\nPeople casually make jokes like \u201coh Hitler was just mad that he got rejected from art school,\u201d 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\u2019d been this dream, like parallel to the American or French dreams as realized in their Revolutions
And how it worked in Germany was like \u201coh 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\u2019 volk M\u00fcller and Steiner take over and put everything in touch with real earthy shit\u201d
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\u2019s this dark art about the horrible alienation of modernity and those sure aren\u2019t German volk names
oh no now here comes nationalism
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