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her,” says Shirer.52 “She was a Damsel out of Die Walkuerie,” adds Shirer, “clad in a dark-blue flowing velvet gown, riding a white steed over the flowering meadows.”53 A Valkyrie is a beautiful hero-loving damsel who selects who is to be slain in the battlefields.54 She, as Damsel of Death also emblemizes the terrible sublime. She symbolizes beauty and death to heroes in the same way that Margarete and Helen’s terrible-beauties symbolize beauty and doom, not just to heroes, but also to many other civilian victims. Hitler’s friend, Heiden, too, adds how drawn and mesmerized Hitler was by beautiful, lovely women,55 and how every pagan work of Richard Wagner,56 including Die Walkuerie, had infatuated him incessantly. Hitler, thus, drawn by the ideal eternal feminine and her terrible-sublime, plans death just like his men and his commandants, while he, like they, daydreams and writes to his beloved goldenes Haar Margarete.
Golden-haired Margareta, says Mr. Felstiner, signifies the sublime archetype of the beautiful German romantic ideals of the eternal feminine represented in Goethe's Faust tragic
52 Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 15.
53 Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 15. From Kubizek, op.cit., 59.
54 The word valkyrie derives from Old Norse valkyrja. It consists of the noun valr, which refers to the slain on the battlefield, and the verb kjósa, “to choose.” When combined, they signify "chooser of the slain." Byock, Jesse. The Prose Edda. Trans. Jesse L. Byock. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. 142–143. Originally from Wikipedia’s “Valkyrie,” however, source was double-checked.
55 Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 131.
56 Hitler was notoriously known for his enraptured listening to the pagan works of Richard Wagner. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 15.
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