Page 44 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

truth, as being.80 Hitler’s Faustian yearnings and strivings to unify the glories of German Romanticism and Classicism manifest themselves metaphorically in the marriage of Goethe’s Faust and Helena. Faust, like Hitler, transfixed by Helena’s ideal classical beauty and her eternal feminine, embodies the German Romantic spirit of “infinite striving.”81 Faust, like Hitler, abysmally strives for her. In Faust, Helena is a spirit from the underworld, an idol, and their offspring, Euphorion, the self-consuming spirit of poetry, symbolizes the synthesis between classical beauty and romanticism.82 As an aspiring romantic artist, architect, and dramaturge of a powerful new civilization, Hitler, a master of theatrics (and of its phantasmagoria) envisions and delivers an aesthetic propaganda driven by a romantic and Platonic neo-classical utopia.83
Hitler’s quest for German Romantic genius, and for Plato’s ideal beauty arises from his infatuation with classical Greek ideals of beauty as being. Hitler promotes and propagates the fulfillment of a beautiful and salubrious, cheerful, mighty Aryan race, a race that must be in harmony
80 This idea of Beauty as “Truth” and as “Being” as the Form of Beauty itself is vastly argued in many of Plato’s dialogues. See Timaeus, the Republic, the Symposium, Phaedo. 81 Goethe. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 441-442.
82 Goethe. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 442.
83 This is affirmed by many texts studied for this paper. See Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. 30-39. See Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. See Glover, Jonathan. Humanity. A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. See Cohen, Peter. Documentary: The ArchitectureofDoom. Sweden,1989.
· 44 ·