Psychopathic Aesthetes and the Horror of the Third Reich
The trope of the art-obsessed murderer is a warning against fascism.
by Colin Broadmoor
There is this music playing—a beautiful symphony. The dogs are barking and the men are screaming at us. It was total chaos. It was a crazy house. And, before I had a chance to say anything, “Men separate! Women separate!” and that’s when they separated me from my mother and little sister. —Helen Colin, Holocaust survivor, describes the first moments of her arrival at the Auschwitz death camp.
The symphony that Helen Colin heard as she, her family, and fellow prisoners were dragged from the cattle car and selected—either for immediate murder or death-by-labor—was probably played by the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. In 1943, the SS created the orchestra to facilitate “intake” at the camps, though whether the goal was to calm or confuse their victims is unclear. The beautiful music was part of the machinery of Auschwitz that kept the assembly line moving.
Auschwitz, inspired by industrialist Henry Ford’s theories of mass production and anti-Semitism, operated as a factory. Its product? Genocide. The members of the orchestra—musicians grabbed from the ranks of Slavic and, later, Jewish prisoners—not only had to play as their families, friends, and countrymen were exterminated, they were also forced to entertain the SS officers in private performances.
The Nazis loved beautiful art so much that, when they weren’t burning it, they stole as much of it as they could. The Third Reich recognized the political potential of the aesthetic and, from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will onward, it became central to the operation of the regime.
Adorno said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But horror films and books are not poetry, and it was within these media that artists found a way to grapple with the pain and loathing inspired by revelations of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is the subtext of all Western art created in the second half of the 20th century.
Horror media, though it had previously reached heights of articulation in works like Dracula, the ghost stories of M.R James, the weird tales of Lovecraft, and German Expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, came into its own after World War II. The West did not recognize true horror until after the Holocaust when the absolute cruelty humans were capable of inflicting upon each other was, for the first time, reflected in the moving and living images of newsreel footage from liberated death camps. Artists had attempted to evoke earlier atrocities and crimes against humanity such as the Atlantic slave trade in mainstream art, but the Holocaust was the first great evil captured and disseminated through mass media.
The Holocaust is the subtext of all Western art created in the second half of the 20th century. Those of us who grew up in the late 20th century lived in a world haunted by the lingering PTSD of the Second World War. Our grandparents, neighbors, teachers had been traumatized as refugees, prisoners, soldiers. They’d lost loved ones, limbs, and minds to the fires of World War II. Horror, as a genre, helps us process societal trauma on an individual level, both by reducing the complexities of genocide and war to digestibly coherent narratives (reducing the many victims to a single character with whom we empathize), and by causing us, as viewers or readers, to feel—in our own bodies—the terror experienced by another person.
Of the many tropes, techniques, and icons that developed in Horror media as a response to the Holocaust, it’s worth dwelling on the character of the murderous or psychopathic aesthete—the art lover whose acts of violence are inspired by aesthetic experience. This figure appears in Horror media only after the Holocaust (a pedant might argue that the trope was predicted by Thomas De Quincey in “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” but that was clearly comedic and no one likes a pedant anyway). Villainous nobles who owned art and characters with aesthetic fixations appeared, of course, in Gothic literature, and we have Sade’s murderous libertines, but there was no direct connection between the love and experience of art and the love and experience of murder until the Nazis forged one with Hugo Boss and Buchenwald, Dachau and Die Meistersinger.
The psychopathic aesthete trope includes characters like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and Hannibal Lecter in the works of Thomas Harris. Characters whose love of the aesthetic manifests itself through violence. Characters for whom the aesthetic and homicidal appetites merge. Originally, this figure served an art critical function. It reminded audiences of the impotence of art when resisting its own co-optation into the political aesthetics of death. Art did not and could not stop the Third Reich. The Nazis either destroyed or assimilated all art with which they came in contact, even art created specifically to oppose them. The murderous aesthete challenged previous theories of art by reminding audiences of art’s limitations and dangers. The murderous aesthete reminded audiences of the Nazis. The problem is, it no longer does.
Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange less than 20 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. A decade later, when Kubrick splashed the book’s aesthetic violence across movie screens in a sharp-edged, minimalist, and synth-drenched cinematic style that intentionally invoked the Art Deco-inspired iconography of the Third Reich, the work’s indictment of the role and power of art became inescapable. Alex, because of his love of violence and high art—and never reformed in Kubrick’s version—represents a direct rebuke to Enlightenment theories of the “refining” and edifying function of art upon the human character.
If you like Black Panther like me, your politics are good like mine. If you like Joker unlike me, your politics are bad unlike mine. Because your politics are bad, it’s acceptable if you die.
In his influential Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant argued that the development of aesthetic taste and the ability to discern beauty was a necessary precursor to the development of a moral faculty. It’s worth noting that in this early incarnation of the trope, Alex is presented as working class, which, because of the stigma associated with that class, served to make his cultural sophistication all the more remarkable, all the more central to the character.
Twenty years later, Bret Easton Ellis expanded the trope via parody with Patrick Bateman. Bateman’s vapid tastes reflect the cultural emptiness of yuppie consumption, but they also show that kind/type/quality of art is irrelevant to the equation. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Western canon or The Last Jedi. What matters is the “appreciation” of art as a signifier of “moral hygiene” and as cultural capital. The type of person who identifies as an art lover feels that because he loves this piece of art he must be morally superior to those who he believes do not. Even people with awful taste in art will feel superior about it and use that as an excuse to sign your death warrant. Art the Nazis were too stupid to understand they labeled “degenerate” and ridiculed or destroyed. Then they used the “moral degeneracy” attributed to these artworks to stain the audiences and cultures that created them as themselves morally degenerate. In our capitalist nightmare, people find validation and self-conception through the media they consume. This validation (often laced through the media and its own marketing) produces, over time, a generalized feeling of superiority: If you like Black Panther like me, your politics are good like mine. If you like Joker unlike me, your politics are bad unlike mine. Because your politics are bad, it’s acceptable if you die.
When the film version of American Psycho came out in 2000, people who had been toddlers during the end of the Second World War were close to sixty years old. At each generational death, and each individual death, we lost some of our connection to that time—to the immediacy of the Holocaust. Today, a child born on the day Germany surrendered would be seventy-five. Cultural memory exists only in people. As they die, it dies. In 2020, we have lost too much of that memory to read the warning about fascism implicit in these characters.
Audiences could still read the Nazi in Hannibal Lecter when Anthony Hopkins conducted Bach’s Goldberg Variations while killing his guards in Silence of the Lambs (1991), but we no longer recognize it in Mads Mikkelsen’s mesmerizingly glacial Hannibal. Harris introduced the character in Red Dragon in 1981, but was forced to flesh out Lecter’s backstory in the early 2000s in anticipation of the film Hannibal Rising. And just as in A Clockwork Orange, the text makes explicit links between Hannibal’s violence and Nazism; however, the Nazis are only responsible for Hannibal’s murderous nature and cannibalism fetish—they are not responsible for his love of art.
In A Clockwork Orange and American Psycho intentionally implicated art for its role in an aesthetic of violence. In Hannibal, Lecter’s love of art and aesthetic passion signify very little. He is a “sophisticated European” (the truest arbiters of taste for many Americans) and “classy.” Hannibal is “refined.” Unlike with Patrick Bateman, the creators never question Hannibal’s tastes, but the character exhibits the same sense of aesthetic superiority and self-satisfaction. The difference is, in Hannibal, the audience is expected to at least somewhat buy into this idea of Hannibal’s superiority. When Hannibal murders someone because they violated one of his aesthetic principles (perhaps by being rude or unkempt), the audience accepts that as an explanation in a way that they would not if he listened to Huey Lewis and Phil Collins. This is because the things that Hannibal finds aesthetically pleasing, like rare wines, classical music, and opera, are signifiers of cultural capital in our own society. Those Enlightenment ideas expressed by Kant and others about the power of art to elevate the moral senses—ideas rendered obscene by the Nazi embrace of high culture— have returned with the deaths of those who kept the physical memory of the Holocaust alive in their bodies and spirits.
When the next industrial genocide is committed, it will be administered by the self-appointed gatekeepers of culture and morality. The act of loving art, for them, is another credential, another justification for their hold on power.
Where do we see this return to reactionary ideals most clearly in modern American society? Our media assumes the poor and working class are culturally illiterate. At the same time, the mega-rich get depicted as boorish and gauche. The role of self-appointed appreciators of art and preservers of culture falls upon the professional managerial class. It is within their sphere that performance of “taste” produces material reward. They see themselves as morally superior to those above and below them economically because they “love art” and not only that, they love the right art.
Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman are avatars of this credentialed class—and even Alex, in the unfilmed final chapter of the novel, manages to join the PMC. In a way, this makes perfect sense because the Third Reich was a PMC regime. The Nazis were administrators, clerks, and murderers. When psychopathic aesthete Reinhard Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference— where half of the attendees had PhDs— to plan the “final solution,” he had secretaries take the minutes!
Today, when these arbiters of culture view Hannibal, they see themselves in his love of art and aesthetic rapture, but they do not see his psychopathy in their own violence or in the banality of their own evil. When they help insurance companies bankrupt the sick, provide tyrants with publicity in the New York Times, silence political dissent, or oversee concentration camps for ICE detainees—they do not see themselves as Alex, Hannibal, Bateman, or Eichmann.
Horror can offer a way to process trauma. In the 20th century, artists and audiences alike expressed a small part of the pain of the Holocaust in books and films through the figure of the psychopathic aesthete. Horror can also offer a warning. The art-loving murderer trope represented a rejection of dangerous theories linking appreciation of art and morality. As we lost witnesses to the crimes of the Second World War, we lost our ability to read this warning at a time when we may need it the most. When the next industrial genocide is committed, it will again be orchestrated and administered by the wonks, the technocrats, and pundits, these self-appointed gatekeepers of culture and morality. The act of loving art, for them, is another credential, another justification for their hold on power. And as they sign our death warrants, they will feel morally superior for having spent hours in front of the mirror practicing how to correctly pronounce Van Gogh. These are the people the trope of the psychopathic aesthete was created to warn us against.
As a genre, Horror continues to play an important role in how we understand and react to social evils. It is only in Horror that we can viscerally experience the incomprehensible evil and savagery of humanity at its most bleak. We must work to retain the lessons and warnings offered by Horror media of the late 20th century such as those embodied by the murderous aesthete. It is politically and morally imperative that we remember how to read the Holocaust back into our art so that we never let anyone repeat it.
Colin Broadmoor is a recovering anthropologist who writes about mass media, technology, and cyberculture.
