Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Wild gift horses strain the reins with 16 notes
People casually make jokes like “oh Hitler was just mad that he got rejected from art school,” because they forget the historical reality that at mid-century a lot of dumb-as-shit Freudian intellectuals really did think that kind of sophomoric psychoanalysis was a helpful way of thinking about history.
The art school thing was a pretty good synecdoche of how German nationalist romanticism reacted to the situation
cause for centuries there’d been this dream, like parallel to the American or French dreams as realized in their Revolutions
And how it worked in Germany was like “oh one of these days all those aristocratic van Pappys and von Poopys are gonna fall on their ass then Deutscher Michel wakes up, good ol’ volk Müller and Steiner take over and put everything in touch with real earthy shit”
And as traumatic as WWI was, it ended the overdue German aristocratic rule
So that means all the von- and van- energy, like gilt-framed paintings of froofy stag hunts, cede to -er paintings of volkish-ass pastoral ever-perfect town life like student-aspirant Hitler?
oh no instead it’s this dark art about the horrible alienation of modernity and those sure aren’t German volk names
oh no now here comes nationalism