Page 55 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

equally repelling. In Nazism, the re-birth of tragedy manifests itself in both the Apollonian (Classicism) and Dionysian (Romanticism). Hitler’s grand theatrics of horror and terror uses art as Nazi Propaganda to indoctrinate and serve the beautiful ideals of the state, as Plato once dreamt in his utopian Republic. It awakens the German Spirit to lofty Apollonian aesthetic ideals, before it succumbs to Dionysian revelry and catastrophe: the Holocaust. Indeed, the Dionysian will, never distant from Circe’s cup, metamorphoses humans into groveling swine. Once Dionysus is abducted, as Tuscan pirates did, he transforms humanity’s ship into an arbor of tangled vines, rendering Apollo powerless to tame nature’s Faustian burst.
Mr. Berlin’s caution against tragic descents towards the labyrinth of extreme –ism’s, the prudent elders of Troy, too, wisely perceived and knew. Like them, Aristotle, too, opts for a virtuous golden mean, where there is neither excess nor lack.101 Mr. Althusser further warns how ideologies have a dangerous material existence.102 The beautiful, as shown and seen, whether physically or ideologically, always enchants and terrifies. It is as sublime as Helen’s gaze, and as terrifying, in its consequences, as the elders wisely perceived in Troy’s famed wall on that day when Helen stunned all. They foretold of impending doom. Yet King Priam failed to opportunely heed their prudent counsel, not once, but twice, as Europe’s leaders
101 Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Book II. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
102 Althusser, Louis. Mapping Ideology. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso, 1994. 100-140.
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