In Hitler's Face Claudia Schmölders reverses the normal protocol of
biography: instead of using visual representations as illustrations of a
life, she takes visuality as her point of departure to track Adolf
Hitler from his first arrival in Munich as a nattily dressed young man
to his end in a Berlin bunker--and beyond.
Perhaps never before had the image of a political leader been so
carefully engineered and manipulated, so broadly disseminated as was
Hitler's in a new age of mechanical reproduction. There are no extant
photographs of him visiting a concentration camp, or standing next to a
corpse, or even with a gun in his hand. If contemporary caricatures
spoke to the calamitous thoughts, projects, and actions of the man,
officially sanctioned photographs, paintings, sculptures, and film
overwhelmingly projected him as an impassioned orator or heroically
isolated figure.
Schmölders demonstrates how the adulation of Hitler's face stands at the
conjunction of one line stretching back to the eighteenth-century belief
that character could be read in the contours of the head and another
dating back to the late nineteenth-century quest to sanctify German
greatness in a gallery of national heroes. In Nazi ideology, nationalism
was conjoined to a forceful belief in the determinative power of
physiognomy . The mad veneration of the idealized German face in all its
various aspects, and the fanatical devotion to Hitler's face in
particular, was but one component of a project that also encouraged the
ceaseless contemplation of supposedly degenerate Jewish physical traits
to advance its goals.
