-hitler

 

1st March 1942, evening

Jealousy of women.
 

 

In the eyes of a woman, the finest of dresses at once loses its charm—if she sees another woman wearing one like it. I’ve seen a woman suddenly leave the opera at the sight of a rival who had entered a box wearing the same dress as herself. “What cheek!” she said. “I’m going!”

In the pleasure a woman takes in rigging herself out, there is always an admixture of some trouble-making element, something treacherous—to awaken another woman’s jealousy by displaying something that the latter doesn’t possess. Women have the talent, which is unknown to us males, for giving a kiss to a woman-friend and at the same time piercing her heart with a well-sharpened stiletto. To wish to change women in this respect would be ingenuous: women are what they are. Let’s come to terms with their little weaknesses. And if women really only need satisfactions of that sort to keep them happy, let them not deprive themselves, by any means!

For my part, I prefer to see them thus occupied than devoting themselves to metaphysics. There’s no worse disaster than to see them grappling with ideas. In that respect, the point of disaster is reached by women painters, who attach no importance to beauty—when it’s a question of themselves! Other women are extremely careful of their appearance, but not beyond the moment when they’ve found a husband.

Social prejudices are in the process of disappearing. More and more, nature is reclaiming her rights. We’re moving in the proper direction. I’ve much more respect for the woman who has an illegitimate child than for an old maid. I’ve often been told of unmarried women who had children and brought these children up in a truly touching manner. It often happens amongst women servants, notably. The women who have no children finally go off their heads.

I often think of those women who people the convents—because they haven’t met the man with whom they would have wished to share their lives. With the exception of those who were promised to God by their parents, most of them, in fact, are women cheated by life. Human beings are made to suffer passively. Rare are the beings capable of coming to grips with existence.

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Ancient Greece Pedagogy Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 100

the-real-hitler

 

3rd March 1942, midday

Ideas on a curriculum for schools.

 
 

I don’t believe there’s any sense in teaching men anything, in a general way, beyond what they need to know. One overloads them without interesting either them or anybody else. It’s better to awaken men’s instinct for beauty. That was what the Greeks considered the essential thing. To-day people persist in cramming children with a host of unrelated ideas.

Do you see the necessity for teaching geometry, physics and chemistry to a young man who means to devote himself to music? Unless he has a special gift for these branches of study, what will he have left over of them later? I find it absolutely ridiculous, this mania for making young people swallow so many fragmentary notions that they can’t assimilate.

If a pupil is particularly brilliant in his speciality, why embarrass him in his studies by obliging him to assimilate notions that are beyond his powers of assimilation? Wouldn’t it be better to help him further in the direction that comes naturally to him?

Forty years ago, the teaching of history was restricted to a dry listing of dates. There was a total absence of principles. What happened when the teacher, into the bargain, lacked the necessary gift forgiving these dead things a soul? Such teaching was a real torture.

Some children have so much vitality that they can’t sit still, and won’t and can’t concentrate their attention. It seems to me useless to try to force them. I understand, of course, that such an attitude annoys the teachers. But is it just to deprive a child of the possibilities that life offers him, simply because he’s unruly?

I remember that on the average I spent a tenth of the time my comrades spent in doing my prep. My selected branch was history. I felt sorry for those of my comrades who never had a minute for play.

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Psychology Table talks (commercial translation) Women

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 101

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 10th-11th March 1942

Feminine jealousy is a defensive reaction
—Some stories about women.

 

In woman, jealousy is a defensive reaction. It surely has an ancestral origin, and must go back to the time when woman simply couldn’t do without the protection of a man. First of all, it’s the reaction of a pregnant woman, who as such has all the more need of protection. She feels so weak in those circumstances, so timid—for herself and for the child she’s carrying. And this child itself, how many years will it take to gain its independence! Without the protection of a man, woman would feel exposed to all perils. So it’s natural that she should be quite particularly attached to the hero, to the man who gives her the most security. Once this security is obtained, it’s comprehensible that she should bitterly defend her property—hence the origin of jealousy.

I knew a woman whose voice became raucous with emotion when I spoke in her presence to another woman. Man’s universe is vast compared with that of woman. Man is taken up with his ideas, his preoccupations. It’s only incidental if he devotes all his thoughts to a woman. Woman’s universe, on the other hand, is man. She sees nothing else, so to speak, and that’s why she’s capable of loving so deeply.

Intelligence, in a woman, is not an essential thing. My mother, for example, would have cut a poor figure in the society of our cultivated women. She lived strictly for her husband and children. They were her entire universe. But she gave a son to Germany.

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Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 102

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 11th-12th March 1942

The evils of smoking—Three farthings a day.

 
 

I made the acquaintance in Bayreuth of a business man, a certain Möckel, who invited me to visit him in Nuremberg. There was a notice above his door: “Smokers not admitted.” For my part, I have no notice above my door, but smokers aren’t admitted.

Some time ago I asked Goring if he really thought it a good idea to be photographed with a pipe in his mouth. And I added, “What would you think of a sculptor who immortalised you with a cigar between your teeth?”

It’s entirely false to suppose that the soldier wouldn’t endure life at the front if he were deprived of tobacco. It’s a mistake to be written on the debit side of the High Command, that from the beginning of the war it allotted the soldier a daily ration of cigarettes. Of course, there’s no question now of going into re- verse.

But as soon as peace has returned, I shall abolish the ration. We can make better use of our foreign currency than squandering it on imports of poison. I shall start the necessary re-education with the young. I’ll tell them: “Don’t follow the example of your elders.”

I experienced such poverty in Vienna. I spent long months without ever having the smallest hot meal. I lived on milk and dry bread. But I spent thirty kreuzers a day on my cigarettes. I smoked between twenty-five and forty of them a day. Well, at that time a kreuzer meant more to me than ten thousand marks do to-day. One day I reflected that with five kreuzers I could buy some butter to put on my bread. I threw my cigarettes into the Danube, and since that day I’ve never smoked again.

I’m convinced that, if I had continued to be a smoker, I’d not have held out against the life of incessant worry that has for so long been mine. Perhaps it’s to this insignificant detail that the German people owes my having been spared to them.

So many men whom I’ve known have died of excessive use of tobacco. My father, first of all. Then Dietrich Eckart, Troost. Soon it’ll be your turn, Hoffmann.

Categories
Aryan beauty Axiology Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche George Lincoln Rockwell God Kali Yuga Literature Neanderthalism Turner Diaries (novel) William Pierce

Solitude

Below, my comments of the ten threads about Nietzsche’s
prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a single entry:


1

Visitors will be surprised to learn that a Spanish edition has more detailed endnotes than the academic English translation of Nietzsche’s magnum opus.

This is because Spaniards are fed up of Catholicism. North Americans have a few centuries experimenting with Christianity. Spain has more than a millennium and a half, and our parents’ religion is on its last dying breaths there.

Andrés Sánchez-Pascual’s scholarly translation of Nietzsche’s books since the early 1970s became so popular that over the decades he has received hundreds of letters from his Spanish-speaking readers. The book’s edition of Así Habló Zaratustra that I purchased this month for example (I lost the old copies that I used to read sporadically in the 1970s and 80s) is its twentieth edition.

So fed up of Catholicism are Spain’s thinking classes that, again, the copies I bought of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums which introduction appears in my compilation The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, were translated to Spanish for an audience unexpectedly avid of this sort of extraordinarily scholarly material (Deschner’s maximum opus has yet to be translated to English).

Another example. Manu Rodríguez, who has had a place of high honor in this site and in The Fair Race, is also an avid reader of Sánchez-Pascual’s translations of Nietzsche. Thanks to his revaluation of Christian values, Rodríguez overcame his original prejudice against National Socialism in his later posts of La Respuesta de Europa. With the exception of non-Christian geniuses like Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, I have not seen such a metamorphosis of the mind in most of the English-speaking racialists.
 

2

“Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!”

This is one of the most quoted passages of Nietzsche’s literature. I abandoned theism long ago. Presently I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god, let alone in the existence of the Jewish god (which would be absolutely dead in the heart of any fanatic of the 14 words if the white nationalist “movement” was not all bluff). That doesn’t mean that I’m an atheist, as Hegel and other philosophers of Classic German Idealism developed a new understanding of God: panentheistic views that I am not prepared to dismiss.

The theological issues of Zarathustra’s encounter with the old hermit aside, I’d rather say something about the soliloquy in the previous post of this fictional character, something related to the very meaning of this blogsite.

The darkest hour is just before the dawn. In the endnotes about the opening soliloquy in Nietzsche’s book, Andrés Sánchez-Pascual interpreted the term Untergehen as follows: “By sinking into his decline, like the sun, Zarathustra moves to the other side. ‘Passing to the other side’ means surpassing oneself and becoming the Overman.”

This is what nationalists have failed to do, and was the message of the last pages of my compilation The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour: white nationalism as a stepping stone at the middle of a river, not as the promised land itself which is beyond the rapid waters.

That was my metaphor.

As to Nietzsche’s metaphor, we could say that today’s whites, including Christian and libertarian white nationalists, have yet to “sink themselves into their sunsets.” Some force may be with them but they’re not overmen yet; they have not surpassed themselves as Hitler’s SS men did (always keep in mind my “Where are the Syssitias?”).

The purpose of this blogsite is to prepare a few metamorphosing men, those in the process of “passing to the other side” (Übergang) from the soul’s darkest night into the coming dawn of the fair race.
 

3

I don’t claim to have reread the Zarathustra since my adolescent infatuation with Nietzsche. But these are surely the words that made a very powerful impression in my mind since my first reading:

“I teach you the Overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the Overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.

You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now a human is still more ape than any ape.

Behold, I teach you the Overman!

The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”

The passage “…and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would even rather go back to animals than overcome humans?” nails perfectly contemporary whites.

This is exactly what they are doing to themselves—white nationalists included, so reluctant to fight (or preparing to fight by saving precious metals before the dollar crashes). As Jack Frost has asked the clueless, feminized males of The Occidental Observer more than once, “Where’s the resistance?” to the anti-white, exterminationist System. Where are the cells for would-be soldiers that treasure William Pierce’s three books as their New Tablets?

I see none of it. And many Jew-wise nationalists are themselves etnosuicidal because they simply ignore that Christianity inverted healthy values—negative values that they themselves subscribe! Cowardice similar to this in the 19th century explains why Nietzsche’s Zarathustra gives the biblical verse an antithetical sense from the original.
 

4

Now Zarathustra looked at the people and he was amazed. Then he spoke thus: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and Overman – a rope over an abyss. What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.”

Again, this brings in mind my metaphor of the bridge. This is what I wrote in the final essay of The Fair Race: “White nationalism is only a stone at the middle of the rapid-flowing waters of a dangerous river; a stepping stone that can help us in our endeavor to jump to the other side. I myself used that stone during my crossing from Christianity and Liberalism to National Socialism. In fact, I could even write such a spiritual odyssey in a text that might be titled ‘From St Francis to Himmler’.” But no American white nationalist today is prepared to wear a T-shirt of Herr Himmler, not even in the privacy of their homes.

“I love the great despisers, because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, who instead sacrifice themselves for the earth, so that the earth may one day become the Overman’s. I love the one who lives in order to know, and who wants to know so that one day the Overman may live. And so he wants his going under.” [sinking in his sunset according to Sánchez-Pascual]

This cannot contrast more with today’s white nationalists, so reluctant to sacrifice themselves as Rockwell did. They want it both ways: enjoy their homely comfort zones and try to “save” the race from the ongoing extermination.
 

5

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche wrote:

In this sense Zarathustra first calls the good “the last men”… He finds them the most harmful kind of man, because they secure their existence at the expense of truth just as they do at the expense of the future.

Do “the last men” sound like contemporary whites overwhelmed with guilt? But white nationalists are the Overman’s “last men” too. Think for example of the voices from those self-righteous, Christian and atheist nationalists who recently called a lone wolf “an evil sociopath” in Dixie, basically subscribing the meme “black lives matter.”

White- or Southern nationalism is phony, was phony and will be phony until societal collapse forces the survivors to grow a hairy pair. This is Pierce’s Diaries: “His forehead was then marked with an indelible dye, and he was turned out and could be readmitted permanently only by bringing back the head of a freshly killed Black or other non-White.”
 

6

Just for the record, about 150,000 copies of a specially durable wartime Zarathustra were distributed to the German troops during the First World War.
 

7

“A nice catch of fish Zarathustra has today! No human being did he catch, but a corpse instead!” looks like me trying to convey Nietzsche’s message to a dead race!
 

8

“I want to teach humans the meaning of their being, which is the Overman, the lightning from the dark cloud ‘human being’.”

For some unfathomable causes, this sentence from the previous section, Prologue §7, reminded me my identification with the art of the pre-Raphaelites and Maxfield Parrish. One of the inner realities that distances me from white nationalists is that they don’t seem to love this 14-words art (“That the beauty of…”) as much as I do.
 

9

“It dawned on me: I need companions, and living ones – not dead companions and corpses that I carry with me wherever I want.”

Just what happened to me during my experience in counter-jihad: after these guys didn’t want to hear about the Jewish problem it was like I had to get rid of their corpses—dead companions. But it also happened to me in white nationalism! After these guys didn’t want to hear about the Christian problem it was like I had to get rid of their corpses.

“It dawned on me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people, but instead to companions!”

Pierce did something similar after the calamity of Rockwell’s murder: instead of speaking to the masses he predicated to a smaller group of companions.

“Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker – but he is the creative one.”

Hitler was the creative one. Read his table talks.

“Companions the creative one seeks and not corpses, nor herds and believers. Fellow creators the creative one seeks, who will write new values on new tablets.”

Less than a handful visitors of this blog share the moral grammar on my New Tablets…

“Fellow creators seeks Zarathustra, fellow harvesters and fellow celebrators Zarathustra seeks: what need does he have of herds and shepherds and corpses!”

…but still no one wants to become a priest of the 14 words in a latter-day “Syssitia” (like the one Rockwell had).

“I do not want to even speak again with the people – for the last time have I spoken to a dead person.”

Occasionally I still comment at The Occidental Observer but even that has to end—the commentariat and even the authors are clueless that Christian axiology enabled the Jewish problem and the Negro problem and the Mestizo problem and even the more recent empowerment of Asia.

“I shall join the creators, the harvesters, the celebrators: I shall show them the rainbow and all the steps to the Overman.”

Hitler and Pierce showed this rainbow but who among us really follows their revaluated axiology? Most white nationalists follow the Old Tablets; atheist nationalists share also the Christian moral grammar and even the neonazis have not really broken the Tablets.

“I want to go to my goal, and I go my own way; over the hesitating and dawdling I shall leap. Thus let my going be their going under!”

This describes me…
 

10

And so Nietzsche’s lyric prologue ends. Below, some snippets from the Cambridge introduction by Robert B. Pippin:

Zarathustra leaves his cave to revisit the human world because he wants both to prophesy and help hasten the advent of something like a new “attempt” on the part of mankind, a post “beyond” or “over the human” (Übermensch) aspiration. Such a goal would be free of the psychological dimensions that have led the human type into a state of some crisis (made worse by the fact that most do not think a crisis has occurred or that any new attempt is necessary).

The problem, then, that Zarathustra must address, the problem of “nihilism,” is a kind of collective failure of desire…

Nietzsche clearly thinks we cannot understand such a possibility, much less be both shamed and inspired by it, except by a literary and so “living” treatment of such an existential possibility. And Nietzsche clearly thinks he has such a chance, in the current historical context of crisis, collapse, boredom, and confusion, a chance of shaming and cajoling us away from commitments that will condemn us to a “last man” or “pale atheist” sort of existence, and of inspiring a new desire, a new “tension” of the spirit…

As noted, the problem Zarathustra confronts seems to be a failure of desire; nobody wants what he is offering, and they seem to want very little other than a rather bovine version of happiness. It is that sort of failure that proves particularly difficult to address, and that cannot be corrected by thinking up a “better argument” against such a failure.

The events that are narrated are also clearly tied to the question of what it means for Zarathustra to have a teaching, to try to impart it to an audience suffering in this unusual way, suffering from complacency or dead desire. Only at the very beginning, in the Prologue, does he try to “lecture publicly,” one might say, and this is a pretty unambiguous failure.

The reminder here of the Prologue appears to indicate that Zarathustra himself had portrayed his own teaching in a comically inadequate way, preaching to the multitudes as if people could simply begin to overcome themselves by some revolutionary act of will…

He had shifted from market place preaching to conversations with disciples in Part I, and at the end of that Part I he decides to forgo even that and to go back to his cave alone.

rosa_s_pak

Categories
Art Degenerate art Painting Rembrandt Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 103

the-real-hitler

 

27th March 1942, midday

Jewish influence on German art
—Painting in Germany.

 

It’s striking to observe that in 1910 our artistic level was still extraordinarily high. Since that time, alas! our decadence has merely become accentuated. In the field of painting, for example, it’s enough to recall the lamentable daubs that people have tried to foist, in the name of art, on the German people.

This was quite especially the case during the Weimar Republic, and that clearly demonstrated the disastrous influence of the Jews in matters of art. The cream of the jest was the incredible impudence with which the Jew set about it! With the help of phony art critics, and with one Jew bidding against another, they finally suggested to the people—which naturally believes everything that’s printed—a conception of art according to which the worst rubbish in painting became the expression of the height of artistic accomplishment. The ten thousand of the élite themselves, despite their pretensions on the intellectual level, let themselves be diddled, and swallowed all the humbug. The culminating hoax—and we now have proof of it, thanks to the seizure of Jewish property—is that, with the money they fraudulently acquired by selling trash, the Jews were able to buy, at wretched prices, the works of value they had so cleverly depreciated. Every time an inventory catches my eye of a requisition carried out on an important Jew, I see that genuine artistic treasures are listed there. It’s a blessing of Providence that National Socialism, by seizing power in 1933, was able to put an end to this imposture.

Genuine artists develop only by contact with other artists. Like the Old Masters, they began by working in a studio. Let’s remember that men like Rembrandt, Rubens and others hired assistants to help them to complete all their commissions.

Amongst these assistants, only those reached the rank of apprentice who displayed the necessary gifts as regards technique and adroitness—and of whom it could be supposed that they would in their turn be capable of producing works of value. It’s ridiculous to claim, as it’s claimed in the academies, that right from the start the artist of genius can do what he likes. Such a man must begin, like everyone else, by learning, and it’s only by working without relaxation that he succeeds in achieving what he wants. If he doesn’t know the art of mixing colours to perfection—if he cannot set a background—if anatomy still has secrets for him—it’s certain he won’t go very far! I can imagine the number of sketches it took an artist as gifted as Menzel before he set himself to paint the Flute Concert at Sans-Souci.

Adolph_von_Menzel_-_A_Flute_Concert_of_Frederick_the_Great_at_Sanssouci

It would be good if artists to-day, like those of olden days, had the training afforded by the Masters’ studios and could thus steep themselves in the great pictorial traditions. If, when we look at the pictures of Rembrandt and Rubens, for example, it is often difficult to make out what the Master has painted himself and what is his pupils’ share, that’s due to the fact that gradually the disciples themselves became masters.

What a disaster it was, the day when the State began to interfere with the training of painters! As far as Germany is concerned, I believe that two academies would suffice: in Düsseldorf and Munich. Or perhaps three in all, if we add Vienna to the list. Obviously there’s no question, for the moment, of abolishing any of our academies. But that doesn’t prevent one from regretting that the tradition of the studios has been lost.

If, after the war, I can realise my great building programme—and I intend to devote thousands of millions to it—only genuine artists will be called on to collaborate.

Categories
Alfred Rosenberg Charlemagne Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 104

the-real-hitler 
31st March 1942, at dinner

German eastern policy—Charlemagne “slayer of Saxons” and Hitler “slayer of Austrians”—The work of Charlemagne.
 
 
I’ve drawn Rosenberg’s attention to the fact that one mustn’t let the great German Emperors be relegated to the background, to the benefit of perjurers, and that it was improper to call a hero like Charlemagne by the name “killer of Saxons.” History must be interpreted in terms of the necessities of the time.

It’s possible that, in a thousand years—supposing that, for one reason or another, the Reich is again obliged to pursue a policy directed against the South—some pedagogue may be found who will claim that “Hitler’s Eastern policy was certainly well-intentioned,” but that it was nevertheless crack-brained, since “he should have aimed at the South.” Perhaps even some caviller of this type will go so far as to call me “the killer of Austrians” on the grounds that, on my return from Austria to Germany, I locked up all those who had tried to thwart the enterprise!

Without compulsion, we would never have united all the various German families with these thick-headed, parochially minded fellows—either in Charlemagne’s time or to-day.

If the German people is the child of ancient philosophy and Christianity, it is so less by reason of a free choice than by reason of a compulsion exercised upon it by these triumphant forces. In the same way, in Imperial times, it was under the empire of compulsion that the German people engineered its fusion beneath a Christianity represented by a universal church—in the image of ancient Rome, which also inclined to universality.

It is certain that a man like Charlemagne was not inspired merely by a desire for political power, but sought, in faithfulness to the ancient idea, for an expression of civilisation.

Now, the example of the ancient world proves that civilisation can flourish only in States that are solidly organised. What would happen to a factory given over to anarchy, in which the employees came to their work only when the fancy took them? Without organisation—that is to say, without compulsion—and, consequently, without sacrifice on the part of individuals, nothing can work properly. Organised life offers the spectacle of a perpetual renunciation by individuals of a part of their liberty.

Guided by these rules, which are quite simple and quite natural, Charlemagne gathered the Germans into a well-cemented community and created an empire that continued to deserve the name long after his death. The fact was that this empire was made of the best stuff of the ancient Roman Empire—so much so that for centuries the peoples of Europe have regarded it as the successor to the universal empire of the Caesars. The fact that this German empire was named “the Holy Roman Empire” has nothing whatsoever to do with the Church, and has no religious significance.