Hitler's Watercolours

This one’s a castle, that’s a customs-house. They’re stolid, listless, just a little dull. The sky supports an arbitrary gull. The languidness of Lizst, the style of Strauss are wholly absent. Colours are metallic. The eye sweeps over cornice, turret, steeple, and then it dawns on us – there are no people. Clock towers, mountains, minarets, all phallic, are void of human life. Stark, empty chairs adorn each arid, motionless interior. As we apprise, eyes sneeringly superior, we note acerbically his love of stairs – a Will to Power, ever pushing up. One daub there is, however, gives us pause: it dates from long before Enabling Laws, before he dreamed of Kesselring or Krupp: a bridge that’s quite impossible to cross, that goes nowhere, has never carried traffic, bears one boy sitting on it. Startling, graphic, without a hint of Schadenfreud or Schloss: self-portrait, this. What features might we trace? What’s here vouchsafed? Incipient racist brute? Well, hardly. An endearing, awful suit, and – most revealingly of all – he has no face.