"Jump." "How high?"

Since I couldn't quite formulate my thoughts into coherent sentences Tuesday in class, I will try to redeem myself here. On the scene the "cellars of the victors:"  

Just the fact that we think Cohen is showing the portrait of Hitler to glorify him, to me, shows how the use of images and other forms of propaganda can manipulate how people view something. The concept of beauty and health being linked together is not a hard one to understand. However, this idea that anyone who wasn't 'pure' - who was physically or mentally ill, who was Jewish - was not acknowledged as a German is extremely hard to come to terms with. Today some people might fall for Schultz-Naumburg's method of juxtaposing images of deformed and mentally ill people with modern art, or the Nazis publicly having disgust with art by Jewish people, but I can guarantee an entire country would not be swept up in Hitler's mind games. No matter how many times you hear the same information about what happened under Hitler's command, no matter which angle you analyze it from, you will never be able to explain why. Why didn't anyone see what Hitler was doing? In the last bit of narration, Gray says, "It was not enemies who were liquidated, nor opponents of the regime. But innocent people whose very existence was in conflict with the Nazi dream." Why didn't anyone question why these killings started happening? Was there not one educated person in the masses that could see through the images and paintings of degenerates the Nazis displayed to what was really going on? There were educated persons, and the brightest ones were high officials in the Nazi party. Why couldn't Hitler ever give a concrete reason for his actions? The answer is simple: "from the first murders of mental patients, to the mass murders of Jews, there is no real political motive," there was just an overwhelming amount of pictures and reports signed by distinguished doctors as being medically proven and true. If you're not a doctor, you don't question them because they are professionals in that field- though, you may get a second opinion. But Hitler had second, third, and fourth opinions to back up his fantastical ideas. He appeared to be legitimate.  The last words of the documentary couldn't have summed up the film better: "Hitler went from words to deeds. Without restraint, he transformed an absurd ideology into a hellish reality." These portraits that pan across the screen don't look destroyed, or old, because what these men did will always be fresh in our minds, no details will be blurred as time goes on. The last picture of Hitler looked like a political cartoon you might see in the Sunday paper; the Nazi flag looks as though it is much larger than Hitler. To me it symbolizes the absorption of Hitler by his own ideology, how wrapped up and obsessive he became with the Nazi party to the point that he was carried away. To end the film, the image doesn't fade to black as a whole--rather the blackness takes over the Nazi flag in the painting first, then Hitler and continues to fade down until all is black. This mimicked that of a curtain dropping at the end of a show. 

 

*Sam Gray was the narrator for the English version of “Architecture of Doom.”