MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Doom’: How the Nazis ‘Sanitized’ Art

“The Architecture of Doom” (NuWilshire) doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s a fascinating historical documentary. Swedish filmmaker Peter Cohen, whose parents fled Germany during the rise of Nazism, methodically chronicles the connection between Hitler’s ascent from failed artist to Fuhrer and the development of the Nazi aesthetic--the idealization of beauty through violence.

One of the multifold horrors of this material is the reminder that the connection between aesthetics and action doesn’t exist in some abstract, philosophical realm. Hitler’s worship of Nordic beauty, of Antiquity, of Wagner, led directly not only to the trashing of “degenerate” (i.e. Expressionist) art, but also to the means by which the “degenerates” themselves were systematically destroyed.

In one of the film’s most revealing sequences, we’re shown a Nazi documentary that compares the physiognomy of physically deformed medical patients with Expressionist portraiture. Proclaiming “an end to lunacy in art,” Hitler founded a House of German Art in 1937 and an annual Great Exhibition of German Art, from which he purchased hundreds of canvases and sculptures--mostly scenes of bucolic sentimentalism.

The ridding of “deformity” from German life was implemented in the hospitals, with the enforced sterilization and then extermination of the insane (40% of German doctors during the Third Reich were in the party). Racial purity and aesthetic purity were twinned. Cohen uses snippets from the 1940 Nazi documentary “The Eternal Jew,” showing indigent Polish Jews living in ghettos, purported to show “how Jews looked before they hid themselves behind the mask of the civilized European.” Hitler’s worship of Wagner is well known but the film also records his passion for German pulp novelist Karl May, who churned out adventure sagas set in the Wild West, Africa and Asia--places he had never visited. Hitler’s adoration of May was linked to his own pseudo-mystic connection to the glory of an Antiquity he could only fantasize about. His plans to destroy Moscow had their basis in Rome’s destruction of Carthage. The architectural designs for Berlin, drawn up by Albert Speer, were meant to outshine Rome and Greece.

The great European capitals existed for Hitler only as reminders of a past that had to be triumphed over. The spookiest passage in the film (unrated: in German with English subtitles) shows him on his first visit to Paris after the Occupation, as he is chauffeured on an early dawn visit to the Paris Opera (whose architectural layout he had long ago memorized) and the great museums. The narrator tells us that Hitler hoped he wouldn’t have to level the city.

In the film’s last half hour, the connection between Nazi aesthetics and brutality is somewhat lost sight of. Footage of Nazi military campaigns take precedence over their philosophical underpinnings; it’s a bit like being yanked into an A&E; WWII documentary. But the film, at its best, uncovers the kinds of visual archival material that makes documentaries an indispensable part of the historical process.

The film also leaves one with a nagging question: What if Hitler had succeeded as painters and architects in their youth?

‘The Architecture of Doom’

A Fine Line Features release. Written, produced, edited and director by Peter Cohen. Narrated by Bruno Ganz.

In German with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes.

Unrated.