The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) will present Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913, an exhibition examining the influence Vienna, Austria had on the young Adolf Hitler and its later manifestation in the destructive power of Nazi Germany. The exhibition, which will be on view from July 13 through October 27, 2002, is the Williams College Museum of Art’s contribution to The Vienna Project, a collaboration among eleven arts and cultural institutions in the Berkshires that explores more than four centuries of art from Vienna. Prelude to a Nightmare is organized by Deborah Rothschild, Curator of Exhibitions at WCMA.

Introduction
Inspired largely by Brigitte Hamann’s critically acclaimed book Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (1999), the exhibition will include approximately 150 paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints, posters, theatrical designs, vintage film footage, photographs, books, pamphlets, and other examples of material culture. When Hitler moved to Vienna in 1908 at the age of eighteen, he was a provincial German nationalist who harbored dreams of becoming a great painter, architect, or theatrical set designer. He left for Munich five years later, an embittered drifter with racist views. Prelude to a Nightmare will look at the various aspects of Vienna’s art and culture that Hitler encountered and will bring to light the ways he copied, misunderstood, and later exploited these experiences. As an academic museum dedicated to the scholarly investigation and interpretation of important issues in relation to visual culture, WCMA is ideally suited to present the subject of Hitler’s years in Vienna. The museum’s mission focuses on the integration of the visual arts within the college’s curriculum and is closely tied to the teaching mission of the college. By exploring the influences that a young Hitler absorbed in Vienna, visitors to the exhibition will gain new insights into the development and warning signs of tyranny.

Exhibition Overview
Vienna around 1910 was an open, multi-ethnic city where a wide spectrum of beliefs co-existed. While Vienna’s impact on Hitler certainly was not the direct cause of Germany’s National Socialism, his political views were formulated there. Hitler’s artistic ideas, which became the basis for “Nazi aesthetics,” also began to take shape during his time in Vienna and were eventually perverted to serve a repressive political system that sought to control every aspect of German society. In addition to art, architecture, and music, the social/political situation in Vienna between 1906 and 1913 will be examined in Prelude to a Nightmare. As in any large city with a multi-ethnic population, the spectrum of political parties and social affiliations varied from extreme left to extreme right. Although many of his associates and patrons in Vienna were Jewish, Hitler’s abiding love of all things German led him to take most seriously the marginal, ultra-right wing pan-German party. The exhibition will demonstrate Hitler’s near verbatim recycling of pan-German rhetoric, symbols, and ideas. From the politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer, he appropriated the “Heil” greeting, the title of “Führer,” and the intolerance toward any democratic decision-making. From the propagandists Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels, he absorbed the fear of mixing races, the belief in the superiority of the Aryan race, and the swastika as logo. In the immensely popular and politically savvy mayor Karl Lueger, he found a model of a dedicated public servant with designer flair and a passion for building who could rouse and distract masses of people through mesmerizing rhetoric aimed at a single enemy—the Jews. Examples of xenophobia and anti-Semitism that existed mostly in the private context of postcards and underground journals during the early 1900s in Vienna will be shown alongside similar examples from Hitler’s reign, where such racism became not only publicly sanctioned but promoted and displayed in exhibitions such as Jews: The World’s Plague, films such as The Eternal Jew, newspapers Stürmer and The Illustrated Berlin Times, and children’s books such as The Poisonous Mushroom.

The exhibition will be organized into six different areas in which visitors will experience the influences Hitler encountered in Vienna and how these played out in the Third Reich. While Hitler was “intoxicated” by the grandeur of Vienna, rejection from the art academy, failure to gain respectability, and discomfort with the multinational, cosmopolitan, and artistically progressive nature of the city led to a lifelong dislike of Vienna. The exhibition will begin with views of Vienna around 1910 showing the Ringstrasse with its extraordinary array of monumental buildings. The pomp and glory of the imperial city will be illustrated through vintage film footage, posters, photographs, and memorabilia of imperial balls and pageants including the Kaiserfestzug (festival procession for Kaiser) and the Kinderhuldigung (children’s homage to Kaiser), two lavish events for the citizens of Vienna in 1908, which Hitler likely witnessed firsthand. Although Hitler voiced disdain for the monarchy, he modeled many aspects of the spectacles staged by the Third Reich on imperial pageantry. Understanding the power of spectacle—its use of symbols, rituals, and rallies—to galvanize the public, Hitler, once in power, it will be shown, had a hand in the design of everything from his party’s emblems and regalia to its architecture and lighting of rallies.

This view of glittering Vienna will be contrasted in the next section with the other side of Vienna circa 1910—a city plagued by unemployment, overcrowded living conditions, and social unrest that Hitler, living on the margins of society, experienced. Documentary photographs of and newspaper articles about public housing, mass riots, and socialist rallies will examine this aspect of life in the city. The original handwritten manuscript of Reinhold Hanisch, an itinerant handyman who befriended Hitler in the Meidling homeless shelter in 1909 and who helped sell his paintings, will be shown for the first time.

In between the aristocracy and the proletariat was the middle class. Hitler’s taste in art and his artistic models exemplified this large segment of Viennese society. Watercolors of Vienna street scenes by Rudolf von Alt, which Hitler emulated, will be included as well as nineteenth-century Austro-Bavarian genre scenes by Eduard von Grützner, August Heyn, and Karl Lessing. A book of Vienna’s most famous buildings and views distributed by the government in 1908 from which Hitler copied will also be shown. In contrast to the conservative work Hitler admired will be a section of the progressive art he despised. Paintings, drawings, and books by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, who rebelled against bourgeois values, will be shown along with documentation for the 1908 Kunstschau (art show). This art was labeled “degenerate” in the press at the time and the Third Reich recycled this pejorative term for modern art, most notably in the 1937 Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition.

Hitler called himself an artist until his thirtieth year, and he nurtured his passions for opera and stage design in Vienna. Although he lived on the fringes of society, he nonetheless managed to attend the Court Opera regularly—sometimes seeing the same performance ten times. He deeply admired Alfred Roller, the forward thinking set designer, as well as the composer Gustav Mahler. Hitler’s chief passion was the music of Richard Wagner, whose operas he first saw as a teenager. Set and costume designs by Roller for Wagnerian operas will be shown in the exhibition. Wagner’s music and writings laid the groundwork for Hitler’s belief system, including his pan-Germanism, his anti-Semitism, his belief in the cult of Nordic ethnic purity, and his ideal of the artist/politician.

Hitler’s early observation and intense study of stage design aided him later in his role as impresario, chief scenic designer, producer, director, and leading actor in Third Reich ceremonies. The exhibition will show images of the dramatic effects he used for Nazi spectacles as well as images of Hitler practicing his delivery, and film footage of speeches and pageants. Hitler learned to stage himself within a dramatic setting with all the theatricality available—light effects and music, flags and torches.

Brochure
An interpretative gallery guide will be available for the exhibition. Hamann’s book Hitler’s Vienna will also be available for sale in the museum shop.

The Williams College Museum of Art is a participating member in The Vienna Project, a collaboration among eleven arts and cultural institutions in the Berkshires.

Contact: Jonathan Cannon, Public Relations Coordinator
413.597.3178; WCMA@williams.edu