Porträt

One of the most prominent impressions that I felt from the final (now infamous in class) "cellar of the war leaders" scene is the remarkable ordinariness of the portraits, particularly in comparison to the men themselves in the paintings, whose leadership throughout the events of their time period had such dynamic and immeasurable impact on the Nazi era. From officers that hardly any of us recognize to Adolf Hitler himself, each action of each man changed something in the constant, rolling action of the chain of events. There was so much packed into the personal history of every figure, yet here they now lean passively, in a form and place most strangely harmless for how much harm they inflicted in their time.

When I see the mute spotlight pass across each stolid face that I recognize, I experience a brief sensation of a life metaphorically flashing before my eyes. It's not my own life, but the life of the person staring back from the picture. And it's not a life from his own birth to death, but a life from the start of his history and span in the Nazi regime to the close of it. In my mind I see glimpses of wherever that one figure is in the repeatedly used film footage and photographs that are strung into countless World War II documentaries. The background story of each portrait suddenly stretches out for miles behind the flat canvas in a moving, twisting collective of actions and events, and when the light moves on, everything slips back into the silent, motionless painting once again.