Sunday 26 June 2016

Adolf Hitler on the destruction of culture

"They insult a nation, over months, and threaten to destroy her, to fight battles in Berlin, to chop Germany's armies, to displace the frontier to the Oder River or the Elbe River, and so on and so forth. And this nation, Germany, patiently watches these events. Solely the English and French warmongers need this war, not peace! 'We need a long war,' as Mr. Chamberlain put it, 'at least three years' long.' Because of my peace offer, I have been abused, personally insulted, in front of the world public. Mr. Chamberlain literally spat into my face and refuses to even talk about peace. I hear but one cry from London, that now, even more, this war has to continue, that they continue this war, even if it means that England should perish! It is not my ambition to wage war but to create a new social state of the highest culture. And every year of this war robs me of that work." - Adolf Hitler, 1940.

Adolf Hitler and party leaders at the opera

Finally, he reaches for the last method: The destruction of all culture, of all that we consider as belonging in a state which we consider civilised. Here is his work perhaps most difficult to recognize, but here the actual effect is the most terrible. We are familiar with his activity in the arts, like today’s paintings which became a caricature of all that we call true inner perception. [Prolonged applause] They always explain that you don’t understand the inner experience of the artist. Don’t you think that also a Moritz Schwind and Ludwig Richter experienced internally when they created? [Stormy bravo! and applause]

Don’t you, finally, believe that, for example, Beethoven’s chords also came from inner experience and feeling and that a Beethoven symphony reflects his inner experience? This is true inner experience, unlike the other ones, which are only superficial swindle [Applause], set in the world with an intent to gradually destroy in the people any healthy idea and to whip the people into a state in which no one can understand whether the times are crazy, or whether he himself is mad. [Big laughter and applause.]

Just as he works in painting, sculpture and music, so he does in poetry and especially in literature. Here he has a great advantage. He is the editor and, above all, publisher of more than 95% of all newspapers. He uses this power, and he who has become such a brutal anti-semite as myself [Laughter] smells out, even as he takes the paper in his hand, where the Jew begins; [Laughter] he knows already from the title page that it is again not one of us, but one of the ‘folks behind.’ [Laughter] We know full well that all his contortions and wordplays only serve to conceal the inner emptiness of his mind and hide the fact that the man has no real spiritual life, and what he lacks in true spirit he replaces with bombast phrases, word twists and turns that seem unreasonable, but he cautiously explains from the outset that he who does not understand them is not sufficiently mentally developed. [Laughter]

When we talk about literature, we also need to jump straight to another chapter where we can admire in excess Moritz and Salomon Wolf and Bear: Our theatre, the places which a Richard Wagner wanted once to have darkened to create the highest degree of consecration and seriousness, in which he wanted to perform works which it would be shameful to call shows, so he named them ‘consecration plays;’ the place where there should be nothing else but the highest elevation, a detachment of the individual from all the grief and misery, but also from all the rot which surrounds us in life, to lift the individual into a purer air. What has become of it? A place which today you are ashamed to enter unless someone might notice you the moment you go in. [Hear, hear.] We see that although a Friedrich Schiller received just 346 thalers for ‘Mary Stuart,’ for ‘Merry Widow’* people today receive 5 1/2 million, that the greatest kitsch today makes ​​millions for which an author in ancient Greece would probably have been expelled from the state by ostracism. [Loud applause.] *Hitler later changed his mind about ‘The Merry Widow’ [composed by fellow Austrian Franz Lehár] and endorsed it, along with Operetta in general.

Adolf Hitler visiting the 'Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung' (Great German Art Exhibition)

And if theater has become a hotbed of vice and shamelessness, then a thousand times more so that new invention which perhaps comes from genial inspiration, but which the Jew understood right away to remodel into the filthiest business that you can imagine: the cinema. [Thunderous applause and clapping.] At first people attached greatest hopes to this brilliant invention. It could become an easy mediator of profound knowledge for the entire people of the world. And what has become of it? It became the mediator of the greatest and the most shameless filth. The Jew works on.

For him there is no spiritual sensitivity, and just as his forefather Abraham was selling his wife, he finds nothing special about the fact that today he sells girls, and through the centuries we find him everywhere, in North America as in Germany, Austria-Hungary and all over the East, as the merchant of the human commodity and it can not be denied away; even the greatest Jew defender cannot deny that all of these girl-dealers are Hebrews. This subject is atrocious. According to Germanic sentiment there would be only one punishment for this: death. For people that play fast and loose, regarding as a business, as a commodity, what for millions of others means greatest happiness or greatest misfortune. For them love is nothing more than business in which they make money. They are always ready to tear apart the happiness of any marriage, if only 30 pieces of silver can be made. [Stormy bravo! and applause]

They tell us today that all that which was known as family life is a completely outlived notion, and who only saw the play ‘Castle Wetterstein’ could see how the holiest that still remained to the people was shamelessly called ‘brothel’. An anti-bourgeoise play written in 1912 by Frank Wedekind, pre-figuring the ‘new realism,’ in which a young woman is corrupted. It was played up by the Jews and became very popular. So we should not be surprised when he also attacks what many people even today are not indifferent to, and what to many at least can give inner peace – religion. Also here we see the same Jew who himself has enough religious customs which others could easily mock, but no one does, as we, in principle, never ridicule religion because it is sacred to us. But he tries to destroy everything without offering a substitute. Who today, in this age of the vilest deceit and swindle, is detached from it; for him there are just two more possibilities, either he hangs himself in despair or becomes a crook.

- Adolf Hitler (‘Why We Are Antisemites,’ National Socialist German Workers Party Public meeting in the Great Hall of the Hofbräuhaus, 15 August 1920, www.theendofzion.com/2013/02/08/why-we-are-antisemites-text-of-adolf-hitlers-1920-speech-at-the-hofbrauhaus. Translation from German by Hasso Castrup, Copenhagen, Denmark, January 2013, from the original published in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H., Oct., 1968, p.390-420. www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1968_4.pdf   Edited by Carolyn Yeager).

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