Page 46 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

“riding her white steed over the flowering meadows”85 3⁄4 and fundamentally encouraged by Hitler in his propaganda of a new pure, fit and salubrious race and world. Lovely-haired Helen of Troy, thus, mirrors Golden-haired Margareta of Germany, both allegories for Lady Beauty, the thing-in-itself, weaving humanity’s struggles endured for her sake, as if they were Loreleis, Stefanies or Valkyries collapsing time and space, transfixing suitors beneath their bewildering, terrible sublime gaze. Homer’s Helen’s beauty dazzles, as if a Grecian sun upon Celan’s Margareta, and transforms her into the thrice-ideal emblem of foremost beauty conjugating intellect, mind, and body.
Hitler’s obsession with the grandeur of classical beauty and culture is so evident that "...it should be preserved for us”, he says, “in its exemplary beauty."86 Thus inspired, and transfixed by Grecian Lady Beauty’s gaze, he draws from the realm of Plato’s unchanging Forms to create and materialize his ideological sublime Platonic utopian Nazi state. Hitler, as a Platonist philosopher king, seduced by the Form of Beauty, and weary of Aryan corrosion, of everything that is ugly and deformed, of everything that contaminates the eternal ideal of beauty, seeks to draw from the eternal realm of the ideal,
85 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.
86 Hitler, Adolf and Johnson, Alvin. Mein Kampf, Complete and Unabridged, Fully Annotated. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939. 631. Inspired, he draws from the realm of the unchanging and the ideal to create a new, beautiful, neo-classical civilization governed by the loftiest ideals of form, beauty and proportion.
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