Hitler As Bohemian Artist

Art historian Birgit Schwarz is making the case that Adolf Hitler, who considered himself an artistic genius, was motivated by the bohemian notion of many artsy types even today, in which they consider themselves above the norms that govern the uncreative masses, that ordinary rules don’t apply to them because they are so creative. From an interview in SPIEGEL ONLINE:

In my opinion, people have underestimated the notion that Hitler considered himself an artist, in fact, an artistic genius, and that much can be deduced from this self-image, this overheated artist’s ego. However, this has hardly played a role in the research to date. That’s the starting point, from my perspective, because it can help us gain a better understanding of Hitler as a person, as well as his system of power. Hitler’s deluded view of himself as a genius is based on the confused system of thought emerging in the late 19th century, which centered on the idea that a genius — a strong personality who outshone everything else — could do anything and could do anything he pleased.

I have noticed this phenomenon but also another phenomenon. It is usually the artistic posers who think this way about themselves–those who are caught up in “being artists” rather than being caught up in making actual art. The truly great creative geniuses are nearly always normal, bourgeois kinds of people: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bach, Cranach, Rembrandt, Jane Austin. Yes, the Romantics, moderns, and postmoderns often bought into the bohemian myth. But even for modern figures T. S. Eliot was a bank teller; Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. I would go so far as to say that someone who considers himself superior to ordinary human beings–and thus not under the moral laws that govern ordinary human beings–can hardly be an artist at all, since this mentality cuts the artist off from the humanity that must lie behind the best work.