Word: hanfstaengl
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UNHEARD WITNESS (317 pp.)-Ernst Hanfstaengl-Lippincott...
Schicklgruber just laughed when Hanfstaengl sat down at the piano, but when he started to play...
...Schicklgruber-Hitler was delighted and Naziism began to take shape. That, at any rate, is the way Ernst ("Putzi") Hanfstaengl tells it. A sometime Harvard student (his grandmother was a New England Sedgwick) and longtime Hitler crony, Putzi* began supporting the Nazi Party in 1922 and labored to make it palatable to Germany's "best people...
With this aim in mind, Putzi excitedly told Adolf about the hypnotic effect of college cheering sections at U.S. football games and, at the piano, demonstrated the "buoyant beat" of U.S. brass bands. Recalls Putzi: "I had Hitler fairly shouting with enthusiasm. 'That's it, Hanfstaengl, that is what we need for the movement, marvelous,' and he pranced up and down the room like a drum majorette." The "Rah, rah, rah!" refrain of Harvardmen, by Putzi's account, became the thunderous "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" of the Brownshirt demonstrations. Storm Trooper bands blared their goose-step...
...Mamma's Boy. An accomplished pianist, art dealer and amateur historian, Hanfstaengl looked down his cultural nose at Hitler. Not only did the man resemble a suburban barber on his day off; he could not tell a Caravaggio from a Michelangelo. Worse, he seldom paid his debts, loved to stuff himself with pastry and whipped cream, sat delightedly through three showings of King Kong. Hitler, says Putzi contemptuously, was a Muttersöhnchen (mamma's boy) whose impotence may have been caused by syphilis and who resented all those who could enjoy normal sexual relations...