Fantasy vs. Reality

The part of the film that I found most interesting was the effect of Karl May’s books on Hitler and his grasp of reality. May’s books were intended to be fictional romantic stories about far away places for young boys to use their imagination. According to the documentary, Hitler took May’s words seriously and even went as far as to plan his military strategies around May’s invented techniques for battling Indians that he had never encountered nor tried to defeat. The documentary goes on to explain that Hitler believed that imagination could provide the basis for knowledge and that one need not know unfamiliar people in order to assess them, so long as one has imagination and insight.

It amazes me that a nation of people would follow the direction of a man who takes military strategy from a fictional children’s book. This infatuation with a fantasy world seems to be directly correlated with his idea of “good” and “bad” art. Hitler wanted to live in a fictional reality where every person resembles the perfect faces and bodies represented in the portraits and sculptures that he put in his exhibit. He wanted to rid the world of the deformed, handicapped and the Jews because they were impure and dangerous to the Aryan race. The very fact that Hitler did the same picking and choosing that he did with the characters in his art as he did with the actual people that were allowed to live under his regime demonstrates his blurry sense of reality. In both his selection of art and his military tactics, Hitler made decisions without any knowledge or expertise, with only his own imagination and a fictional reality to guide him.