Page 50 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

ideology and his neo-Platonisms, Hitler’s gaze, transfixed by Lady Beauty’s gaze, turns to error and terror. Hitler, too, errs by becoming Germany’s Meister of Death, emblem and metaphor, too, for the man who
lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays his vipers He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
Paris and King Priam, as Masters of Death, too, err in sacrificing Troy, their own nation and their families, and flesh of flesh in their blind quest to preserve Helen’s glorious physical beauty, while Hitler sacrifices the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the racially inferior 3⁄4 the other. In so doing, he sacrifices the West in a mass genocide. For Lady Beauty’s sake, Helen and Margareta, Paris, Priam, Menelaus, and Hitler war and kill. Both epics are woven with the flesh and blood endured for beauty’s sake, showing an intricate, fearful symmetry between the past and the future, Paris, Priam, and Hitler, in their Promethean quests90 for the terrible sublime, and in their obstinacy not to let Lady Helen opportunely depart and return to Argos, or Lady Margareta to return to her Romantic Germany of days bygone before her many –isms and extremisms cremate peoples and lands. “To cause pain, to kill, to torture are generally rightly condemned,” says Berlin, but to do so in the name of idealism, or any –ism, “Socialism, Nationalism, Fascism, Communism, or a fanatically held
90 Hitler’s Faustian impetus is also likened to Prometheus. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 134.
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