48

THE FÜHRER SELLS A PAINTING

1920

By Mike Resnick

Just a little more talent . . .

Adolf Hitler was considered a brilliant student and a wildly popular class leader when he was in primary school in Braunau, Austria, the town where he was born. Secondary school was a little harder. In fact, at fifteen, he flunked his exams and was told that he’d have to repeat the year. His response was to quit school.

His greatest interest at that point in his life was painting, and after his father’s death in 1903, he drifted down to Vienna, hoping to be discovered. Didn’t happen. So he figured he’d go to the Vienna Academy of Art, find out what few things his enormous talent was lacking, and fix them. That didn’t happen either. He flunked the entrance exams.

So okay, he decided, maybe the world wasn’t ready for the next da Vinci or Michelangelo. He’d take his talent and go into architecture instead. He applied to the Vienna School of Architecture, and (you guessed it) he was turned down.

As it turned out, he was a lot better at destroying than creating.

You know the rest. He became enamored of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party and joined it. He fought in World War I, ran dispatches for superiors, rose one rank to corporal, got mustard-gassed, and survived, a very bitter young man.

In 1919, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party and learned how to manipulate crowds while making dozens of speeches condemning the Treaty of Versailles. Within a couple of years, he was speaking to crowds of fifty thousand or more, he’d helped rename the party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (which the world came to know as the Nazi Party), and, in 1923, he staged the Beer Hall Putsch. It didn’t work; he was jailed (with an exceptionally, almost ludicrously, light sentence for the charge of treason), and while in jail he wrote Mein Kampf, which told a mostly unbelieving world exactly what he planned to do when he got out.

And the rest is history. He took over the government in 1933, remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, signed a nonaggression pact with Russia in 1939 (which he broke in 1941, when he invaded that country), began creating and filling concentration camps, which killed literally millions, tried to exterminate the Jews, conquered Poland and France, began bombing England, and declared war on the United States of America.

By 1944, the Allies had the Nazi army in trouble and, in 1945, with an absolutely certain defeat on the horizon, Hitler committed suicide.

When the dust had cleared, he was responsible for more than twelve million deaths (and that total includes his own soldiers, because Hitler was not inclined to listen to his generals when they spoke to him of the Russian winter or other hazards to his army). There is no question that he has gone down as, and will remain, the greatest villain of the twentieth century—worse than all the competition, including Stalin, including Pol Pot, including all of them.

So of course, as one looks back over Hitler’s life, the question presents itself: At what turning point might he have gone a different direction? At what point in time might something have occurred that could have saved most of those twelve million lives?

And the answer is obvious, because Hitler remained a hobby painter throughout his life. In fact, a watercolor he did of Munich Hall sold for $161,000 as recently as 2014; another watercolor, this one of a flower, had a minimum bid of $30,000 and was auctioned off after this article was written.

All right, a lot of those prices were caused by who he was and not how the paintings looked, but there is nonetheless some basic talent on display in them. Had the Vienna Academy of Art not rejected him but allowed him to study there for four years, there’s every chance he would have chosen a totally different career, either as an artist or in one of many related fields.

Let’s say that he sold a painting, not for the kind of money they bring today, but enough to encourage him to think that he might actually be able to make a living at it.

How might that have affected history?

Well, if he was studying books on the creation of art rather than tracts on anti-Semitism, there’s every likelihood that he would have become, at worst, a follower of the German Workers’ Party and later the Nazi Party. Even had he wished to be more active, he would—in this future—be without the background of giving speeches to larger and larger crowds, and learning how to manipulate them.

Would there still be anti-Semitism in Germany?

Of course. The Nazis didn’t invent it; they merely used it to unite the people against what Hitler had them believing was a common enemy (before he created a world full of common enemies). They wouldn’t have been any better loved by the German people—after all, there’s still anti-Semitism in Europe and, indeed, all over the world today—but six million more Jews would have been around in 1946.

The Russian pact? There was probably a need for it, since popular German thought was that Stalin wasn’t any more inclined toward peace or respecting borders than Hitler was; but without Hitler trying to run an army based on his incredibly limited corporal’s knowledge, the German generals would have convinced whoever was in charge to honor the treaty and never to invade Russia by land until winters were a thing of the past.

As for declaring war on the United States, it was a blunder above all others. We were already at war on the other side of the world after Pearl Harbor was bombed. There was every reason to assume we’d leave any European wars to the Europeans, given how Congress, until then, had defeated or ignored every attempt by the Roosevelt administration to enter the European war. And the outcome of World War II ceased to be in doubt the day the Americans entered the war. Most rulers and generals would have been once burned, twice shy.

So the young Hitler sells a painting and . . .

So . . . you think the best way to stop the Führer is by assassinating him?

Forget it. Been tried by his own generals and his own citizenry. Didn’t work.

You really want to stop him?

Go back a little more than a century and buy his first few paintings. That’ll do the trick.