Hitler, patron of art, has bought himself a picture: an oil painting by the artist named Wirth. No doubt the work, “Germany’s Awakening,” expresses Hitler’s taste and embodies the great concept of racially pure art, the lack of which the German people have so long felt.
The painting certainly is not, as Hitler expressed it at Nuremburg “the artistic stammering of a painting, music-making, sculpting or building charlatan,” whose stuff “will one day be proof of the extent of a nation’s decay.” Of course he wouldn’t be spending money on it, if it were. The only thing he spends his money on is the real genuine Hitler art.
One’s first reaction on looking at the picture is that it is “heroic.” Man with sword is always heroic. As is tumultuous hair. The eyes look straight ahead. It is the self-portrait of the artist, who apparently received a very thorough artistic education within the storm troops. Where one formerly wore the merit cross one wears an irridescent swastika. So far, so good. But like every great work of art–take for instance Duerer’s “Melancholia” –it contains a secret mysterious something. The hooked-cross man grasps in his martial claws a feminine being whose actual identity it is difficult to determine. It cannot be meant to personify the “Marxian rabble”, for it is feminine. But if it is really the awakened Germany lying in the arms of its saviour, this awakened Germany seems to have fallen into a terrible faint. Several other things seem to be wrong with the person. The rubber-like posture seems to indicate that on some heroic occasion the creature had a goodly number of its bones crushed. Similar crushed and crooked figures formerly were frequently to be seen in so-called expressionist art. But this could not be expressionism, for this kind of expression has been steered away from by the new ideal of beauty.
Strangely enough, the artist of “Germany’s Awakening” is from Chemnitz But that is a matter of fate.
Forty-eight persons were arrested in Bremen late in March for having continued the “Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold” organization formed, data gathered after months of investigation irrefutably shows, for the purpose of reestablishing the group, which had been banned. As a result of careful work by the police it was possible to seize a large amount of incriminating material, including propaganda material from abroad, invisible inks, false addresses, military equipment, uniforms and weapons.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
