A former watercolourist himself, Hitler got to paint on a much bigger canvas. He was interested in all the arts – painting, music, architecture – but he was addicted to film. He was renowned for his binge-watching stamina; he even planned to have a film projection unit installed in his car. Bill Niven’s Hitler and Film: The Fuhrer’s hidden passion documents all this meticulously, from Hitler’s private screenings to the commissioning and micromanaging of what the German people were permitted to watch, from newsreels to feature films. In the pre-war years, especially when staying at the Berghof, his mountain fastness, he would rise late, tend to business briefly, then drag his retinue into endless screenings of old favourites: westerns, musicals, Disney cartoons, revue films, thrillers, historical epics – plus the latest Nazi propaganda films. What the public were permitted to see and what Hitler and his circle watched were very different: even Jewish actors might appear on the screen behind those closed doors. Hitler was fascinated by actors, and loved to be around them; he intervened routinely to help their careers, even to the point of overruling directors on casting decisions.

One of the most astonishing stories in the book is of the night the Fuhrer had a newsreel featuring Stalin rewound and replayed numerous times, while he closely studied the face of his fellow dictator and sworn enemy. Eventually, he announced he could do a deal with this man; three days later Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and the infamous Hitler–Stalin pact was signed.

Digressing from Niven’s book for a moment, it is worth noting that Stalin was also a film buff, who had a habit of rising late then rounding up minions to watch films with him. One of his usual gang, Nikita Krushchev, wrote, ‘As soon as he woke up, he would ring us – the four of us – and invite us to see a film.’ As with Hitler, westerns were staple fare – including the John Wayne film-within-the-film in the recent tragical-comical-historical The Death of Stalin (2018). Perhaps Uncle Joe had also been studying Hitler’s face on newsreels. They never met, but it might explain his stubborn refusal to believe the news when Hitler broke their pact and invaded Russia.

In those pre-subtitle days, Hitler would often watch foreign movies in languages he didn’t understand. Admittedly, he had grown up in the silent era, and the painted image was his first love – but night after night? Niven suggests that the power of the image was at least as important to him as the power of words. Who would argue in our era, when the manipulative, simplifying image is king, and the first-choice from ministries of propaganda of all kinds, whether from governments, businesses, advertising agencies, NGOs, or the all conquering social media. A picutre is worth a thousand words? 140 characters, certainly; Hitler would also have loved the simple-minded world of Twitter.

Emote first, think afterwards – or not at all.

Cinematic imagery seems particularly powerful, and leaves deep, mind-bending residues. Frederick Crew’s classic book The Memory Wars (1995) describes – among other things – how the false memories that patients ‘retrieved’ under hypnosis often had imagery straight from Hollywood, whether of being subjected to improbable narratives of ritual satanic abuse, or (probably more plausibly) alien abduction, with anal probes de rigueur.

At the core of Niven’s book is Hitler’s relationship with Riefensthal: actress, dancer, and brilliant filmmaker. This ground has been much raked over, from all kinds of perspectives – including her own self-serving one – but Niven offers an excellent account of the verifiable historical facts to this point, with some new (at least to me) insights. And no, they weren’t lovers – although that would make a ripping movie. Goebbels was a serial couch-caster, but Hitler just wanted to take tea with his favourite actresses – and perhaps a vegetarian meal.

Another fascinating thread that runs through the book is the pagan, nature-worshipping Hitler’s Nietzschean war against Christian influence – and imagery – in movies. He was creating his own religion in a way: a crank mix of atheism, tree-hugging nature worship, Old Norse myths, and Nietzschean will-to-power. But film worship also seems in that mix somewhere.

Hitler and Goebbels on the set of Gerhard Lamprechts film Baracole in 1935 (from the book under review)

Are filmmakers, not poets, the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Maybe, but a more serious problem seems to be when artistic, poetic souls are given acknowledged legislative power. Mao Zedong, the third and most effective of the great mass murderers of the Century of Genocide, wrote a lot of poetry, but he was also a film buff. He wept while watching Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, and watched it several more times. I’m not sure what this means, except as another case study in the creepy sentimentality of power-corrupted monsters. In our polarising era when the so-called National Socialism of Hitler, or the avowed Marxist–Leninisim of Stalin and Mao, have a renewed attraction at the political extremes, the psychopathology of the totalitarian sensibility seems worth revisiting. As does the relationship of art to visionary, utopian politics. Mao was a pretty good poet; it’s even possible he was the most widely read poet who ever lived. Radovan Karadžć, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, was another well-regarded poet, in his student days, giving readings in the bohemian haunts of Greenwich Village.

An infinitely better poet than either was W.H. Auden, who, like Plato, thought that poets – read visionary artists of all stripes – should be kept well away from the levers of power. He has the measure of them all, and their creepy poetic souls, in ‘Epitaph for a Tyrant’.

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easyto understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

For poetry, read film, in the case of Hitler. Films in the Third Reich were always very easy to understand.