Max

Max
Menno Meyjes

Emilie Bickerton

Menno Meyjes' exploration of how Adolf Hitler's early years spent struggling for artistic creativity led him to the barbarism of the concentration camps and the Final Solution sheds some light on the Nazi aestheticisation of politics. But, in positing a 'what if .. ?' over events, Meyjes also runs the risk of personalising history, and reducing subsequent events to the actions of a single man.

Max is effectively A Portrait of the Struggling Artist Who Became a Nazi Dictator. In looking at the 'human face' behind the myth of the monster, Meyjes confronts a topic long left untouched by filmmakers. Previously Hitler has been treated as a source only of ridicule, as in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, (1940), or avoided completely, leaving a structural absence as in Spielberg's Schindler's List, (1993). Here we look at Hitler's early years through his fictional relationship with Max Rothman (John Cusack).

Munich, 1918 is a desperate, impoverished environment, and to this barren landscape the German soldiers return, defeated and bitter. Noah Taylor's young Adolf is just another 'unknown soldier', sleeping and working at the army barracks, and is portrayed as an unpleasant and rather talentless little man, making bad art, and espousing bad politics. In contrast is the art dealer, Max Rothman, a fellow soldier, but polar opposite in character and social status. Coming from a well-established Jewish family, Rothman is a passionate and visionary art-dealer struggling to come to terms with his relegation (as an artist) to the world of words, rather than images and paintings, having lost his right arm in the war.

This tragedy allies Rothman even more closely with the Dadaist movements developing out of Expressionism (Die Brucke and Die Blaue Reiter groups) following the war. 'The highest art', according to the first German Dada manifesto, '.. will be that which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash'.

This provocative, often bleak but nonetheless vibrant artistic culture in Weimar Germany contrasts with the moribund political environment. But Meyjes is less concerned with the contrast between art and politics than with what they have in common, with what drew Hitler to both: namely the pursuit of 'power'. The question thus becomes why did Hitler rise to power in politics and yet fail in his art?

This, rightly, shifts attention to the conditions in post-First World War Germany. By 1919 the country was crippled by the Versailles treaty, which demanded German acceptance of war guilt and payment of reparations. Such extreme circumstances, whilst sometimes inspiring artists, created a vacuum for ideas in the political sphere, leaving people unable to see beyond the daily desperation to progressive alternatives.

Rothman, and the artists he is promoting (Max Ernst, George Grosz) articulate this void through a nihilism in their art, rejecting reason for chaos, for the senslessness of nature and the end of artistic elitism. Hitler rejects the new artistic avant-garde, as much as the artistic avant-garde (Rothman aside) rejects him. Holding a Romantic 19th century perception of art, he is repelled by the modern eagerness to express explicitly the degeneration of social structure. For Hitler, the abandonment of the struggle to reflect pure beauty, in favour of a more abstract art engaged directly with reality, is a betrayal of art. Indeed, in 1937 the Nazi party held an exhibition of work by modern artists, (including Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Max Beckmann) labelling it all 'degenerate art' to make clear what was not acceptable in the Reich.

At times though, Meyjes just plays with history, dangling a 'what if' over events and discussions. What if, considering his concern for animals, Hitler had concentrated on freeing the Chinese starlings sold in the park, as Rothman suggested. Then his legacy would have been benign, his name synonymous with birds ('Hitler's starlings') not mass extermination. And what if Rothman had not been beaten up on his way to meet Hitler to see his new paintings?

But the origins of the Third Reich do not rest on such transient moments, so the dramatic impact of such moments in the film is disingenous.

Meyjes' claim that the whole Third Reich was the work of a disappointed artist misses the point that history, whilst made by men, is determined initially by the conditions of their existence. Had Hitler kept a hold of his paintbrush the conditions in which he lived were such that it is likely fascism in some form would nevertheless have developed. Hitler's initial ideas were not so original, indeed, even the art (drawing from his formula, art+politics=power) that Rothman particularly liked is what Walter Benjamin would call 'auratic', a vision of the future based on the past; not an alternative to the present, but a negation of it, drawing from myths and traditions, rather than progressive and visionary.

To what extent is it really relevant to consider Hitler's early years as an artist in relation to what later became the Third Reich? There is no doubt that the artistic aspirations of many Nazis do shed light on the aspirations underlying their politics. But is the suggestion broader than this, implying that art and politics have similar motivations, albeit articulated differently?

Rothman commissions Hitler out of pity (Hitler returned from the trenches to nothing, his art is 'all that he has'), but also in recognition of his frustrations and bitterness, which he believes he can identify with. Rothman sees a universal quality in these feelings, and urges Hitler to channel them into his art, to let them explode onto the canvas. He wants raw, war art, authentic because it is created by the 'unknown soldier' with which thousands can identify.

The implication here is that if only Hitler had 'funnelled' his emotions into art, rather than politics the Third Reich may never have happened. In other words, the motivations of artists and political leaders are the same. To be sure, there are parallels, both have visionaries as leading figures, both can be about seeing alternatives to the present, about reaching beyond the surface in the attempt to bring to existence something which is not immediately evident.

But politics must be grounded and constrained by external reality, whereas art can afford to indulge the imagination, and transcend reality. As Leni Riefenstahl's documentaries also reveal, bad politics doesn't necessarily make for bad art. Her propaganda films, The Triumph of the Will (covering the Nuremberg rallies of 1934) and Olympiad (covering the Berlin Olympics of 1936) were notable for the groundbreaking techniques she developed. Later challenged for her complicity with the Nazi regime, Riefenstahl insisted (albeit disingenously) that she was never a member of the Nazi party, and was only ever interested in the aesthetic criteria and value of her films.

Max itself met opposition from various organisations, including the Jewish Defence League and the New York Times. One critic called it a psychic assault on Holocaust survivors and the entire Jewish community. Meyjes was charged with trying to understand fascism, as though it could be rationalised. Rehashing the old claim that 'tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner', critics appear to prefer dehumanising the Nazis, rather than acknowledging that condemnation of actions can only come, and be in any way constructive when, precisely, you do understand why people did them.

Meyjes unfortunately responded to his critics by encouraging a greater fear of ourselves (a similar line adopted by the recent documentary Hitler: The Rise of Evil), in arguing that it is important to understand Hitler because we all harbour the same emotions which engender fascism: fear, anger, frustration and envy.. none of us are immune to that… there is a part of you that is mean, small, cowardly and enraged.

This is what, for Meyjes, links art and politics for Hitler, in both he sought a means to channel such feelings. The implication is that we could all be 'littler Hitlers', and this perhaps explains why the void of serious Hitler films is now being filled - it appeals to the increasing willingness to believe the worst of the 'ordinary man', a suspicion and fear of others, as well as an uncertaintly about what lies within ourselves.

Perhaps this is why Meyjes emphasises Hitler's banality so much, but it remains to be seen how the pathetic portrayal will be received, whether struggling artists who themselves stare at blank pages or white canvases, will cling ever tighter to their paintbrushes out of fear that otherwise this passion they harbour may be funnelled elsewhere. More productively, however, the lazy and pathetic character cut by Noah Taylor's Hitler makes it obvious that there was more to fascism than the bitterness and anti-semitism of one man.

The idea that propaganda can be art, meanwhile, which is presented as Hitler's inspired idea, was hardly his personal brain child. In Germany alone many leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Baldur von Schirach and Walter Funk all held artistic ambitions which, it has been suggested, were originally deeper that their political ambitions. Under fascism the aestheticisation of politics is effectively the negation of politics.

The 'pure kitsh' of Hitler's early speeches shows that he never gave up being a bad artist - his political designs and choreography show that he continued to be seduced by the same transcendence offered by the aesthetic. For example, the 'monumental aesthetic' under the Nazi regime was designed to reduce the individual to insignificance, make individual consciousness subservient to the larger idealised aims of the nation-state. In effect, Nazi ideology drew from aesthetics to develop idealised notions of purity, violence (the soldier as warrior) and human form, as well as developing the monumental aesthetic (in pageants, mass rallies) much of which is latent in the film, in Hitler's disgust for modern art: 'Don't expect anything abstract,' he warns Rothman, presenting idyllic scenes of the countryside, and careful sketches of the trenches.

Meyjes' insistence on making art synonymous with the politics (with writer's block as the prelude to tyranny) has the effect of emptying both of their independent function and value. An independence which is clear once the vibrancy of the art world is contrasted with the stagnation in the political sphere. The void of political ideas and alternatives in Germany at the time, the disillusion of many soldiers towards the Weimar government, and increasing unemployment, all combined to create an environment in which the aestheticisation of politics was more feasible.

Historical figures, especially the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, are difficult to portray on screen without falling into caricature. Max doesn't always escape this vice, as sometimes the young Adolf seems to speak only in a string of Nazi aphorisms. Still, watching the film (rather than listening to the director or the actors defending it) forces us to reflect on some interesting, if only partially explored, themes.