‘Max’: Politics as a New Art

If you want to understand Hitler, you have to understand he was an artist first.
                                                                 —Albert Speer

In my poem “If Hitler also Spelled Hiedler”, published in the March 2014 issue of Quadrant, I proposed the following “what if” scenario:

If Hitler also spelled Hiedler
Hüttler or Huettler
at seventeen had remained
in watercolour been accepted
at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
even become a priest as once intended
the swastika would still signify
auspiciousness in Sanskrit
Israel wouldn’t exist
no Berlin or West Bank walls
holocaust would refer to
a burnt offering of Moses
WWI would still be The Great War
I would have had one more uncle.

The film Max, a 2002 joint British, Hungarian and Canadian production, written and directed by Menno Meyjes, explores this premise from a different perspective, hypothesising a friendship between a Jewish avant-garde art dealer, Max Rothman, and a young Adolf Hitler, recently returned from the front. Both men fought for Germany in the First World War, a kilometre away from each other. Both suffered losses: Rothman, his right arm, and Hitler, his home and family. The two men form an unlikely friendship over their love of art.

The story opens in 1918 in Munich, in an old leaky ironworks factory that Max Rothman (played by John Cusack) has converted into a contemporary gallery. He’s impeccably dressed and smokes a cigarette with his left hand. He aspired to be a painter but when he lost his right arm in the Third Battle of Ypres he abandoned his dream. One hundred thousand Jews fought in the German army, 40,000 of them volunteers.

Wine carafes and glasses are laid out in preparation for a gala exhibition. Rothman is married to Nina but is having a discreet affair with Liselore von Peltz. Both women are in attendance and are very aware of each other’s presence. A young corporal, Adolf Hitler (played by Noah Taylor), has also returned from the war, disillusioned and homeless, and is working as a liquor salesman, delivering alcohol to the exhibition. He carries a portfolio of sketches and drawings under his arm. Rothman meets him in the lane to receive the delivery, recognises his distinctive army coat, and discovers that they fought near each other. Rothman invites him inside for some champagne but Hitler tells him he doesn’t smoke or drink. Hitler dislikes avant-garde art but tells Rothman he did some “modern stuff” in the trenches and Rothman expresses interest in seeing the work.

At home, during dinner with his wealthy family, Rothman’s mother asks how his wife Nina stays so thin. She tells her that one of her girlfriends swallowed a tapeworm to lose weight. His father becomes irritated with the topic but Max thinks it very “aesthetic”.

Hitler purchases a new suit, shirt and tie for his appointment and meets Rothman at the gallery, telling him not to expect anything abstract. Rothman looks at the portfolio, asks if he is some kind of Reverse-Futurist, like the Italians, and tells him, “I think it’s good, but I think you can go even deeper”, and find his “authentic voice”.

Hitler is insulted and tells Rothman he returned from the war to nothing: no family, no home, no job. “All I have in this world is the conviction that I am a great artist and a master builder, and you just stole from that, from the one thing that’s mine, a rich boy like you.” He packs up his portfolio and walks out.

While working in an army laundry, Hitler meets Captain Karl Mayr, a Reichswehr intelligence officer, who is impressed that an “artist” like Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. He offers him an all-expenses-paid place in a course on public speaking, in a new science called propaganda. Mayr longs for another war to “cleanse” the government, telling Hitler: “War is vitality. War is the hygiene of the world.”

Hitler begins giving impromptu speeches in the street. When one of Mayr’s men comments that he’s just a nothing, Mayr says, “Perhaps this is the Age of the Nothing.”

Rothman is watching in the crowd. Hitler approaches him afterwards, saying how honoured he is that Rothman came to hear him. He apologises for storming out of the gallery. When Hitler asks him what he thought of the speech, Rothman tells him that if he were to put the same amount of passion into his art, he could break through. Hitler admits that he might need to find his authentic voice and that he does admire some of the ideas in Cubism. Rothman agrees to take some pieces on consignment, giving Hitler an advance against future sales, and advises him to get out of politics.

Next day, Rothman returns to the gallery to find Hitler hanging his paintings. Rothman informs him that he only agreed to take the work on consignment, and there is another exhibit, by George Grosz and other Modernists, scheduled for the gallery, so he’ll have to take his paintings down; but he gives Hitler his word that he will try to sell his work.

Rothman offers some of Hitler’s paintings to a couple of wealthy buyers as an example of “krieg und kunst [war in art] … not as mannered, as tutored, but an authentic voice of the trenches, the voice of the everyman, the voice of the Unknown Soldier”. To Hitler’s shock, they buy a Max Ernst instead. Hitler says “the man has no technique”, and tells Rothman he has been attending séances “to learn how the old German gods could be usurped by the god of Israel; the god of guilt, the projection of slaves”.

Rothman replies, “It sounds like lunch at my house.”

When Hitler is in Captain Mayr’s company, he denigrates Rothman for his decadent and unhealthy habits, his immorality and his friends: “artists and the usual degenerates”. Mayr assures him not to despair, that he has his own talent, “Just let it out.”

Rothman introduces Hitler to some girls, telling them, “He’s a Futurist, doesn’t he sort of remind you of Marinetti?” but they think his views on blood purity are repulsive, considering him vile and a joke. Hitler overhears their comments and becomes embarrassed and angry.

Returning to his room, he begins painting passionately but grows frustrated, throwing down his brush and smashing the canvas. To calm down, he begins drawing eagles and designs for logos and military uniforms on a sketchpad.

Captain Mayr visits him, trying to entice him join his 600-member National Socialist Workers Party. “But don’t let the name fool you—they are about as socialist as you and me.” He tells him their scheduled speaker is ill and asks if Hitler would mind stepping in and saying a few words.

Rothman decides to attend the event. Hitler exhibits the confident and bombastic foaming-at-the-mouth style he will later become known for, insulting and accusing the Jews in every other sentence.

Afterwards, he approaches Rothman and tells him that “the way to reinvent art is not to make it political. Politics is the new art!”

He tells Rothman he has taken his advice and gone deep, “deeper than any artist has gone before”.

Rothman asks: “But where is the work?”

Hitler screams at him, “I am the new avant-garde! I am the new artist, practising the new art, and politics is the new art!”

Rothman looks at Hitler’s architectural sketches, the large super-highway layouts, Teutonic uniform designs and the Sanskrit swastika. Hitler tells him, “It’s a symbol of energy, of the sun, but I’ve reversed it.”

Rothman, intrigued, comments, “This is different than boring old modernism. It’s some old-new future world, isn’t it?” and tells him he thinks he’s finally found his voice: “The future as a return to the past.” Hitler asks him if he would exhibit this work and Rothman says yes, “this work belongs in a gallery”. He tells Hitler to meet him at the Metropol Cafe and bring it all.

Rothman is excited by Hitler’s new work and considers it “future kitsch”. He sees the sketches, the raving speeches and manic hand-waving as some kind of Futurist art performance-installation piece and envisions a spectacular opening, comparing it to Duchamp, exclaiming, “The future is subversive.” His friend grimaces and says, “Ah, the Meshuggener [crazy man] Show.”

Hitler is preparing his speech for the National Socialist Workers Party and asks Mayr to seat the most excitable members in the first few rows. He is setting up the talk to be a dynamic interactive experience. But he tells Mayr that this will be his last talk because Rothman has now agreed to exhibit his work and he plans to commit his life to art. Mayr points to the crowd and tells Hitler, “There is your canvas,” and places his hand on his head, “and that is your paint. What are you waiting for? Let it out.”

Hitler gives a violent anti-Semitic speech, leading the entire rally in a thunderous chant: “Blood Jew! Blood Jew! Blood Jew!”

While walking towards the Metropol to meet Hitler, Rothman is attacked by a group of soldiers who have been stirred up by the talk, and is brutally beaten to death. Unaware of this, Hitler patiently sits at a table at the Metropol, with his drawings in hand, waiting. He waits until closing and, resigned that Rothman has broken his word, walks out of the cafe, and on into his infamous destiny.

Menno Meyjes, the writer-director of Max, wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s hit film The Color Purple (1985). Spielberg said that he liked the script for Max and encouraged Meyjes to make the film, but told him his company, Amblin, couldn’t be part of the project as he felt it would offend Holocaust survivors.

Mica Rosenberg, of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said that the film’s producer, Andra Hamori, a Jew whose family was persecuted by the Nazis, had the initial reaction after reading the script, “Let’s not make this movie,” but was persuaded by Meyjes to help find the finance.

Despite a budget of ten million dollars, the film grossed only half a million during its fifteen-week American release. Rosenberg feels most objections to the film come from people who have not actually seen it, such as Brett Stone of the Jewish Defense League, who attacked the film on the organisation’s website as “a psychic assault on Holocaust survivors and the entire Jewish community”. It seems Stone had read something about the film in a Fox News column on the internet. Rosenberg commented, “Few people who see the movie are likely to feel it shows Hitler in a positive light.”

Noah Taylor,who plays Hitler, later played him again in the American hit television series Preacher. This role was slightly more humorous. He told Karen Han, of Vulture magazine:                    

It’s more like the Mel Brooks sort of thing … it’s harder to be comical about Hitler, but then it’s also equally important to recognise bumbling clowns can be very dangerous, because they don’t initially seem to pose any threat. You should always be aware of the clown. Again, I think Hitler is a valid character, especially if you’re going to take the piss out of him, because that’s the thing Fascists really hate the most—being made fun of.

Ulrich Thomsen graduated from the Danish National School of Theatre and Contemporary Dance in 1993. His character, Captain Karl Mayr, is based on Adolf Hitler’s superior in the Reichswehr Intelligence Division, who introduced Hitler to politics. Mayr worked closely with Ernst Rohm and, under Rohm’s advice, recruited the young Hitler as an undercover agent in 1919 to report on soldiers who were communist sympathisers. Mayr was quoted as saying that Hitler “looked like a tired stray dog looking for a master”. Mayr later became a critic of the Nazis, turning against Hitler and fleeing to France after the Nazis came to power. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, the Gestapo found him and sent him to Sachsenhausen and then to Buchenwald, where he was killed in 1945.

When Max debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, many people walked out of the theatre, objecting to way it turned Hitler, responsible for murdering six million Jews, into a somewhat sympathetic character. Meyjes told Rosenberg:

What Hitler did was so awful that we all desire a kind of extreme grandeur to surround him. We want to believe he was a force born of a cloud of sulphur who disappeared in a puff of gasoline and now, thank God, we’re rid of that forever. But that’s not the truth. Hitler was a human being, and it is the fact that he made a choice to become a monster that is essential to understanding him. There are Hitlers of the future lurking, and I think if you want to comprehend what makes evil tick, you have to begin with ordinary human emotions.

Sean P. Means of the Salt Lake Tribune said “the drama depicts Hitler as passive and pathetic—nearly, in a sense, letting him off the hook for his grotesque crimes”. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times disagreed:

The film … has been attacked because it attempts to “humanize” a monster. But of course Hitler was human, and we must understand that before we can understand anything else about him. To dehumanize him is to fall under the spell which elevated him into the Fuhrer, a mythical being who transfixed Germans and obscured the silly little man with the moustache. To ponder Hitler’s early years with the knowledge of his later ones is to understand how life can play cosmic tricks with tragic results.

The Melbourne art historian Dr Christopher Heathcote reminds us that Hitler “applied for the Art Academy in Vienna but never attended his scheduled interview. So he wasn’t even rejected. He just didn’t try.”

David Edelstein, of Slate, wrote:

As a ravishingly photographed, high-minded meditation on the potential of art and therapy to exorcise the vilest sort of psychological poison, it is positively riotous—an Everest of idiocy. Tony Soprano and his Italian Freudian aren’t a patch on Hitler and his Jewish art therapist … the only surprise is that Max never prods Hitler to discuss his mom.

Ebert concludes, “But what, we may ask … is the purpose of this movie? … I think the key is in Rothman, who is a kind liberal humanist, who cares for the unfortunate, who lives a life of the mind that blinds him to the ominous rising tide of Nazism.” George Grosz and Karl Mayr were not so naive.