Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

366 DER FUEHRERardice the people no longer dare to say: that doesn't suit us, away withthis garbage. No, against their better knowledge and conviction the socalledintellectuals in our nation accept as beautiful something setbefore them by those people, which they themselves must automaticallyfeel to be ugly. That is a sign of our universal decay, a cowardice thatcan be thrown to the ground with one slogan: you are a philistine. . . .These are indications of the decay of taste and hence the racialdecomposition of our people. . . .' The good people of this nation, saidHitler, went timidly and sheepishly to operas and concerts, where 'thereis an echo of dissonances. . . . The people do not want that in the least,but no one dares to stay away. The wretched sound is an insult to theirears; they look around: beside them sits a blase young chap or an oldbounder who begins to applaud and looks impudently around, and theothers, instead of giving the young chap' — cry in the audience, 'alicking' —'. . . begin to wonder in all earnestness whether they haven'theard something profound after all, and finally they begin to clap, too,though they hadn't the slightest desire to clap. . . .'According to Hitler, we had adapted our daily lives to forms whichwere profoundly alien to us and which we also felt to be alien; butNational Socialism would give the German people courage to repulsethe alien: 'The things that we cannot understand because they are aliento us, we do not need to understand,' he cried loudly and with furiousgestures: 'Nor do we want to understand them.' According to report,there was stormy applause at this spot. It is as though the politician inhim were jealous of the artist — or perhaps the unsuccessful artistprincewas jealous of his more successful colleagues. Do we really needart? 'Minds who give birth to something new are infinitely rare,' hedeclares. 'It is only a very few great men on earth who really bless thenations by new achievements in the field of art. More than that is notnecessary ... for what an artist devises in a month, a people often needsthirty years to understand. . . . We need to produce no new art. If we accomplishnothing better, let us concentrate on what we already have, onwhat is immortal. . . .' This he said in the year 1928, and to thisrenunciation of original creation, unlike his many other promises andassurances, he has remained faithful. When in 1933 he