Hitler's Face The Biography of an Image Claudia Schmolders.
Translated by Adrian Daub "With "Hitler's Face," Claudia Schmolders
has written an explosive book and delivered a thrilling
contribution to physiognomy."--"Suddeutsche Zeitung" "It contains
fascinating insights into the mindset of the Twenties."--Ian
Kershaw "Despite the innumerable books devoted to Hitler's imposing
presence and the Nazi dictatorship of the media, no single work has
provided a comprehensive and focused study of the sights and sounds
which allowed an otherwise unimpressive-looking individual to
become a compelling site of attention and allegiance. This is
precisely the project of Claudia Schmolders's significant book. She
scrutinizes photographs, paintings, filmic representations, and
verbal descriptions of the leader to 'read' these artifacts as
texts. One might best describe her book as the history of a face
and an image, the chronicle of its construction, transformation,
and reception."--Eric Rentschler, Harvard University "This is a
work that can be read with profit by all those interested in the
biography of Adolf Hitler and the mythology surrounding his person
and image, as well as by those enticed by a biographical
methodology that concentrates on the history of visual
representations rather than on biographical 'facts.' This book, in
short, well deserves the wider readership it will garner in English
translation."--"Biography" In "Hitler's Face" Claudia Schmolders
reverses the normal protocol of biography: instead of using visual
representations as illustrations of a life, she takes visuality as
her point of departure to track Adolf Hitler from his first arrival
in Munich as a nattily dressed young man to his end in a Berlin
bunker--and beyond. Perhaps never before had the image of a
political leader been so carefully engineered and manipulated, so
broadly disseminated as was Hitler's in a new age of mechanical
reproduction. There are no extant photographs of him visiting a
concentration camp, or standing next to a corpse, or even with a
gun in his hand. If contemporary caricatures spoke to the
calamitous thoughts, projects, and actions of the man, officially
sanctioned photographs, paintings, sculptures, and film
overwhelmingly projected him as an impassioned orator or heroically
isolated figure. Schmolders demonstrates how the adulation of
Hitler's face stands at the conjunction of one line stretching back
to the eighteenth-century belief that character could be read in
the contours of the head and another dating back to the late
nineteenth-century quest to sanctify German greatness in a gallery
of national heroes. In Nazi ideology, nationalism was conjoined to
a forceful belief in the determinative power of physiognomy . The
mad veneration of the idealized German face in all its various
aspects, and the fanatical devotion to Hitler's face in particular,
was but one component of a project that also encouraged the
ceaseless contemplation of supposedly degenerate "Jewish" physical
traits to advance its goals. Claudia Schmolders lectures at the
Humboldt University in Berlin. She is the author of numerous books
in German, including "The Eccentric Look: A Discourse on
Physiognomy" and "The Invention of Love: Famous Testimonies from
Three Millennia." With Sander L. Gilman, she is the coeditor of
"The Faces of the Weimar Republic: A Physiognomic Cultural
History." Material Texts 2005 - 240 pages - 6 x 9 - 91 illus. ISBN
978-0-8122-2081-0 - Paper - $24.95s - 16.50 World Rights - History,
Cultural Studies Short copy: From his emergence on the German
political scene in 1914 and subsequent public infatuation with him,
to his fall in 1945 and the growing revulsion as his horrific acts
were revealed to the world, Adolf Hitler's visage, Claudia
Schmolders argues, was the first political image manufactured for
the modern media."
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