Word: hitler
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...never seems to have doubted that the "religious war" against Hitler would be won. "Once the German problem has been dealt with," he wrote, "the real problems will become apparent." These haunted his dreams and letters: "For centuries, humanity has been descending an immense staircase whose top is hidden in the clouds and whose lowest steps are lost in a dark abyss. We could have ascended this staircase; instead we chose to descend it. Spiritual decay is terrible." The man who hurtled through the sky with the help of technology felt out of place in the 20th century ("I cannot...
...hours of the day and from all the streets of Vienna, poor girls whom they found alone, who in most cases went out only to earn an honest living." Sodomy was long considered a capital offense, and the Marquis de Sade was sentenced to death for engaging in it. Hitler threw homosexuals into concentration camps. In recent years the resurgence of Islamic law means that adulterers face flogging in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. And down through the centuries, despite all the decrees, people have gone right on, of course, enjoying sex as best they could...
...edgy as Budapest, the Vienna of today is a cozy and polished metropolis. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna was chockablock with giants of the age: Freud and Wittgenstein, Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Hoffmann, Wagner and Loos -- as well as the young Adolf Hitler, a desperate artist-architect manque. Old cultural dogmas had been discredited, new doctrines not yet entrenched. Imminence was all. Artists and intellectuals all over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century and a mad one, between well-behaved traditionalism and liberated modernism...
...Vienna's 19th century Ringstrasse urban renewal, then Reagan is our reassuring figurehead Franz Josef. The Wiener Werkstatte? The firm of Swid Powell, for whom the most prominent architects design tableware. Turn-of-the-century Viennese could feel cataclysm coming -- and in retrospect, the anonymous presence of young Hitler makes that last-waltz skittishness seem almost operatically prescient. Today the moment-by-moment potential for nuclear war supplies the apocalyptic undercurrent. In both eras, the ambitions of architects and artists seem rather diminished, their work purely picturesque or else merely solipsistic. Now as then, people dress beautifully, live elegantly, party...
...knight-errant was the right figure for him. Kokoschka had to work in Germany because the decorative traditions of Vienna could not, in the end, contain the intensity he wanted to project into painting. And just as surely, he had to leave Germany because of Hitler. In 1937 he painted a big-jawed self portrait, titled Portrait of a "Degenerate Artist," which commemorated his inclusion in the Nazi exhibition of "Degenerate Art." A figure among the trees, in the background on the left, sketchily furnishes the key: it is the Adam from Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise. Kokoschka was being...