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Spotts traces Hitler's early years as a disillusioned veteran of the Great War, a kind of "bohemian aesthete" searching for a "philosophy of culture." He hoped to make the grade as an artist. And he wasn't that bad, according to Spotts. Those who have dismissed Hitler the artist as thoroughly second-rate are simply wrong, Spotts claims. To be sure, Hitler was not very adventurous in his painting, pursuing standard modes of representation at a time when the entire direction of art was moving toward expressionism. But he was immensely bold when he finally settled on a plan to aestheticize politics instead, pursuing grand visions of a European Culture Center at Linz and in other sites in the Thousand Year Reich. The Nazi aesthetic would make of Germany a new Rome, with grand public buildings and popular access to all the glories of culture—minus, of course, the decadent and degrading influences that threatened from a number of directions.

Hitler was immensely knowledgeable about the major opera houses of Europe. He planned to design opera houses with perfect acoustics and a grand, classical design. He collected art with alacrity—simply seizing much of it when he came to power—and among his art works were "at least seven paintings with Jewish subjects or references." The ideal for Nazi-era sculpting was to express "the characteristic and the enduring" and to "avoid phantasy." Art would be made available to the public not only through opera and symphonic festivals but also through the aesthetic construction of tunnels and bridges—much of this was successful, Spotts demonstrates, with designs planned to blend in with natural wonders rather than to detract from them while, at the same time, being classically modernist in style as befit the relative newness of auto-travel—and through generating mass products, like the famous Volkswagen, that displayed clean yet functional lines.

One finds oneself thrown off-guard reading Spotts' work. We prefer not to credit Hitler with the talent and knowledge he demonstrably possessed, especially in the area of design. We prefer to think of him as an inadequate yokel, a barbaric bumpkin, a monumental fraud as an artist as well as a monster. We can then separate Hitler from ourselves in all things. But Spotts suggests that this is too simplistic by far and lets the rest of us off too easily. Paying attention helps us to recognize the fusion of architecture and aggression as characteristic of the Nazi style —and may help to account for why it remains interesting. We think of the spectacles, even the design of costumes (those iconic Nazi uniforms), down to the last detail. (This was Hitler's doing, too.)

Even as the war rumbled along and began to go badly, Hitler's associates found they sometimes could not keep him focused on the challenges at hand. He would rather spend his time looking at designs for the great new European Cultural Center with its "suspension bridge … theatre, opera house, command headquarters, stadium, art gallery, library, weapons museum, exhibition hall, concert hall … planetarium, a technical university and an institute of metallurgy … a new railway station," on and on. Indeed, on these and other subjects, Hitler could not be shut up. He was still going on about the glorious cultural future in his final days in his bunker.

Spotts acknowledges that all absolutist rulers seek to overwhelm others through the building of "gigantic buildings. They are motivated by self-assertion and self-worship, and they accept no limits to their extravagance. But Hitler," he adds, with a touch of hyperbole, "went well beyond the others. He alone used aesthetics to help get and keep power. … Because his interest in the arts was also personal and genuine, and because—for all his railing against art for art's sake—he saw culture as the supreme value in itself," he was bound to try to control culture from top to bottom. So worried have Western democratic officials been about the "incendiary power" of Hitler's aesthetics post-Nazism, most of his watercolors have been kept under lock and key.

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