There was a German politician who watched everything Mussolini did with a mixture of excitement, envy and conviction that he could do even better. In 1933 Adolf Hitler conquered Germany with a bigger show than Mussolini had ever dreamed of. Booked in for a long run under the title of the Thousand Year Reich, Hitler’s mega-budget spectacular was a monster musical that included the audience in its choreography. Hitler was a self-proclaimed superman with an irresistable appeal, because he persuaded his followers that they were supermen as well. For the price of a ticket, they weren’t just entertained, they were transformed. The trick was made plausible because Hitler had so succesfully transformed himself. He didn’t look like a superman, but that was the point. He was up from nowhere and could have been anybody. What made him unique, in his own eyes and in the minds of all who fell under his sway, was his willpower.
Hitler raved on about a new race of seven-foot-tall, blue-eyed blondes with big muscles and even bigger husbands. His own personal appearance was rendered significant only by the flopping cow-lick, the dust-bug moustache, and the pointed eyeballs common among people for whom anti-Semitism counts as a complex political theory. Yet his admirers, numbered in the millions, never noticed the contradiction. He mesmerized them.
The charisma kids [fragment]
uit:
Fame in the 20th century - Clive James
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