ABSTRACT
In March 1941-after Kristallnacht and after evidence of genocide had been circulated-C. Brooks Peters praised the landscape of the Obersalzberg and the Berghof’s décor in a gushing New York Times piece titled “In Hitler’s Chalet.”1 Like Ignatius Phayre’s essay in Homes & Gardens (see Chapter 1), Peters’s article makes no mention of Nazi violence. These British and American articles, exporting Nazi propaganda from this crucial spot in the Bavarian Alps, were complicit in mythologizing the ultimate Nazi dream. The idealized images of the Obersalzberg represented in the popular press, including quaint Bavarian folk-dressed wives of high-ranking Nazi offi cers who commissioned unprecedented acts of violence, encapsulates perfectly the aestheticizing mechanism of the Nazi enterprise. The quaint, the picturesque, the stunning Alpine landscape, and the elegance of the Nazi holiday complex became part of the potent enabling factors for violence that offered a powerful counterimage to the Nazi genocide and other Nazi atrocities. But the Obersalzberg was not merely a holiday retreat; it was, as I discussed in Chapter 1, also the place where fundamental choices were made. For two examples among many, consider the Berghof meeting with Chamberlain resulting in the Munich appeasement; or the gathering of leaders of the armed forces at the Berghof to discuss plans for the invasion of Poland (22 August 1939).2 Thus, while the Holocaust was not planned on the Obersalzberg, key military decisions that fed war were hatched amid the beautiful landscape of the Bavarian Alps. The Obersalzberg and its diverse depictions in the popular press, in literature, and in souvenir albums represent a twist on the familiar discussions of aesthetics and politics in Nazi Germany. Most of the scholarship engaging Walter Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics,” where he argued that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (Illuminations 241), focuses on the spectacular nature of Nazi party rallies made
iconic by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. But in this chapter, I look at the quieter side of aestheticization using the Obersalzberg and its iterations as case studies for how violence was masked and therefore ultimately justifi ed within the perverse logic of the Nazi imaginary.3
