Tuesday, May 2, 2017

You know, Underneath all those Swastikas Hitler...

...is almost impossible to fathom.

So we're 6,000 words into the Austrian Painter It's coming along nicely. We have this nice old painter camped at the Brandenburg Gate, selling postcards and doing quick portrait sketches.

We've really tried to get to know the man. Here's the sketch of young Adolph before 1919:

A loner and bit of an oddball. Always an outcast. Whip smart, he had a photographic memory. Loves art of course, but also loves architecture. A young man perfectly happy to wonder the streets of a city taking in the sites. Hitler has a great eye for detail and a great ability for getting that detail down on paper. In the prewar years he was a Vienna Bohemian. Hitler was a vegetarian and more or less asexual or at least not interested in sex the way most 25 year old men are.

Hitler was an excellent soldier. Personally brave. He won several medals and commendations. His commanders never recommended him for promotion. One said at Nuremberg that he did not believe Der Fuhrer possessed leadership qualities.

He loved dogs, Disney, and Karl May Westerns.

We have always believed that as Branch Ricky said, 'Luck is the residue of design', but Hitler seems lucky anyway. In October of 1914 his regiment rook something like 70 percent casualties but he came out of the 'race to the sea' without a scratch. Later in prison, Rudolph Hess described Hitler breaking down when writing about one battle.

So basically in a any group of friends, Hitler is the quiet eccentric.

The loss of 1918 transformed the man. Just how much of what the man was made of in the 1920-1945 period should exist in our alternate 1964 is a matter we are grappling with now.

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