Alternate History Traveller Guide [5/7]

From: Max Belankov (2:5054/2.31)
To: All
Date: 1997-09-13T20:15:57Z
Area: PERM.LANGUAGE

=== Cut ===

Time Edwards

Springtime for Hitler

1996 Time Edwards

If your travels take you to Vienna before the end of September, be
sure not to miss the Hitler retrospective at the Vienna Museum of
Modern Art. The museum has assembled a truly comprehensive exhibit of
the life work of one of the most interesting and controversial artists
of the twentieth century.

The exhibit begins with some of Hitler's early watercolors, which have
never before been exhibited. The works are, frankly, somewhat
prosaic, but they give the viewer a chronological baseline for the
artist's evolving style. This evolution is visible in the posters the
artist designed for Germany's ill-fated National Socialist party.

After his brief flirtation with politics , Hitler returned to painting,
and drew on the rage and hostility of his experience in the Great War
to produce the stunning surrealist works for which he became famous.
The triptych "Mein Kampf" remains the largest work on canvas in the
world. The viewer will be overwhelmed with its passion and grandeur,
and may have difficulty penetrating the convoluted internal logic and
Teutonic mythological imagery that led many critics to dub Hitler
"Austria's answer to Salvador Dali"

Many people are unaware that Hitler also dabbled in sculpture. The
stunning homoeroticism of "Ubermensch" often surprises unprepared
viewers.

The painting "Kristallnacht" marks the beginning of Hitler's so-called
"black period" during which the artist pushed the envelope of radical
abstract expressionism. Hitler's worsening drug addiction in this
period led to darker and more violent imagery in his paintings. The
exhibit ends with the macabre "Endlosung" which still bears the
bloodstains of the tragic dual suicide in 1945 of the artist and his
favorite model, Eva Braun.

"Hitler: A Retrospective" will be at the Vienna Museum of Modern Art
until September 30th, every day except Tuesday from 9:00AM to 7:00PM
30 Sch/ 15 Sch with a valid student ID
Another point of view...
1996 by Pyotr Filipivich

...The important thing to remember is that following the Great War,
Europe went through radical transformation, not only politically but in
the arts and society. (Even America, untouched by war, had the roaring
twenties.)
It is interesting to note that Hitler quit his dabbling in radical
politics shortly after the restoration of the monarchy by von
Hindenberg. But Hitler himself spoke of his military service as both
the consummate horror and crucial events in his development as an
artist. Much has been made of his prewar landscapes, particularly the
urban watercolors he painted in his early days. But even as they have
been dismissed as prosaic, these were harbingers of his later work, for
in them one can see the first glimmerings of his conceptualization of
the sterile inhumanity of the modern urban landscape. Hitler had
intuitively rejected the middle-class expressionism then popular, but
had not yet found his metre. Later he was to use the formal structures
of the prewar art world to channel (in both senses of the word) the
anarchistic postwar weltanschauung, and some say he best expressed the
zeitgeist of post war Europe.
While some of his immediate postwar works were raw reflective of a
neo-wagnerian excess, one can compare them with Goya's Peninsular
Etching documenting the atrocities of 1812. Both men had seen things
which were unbearable, and both used their artistic abilities to give
voice to the unspeakable brutality and inhumanity which is war, and in
particular, that of the Great War. But raw outrage can only go so far,
and Hitler began what came to be called the Aryan Mystique as he
appropriated the symbols and icons of his upbringing and what he
considered the bourgeois middle class values of the Whilma Republic.
Hitler was not the first who juxtaposed incongruous symbols, but not
since Hieronymous Bosch were items of day to day life inhabited with
such vigor or malice.
It has been explored at great length in "The Aryan Ideal, Hitler's
Vision" (Rosenberg, et al, Munich 1955) how Hitler, though raised
nominally Catholic, had broke with organized religion, save as how it
could provide symbols for his art. Yet even then, there was the
rejection, as the crooked crossed evidences, and the even reversal of
the fylfot or swastika (a good luck symbol from the Isle of Man).
Hitler was especially contemptuous of the Russian Patriarch Vyacheslav
"Molotov" and his campaign for Social Realism in art, saying on one
occasion "Keinen Kunst ist, Tapete sind!" ("That isn't Art, that's
wallpaper!" [Gobbels, "Table Talk in Berchesgaden", Innsbruch, 1947].)
As has been noted elsewhere, Hitler had an aversion for things slavic
probably originating in his war service on the Russian front, and a
resulting suspicion of slavs bordering on the pathological. Some say it
is not coincidence that Hitler took his own life in the famous Russian
Spring, when Lufthansa, Areoflot and Air Polska engaged in a fare war,
flooding Berlin with thousands of Russian Tourists. These two threads,
his anti-religion feelings and the hatred of things Slavic, when
combined with his drug use, drove his development of the Aryan Ideal in
Art. Hitler saw himself as chosen for the mission to bring about the
Aryan Artistic Ideal, and took to calling himself "der Fuhrer" (the
Leader) and requiring guests at his studio "Eagles Nest" to use the
term.
While _Kristallenacht_ does mark the beginnings of his black period,
there are those who also see the black humor of his _Night of the Long
Knives_, with it's images of sacrifice and rejection of the necessity
for commercial support needed by an emerging artist. That this was
painted when Hitler took control of his own work and presentations,
cutting off the large commercial galleries from their control of his
work.

_ There are reports that all of his sketch books were burned upon his death by his friends, all though rumors
_ persist that they were smuggled to South America...
_ From Nikolai Petrovich's review of the retrospective in the Moscow Pravda Arts section.

David Johnson

Camp Angeles

1996 by David Johnson

Camp Angeles is a small tourist town of about fifteen-hundred
permanent residents, hidden deep in the Sierra Madre backcountry, on
what use to be called "Horse Flats." Most of the people their live
along the trolley line that's both their link to the outside world, and
financial support for the town. The remaining one-hundred-fifty,
two-hundred folk live within five miles of the rails, in buildings that
range from the overblown, mansion-sized "hunting cabins" of those with
lots of money, but little taste, to lean-tos, banged together out of
deadwood and old tin-cans.
The town got its start back in the early 1900's, when the city of Los
Angeles staked out the land, intending to use it for a city campground.
They set up some cabins, a big meeting hall/cafeteria, and carved out a
handful of trails to the surrounding peaks, waterfalls, and other
scenic spots. Then, they advertised it as "Los Angeles's Own Mountain
Playground."
For the first couple of years, the tourist trade remained light. At the
time, the only ways into the area were to either take the main Arroyo
Seco trail up from Silverstone, then the Diablo Cano?ntilde; Ridge
trail for the rest of the trip, or shave about fifteen miles off your
hike by taking the trolley to Camp San Gabriel, and the West Fork trail
to the Diablo. Even the short route was twelve miles, and this scared
off all but the most dedicated hikers.
So Los Angeles asked the Silverstone & Jade (still the Silverstone &
San Pedro at that time) if they'd build a rail-line from their Camp San
Gabriel terminus to Camp Angeles. The S&J said yes if L.A. would pay
for construction.
Surprisingly, Los Angeles did. So the S&J carved their mountain railway
another eleven miles of track, built a small, rustic station and hotel
at Camp Angeles, and started running four trolleys a day there from
downtown L.A. to go along with their six Silverstone to Camp San
Gabriel trolleys.
With a way to get there that didn't take eight hours of walking, Camp
Angeles became very popular, both among the rich who tended to stay at
S&J's Alpine Hotel (which was soon revamped and expanded) and those of
more modest means who leaned towards staying at the cabins and
campsites.
Not surprisingly, within a few years some of those who visited were
working out ways to stay on a more permanent basis. They'd build small
stores (usually with a cabin attached), work as tour-guides, or
maintenance personnel for the hotel and campgrounds, or just provide
whatever services in general for the tourists they could.
By 1920 at the height of the area's popularity there were close to
three-thousand living there, servicing more than one-hundred-thousand
visitors a year, and almost three-hundred of Southern California's
richest were maintaining summer homes at the site. Construction began
on a new shorter railline from Silverstone to the area up the Arroyo
Seco.
The town's fortunes declined after that. Thanks to the new S&J line to
Jade, the big tourist draws of the Widney Sea began to draw off many of
those who had stayed at Camp Angeles long-term, and newly created Verde
Lake, to the south of L.A., picked up much of the day-trip trade. Then,
the Angeles fire of 1924 burned down much of the town, including the
S&J's trolley station and the Alpine. After the fire, S&J replaced the
tiny station, but not the hotel. The "Arroyo Route" project was
canceled, with only three kims of the line completed (to the current
site of "Hiker's Station").
=== Cut ===
---
* Origin: Кто к нам с чем -- тот оттого и того... (2:5054/2.31)