In the late 1930s, a German postcard was issued with a map that showed the ‘unification of Germany and Austria’. It carried the legend, ‘Ein Volk Ein Reich Ein Fuhrer’ or ‘One People, One Realm, One Leader’. Superimposed on the map was the portrait of this ‘One Leader’: Adolf Hitler. One could no longer see the country or the territory as distinct from the leader. The nation had acquired a face.

The postcard embodied a quality that has long been associated with powerful men and women: charisma. Power demands but also the circulating of images that enable the charisma to be participatory in nature, as fawning followers appropriate, yearn for and adore the images. Much of the power of monarchs, leaders and dictators from the time of Julius Caesar has produced a visual archive. 

The face of the ‘Leader’ – necessarily in upper case – is where the public begins to relate to the man or woman to whom they then pledge their love, loyalty and blind faith.

All power has a visual grammar in play. 

Visualising charisma

Commentators have argued that it was Hitler’s charisma that propelled him to power. Even biographers have been unable to escape from the near-totalising impact of Hitler’s charisma. As Eva Horn and Joel Golb put it in a 2011 essay in New German Critique, “Writing the biography of this captivating personality will always lead authors into the trap of the politics of charisma,”

Those in close proximity to Hitler document the power of his presence and his personality. His secretary, Traudl Junge, records how they felt “that famous piercing gaze on all of us”, his “fascinating gaze” and how “Hitler radiated a power that neither men nor women could entirely escape.” 

Another secretary, Christa Schroeder writes: “As soon as he entered a room everybody present would notice him.” 

Hoffman himself recorded in his Hitler Was My Friend how women were mesmerised by Hitler:

Once more I was able to observe what a great influence he exercised over women. In his cutaway coat he looked very smart. He had not yet started to wear the lock of hair hanging over his forehead, and his air of very modest reserve only served to enhance his charm. The women were charmed by his little moustache, though to me personally it was an eyesore.

Admittedly, these are accounts written with the benefit of hindsight, and in the aftermath of Hitler’s colossal failure, but they are nevertheless important because they point to a personal fascination experienced by numerous people.

A ‘personality cult’ around the Leader grew from the early 1920s, and by the early 1930s, there was no turning back. Part of this charisma was codified through portraits such as Heinrich Knirr’s. But some biographers like Ian Kershaw have also argued that it was the historical processes of Nazism, rather than Hitler’s personal acts, that created the Nazi state and eventually the genocide. 

While there is some truth to Kershaw’s claim, it is indisputable that a cult and culture of the charismatic leader was carefully built up from the 1920s.

Michel Dobry in a perceptive essay on Hitler’s charisma (which actually means ‘gift of grace’), proposes that multiple actors made uses of the figure of the Führer, or of the Nazi Party (or even … the ‘extraordinary qualities’ that others may attribute to Hitler), as resources in the different political games in which these actors participated. 

For such use to be made of the figure, it was not enough for personal magnetism to operate in small confines: it had to be a public performance. 

As Max Weber, one of the first theorists of charisma put it, “What decides charisma's validity is free recognition by the ruled, born from an abandonment to revelation, hero-worship, and trust of the Leader, itself … secured through confirmation.” The process of such a confirmation in Nazi Germany was achieved through the Hitler portraiture. 

Hitler’s charisma was figural, working by association and images, so the visual dominated the reception of the Führer. The very idea of Führer was set in place even before the political persona of a political Hitler emerged, as Schmölders notes.

The PR machinery understood that the portraits in the gallery had to be circulated in the form of postage stamps, recruitment posters, propaganda, etc. Hitler’s PR machinery perfected this, and they did so by making Hitler’s face the physiognomy of German triumph which of course was read into his face as indicative of racial triumph as well. 

The face of the nation

This imposition of the ruler’s visage on the map of the realm is not new. Elizabeth I in the famous Ditchley Portrait painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1592) stands on the map of the world with her feet in Oxfordshire. 

The clouds part and the sun shines, symbolising a new dawn and the monarch’s role in bringing light to an era of darkness and turmoil. Centuries later, the portraits of Ulysses S. Grant presented the Civil War general and later US President with an air of command about him in an attempt to capture his key role in American history. The 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill showed the audience a determined leader who forged unity among the British during the war years. 

The German postcard with the ‘One People, One Realm, One Leader’ slogan, shows Adolf Hitler looking into the distance, symbolises more than the so-called unification of the two nations and peoples: it is a harbinger of the regions Hitler was setting his eyes on for conquest (perhaps he is looking towards all the countries Eastward, including Russia).

However, the portrait also merges the land with the ‘Leader’. As Jonathan Goldberg argues about the portraits of Early Modern English monarchs, texts from that time attempted to declare “all territory as the king’s and, in particular, merged territory with the body of the king”. The Hitler postcard does the very same. Hitler is the land. 

The Nazi Party’s iconic eagle that literally and metaphorically is at the head of the image is symbolic of the power, the hierarchy and the overwhelming superiority the Party and its Leader believed in (by this time, Hitler was the Chancellor, and preparing the nation, and the world, for war).

Claudia Schmölders in her brilliant Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image (2006) examines the historical record of the dictator’s visage in photographs and how the posturing and framing changed from 1910s to the 1930s. Schmölders’ purpose is to tell “the story from the viewpoint of the “spellbound” spectator, who venerated Hitler in his photographic, filmic, later even painterly mise-en-scenes as a national icon” and the “visual conditioning” the photographic campaign – in which Hoffman made a lot of money, of course – enabled among the star-struck followers. 

What is less attended to in Schmölders is the portrait campaign that accompanied the photographic one.

The dictator and his vision

Portraiture is central to the construction of the myths around rulers, and is a mode of imposing a certain presence and aura – charisma – on the audience. 

It is well known that smiling portraits of Hitler are extremely rare (there are photographs, by his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, that capture a smiling Hitler though). As Luciano Cheles and Pierre Sorlin write, the dictators were to display a determined attitude and firm belief in the future, all of which was conveyed by their serious expressions. To communicate this sense of seriousness, Hitler was always drawn as unsmiling.

Hitler’s portraiture and photographic archive that began to be built from the 1920s came in the wake of similar archives, using physiognomic theories and racial views, prepared for the Jews. In 1920, The Face of East European Jewry, a collection of drawings of Jews appeared, and a few years later, an exhibition titled Racial Study of the German People from 1922 to 1935 ran to 16 editions. These were clearly attempts at visual conditioning: training people to distinguish the ‘high’ German race from the ‘evil’ Jewish one.

In 1935, a photo volume titled The German Fuhrers’ Face included “two hundred images of German fighters and pathfinders from two millennia”, clearly presenting a genealogy of the Leader. Hitler’s portraiture fitted right into, and developed out of, this visualisation of racial difference.

An emblem of racial superiority, the clear eyes, looking straight ahead, were meant to communicate the visionary Leader. He is frank, forthright, courageous: he looks you in the eye and does not flinch. He is unsmiling because he has the weight of the nation to carry. 

In the case of Hitler, one of his most famous portraits combined this expression with military bearing as early as 1928. In this hand-coloured photographic portrait, drawn in Hoffman’s studio, Hitler is in the uniform of the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. The head was used in the election poster campaign of 1932. The poster had just his head embedded in a pitch black backdrop. 

Under the head, which looks eerily free floating and untethered to a body, was one word in upper case: HITLER. The absence of a body also enabled the sensation of a man not limited to a mortal frame. He was an idea, an ideal, perhaps beyond time (like a Thousand-Year Reich).

It did not need explanations. The face and the name were enough. The icon was in place.

A parallel to this portrait is Hoffman’s photograph with Hitler in the brown shirt, the swastika armband and the Iron Cross First Class (awarded for his role in the First World War) with his hands on his knees. The arms crossed, the expression is one of iron will. A parallel one from 1928-29 showed him sitting in uniform, slightly angled, hands clasped and on his legs, again staring straight at the audience. 

These photos, if not the portrait, was one of the most widely circulated images across Germany through the 1930s. Oswald Spengler, who would author The Decline of the West wrote elsewhere of Hitler’s gaze:

The eye of the preying animal gives a target. The very fact that…  the two eyes can be fixed on one point in their environment enables the animal to bind its prey. 

Spengler was to prove prophetic in his assessment of what Hitler had fixed his eyes on.

Later, as his power grew, people began to observe, and adore, his hands as well, which therefore had to be carefully positioned for maximum effect. The chief of broadcasting, Eugen Hadamovsky, wrote in 1936:

This infinitely fine-jointed hand with the strong lumps above the joints, the wonderful contour of the veins, and the lines on the insides of the hands were more intricate and variegated than I ever saw in the hand of another human being. This hand then is the tool of a similarly thousand-faceted spirit and a similarly intricate and rich soul. It is the hand of a great artist, of a great shaper. 

This portrait and accompanying photographs quickly became ‘The German Face’ and ‘The Face of the Century’, bolstered by the then prevalent science of physiognomy. The body language was no less important, as Hadamovsky recognised. 

Here was the Leader ready for anything.

In 1933, the artist von Jacobs drew an almost identical portrait, with the Iron Cross added. But here, too, Hitler is looking away, almost as though he seeks direction, or opportunities. But it could also be a Hitler in a more contemplative mood – this is 1933, and he is to be chancellor – recalling the events, notably the Versailles Treaty and the German defeat in the First World War that would enable him to muster up ground support for his murderous plans in another few years. 

Similar portraits by  K.I. Böhringer, Schmidt-Weimar and others appeared too, and adorned the cover of text books, in art exhibitions and numerous magazines. Postage stamps used a similar visage in the 1941-42 period:

The above portraits captured the quintessential Hitler, and a verbal portrait is painted in remarkably similar tones by William Shirer, writing about the September 1936 Nuremberg Convention of Honor: 

I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph … Suddenly, as though his face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire… 

The dictator rises

In 1935, the Party issued a postcard and poster which showed Hitler in a slightly different light. Believed to have been designed by K. Stauber, it showed Hitler carrying the German flag at the head of a vast army while the caption read, “Long live Germany!” 

Heading the army like in the Crusades, Hitler takes charge and steers the country to inevitable victory. Light from the skies and the Nazi eagle soar high above, as though unearthly powers accompany the Leader. He is blessed (Hitler, throughout his career, firmly believed that he was chosen and, therefore, destined to save Germany). 

The dictator as saviour is blessed and belongs to a long line, if we read the photo volume and the above portrait together, of heroes and visionaries. Naturalising the rise and power of the Hitler was another iconic oil-on-canvas painting by Heinrich Knirr and dated to 1937. 

It is said this was the only portrait for which Hitler posed voluntarily (Knirr did a set of Führer Paintings). Hitler stands in the midst of nature, erect, staring ahead, the Iron Cross and swastika prominently visible, and a walking stick (more for fashion than support: Hitler was averse to showing weakness in public and refused to wear glasses outside the Chancellery for this reason).

However, nature here seems not at ease. The clouds gather, and like the warrior painting, it seems to suggest a man around whom things happen constantly. His bearing, however, suggests that no matter what, he is rock steady, unmoving. 

It could also be argued that the man is produced by Nature: he is Nature come to fruition and full life. It recalls the English idea of genius loci: the genius of the place. Hitler, who ascribed the status and feature of a genius to himself, is the consequence of a place (Germany), which produced him and then called out to him to avenge its past humiliations and lead it to glory.  He towers over the rest of the landscape in Knirr’s depiction, but that is the point. Hitler is the embodied genius of the place, and he has grown so that the place is now his, to conquer and to safeguard.

The fact that Hitler, like other political portraits, does not look anywhere else but straight ahead (other Leader photographs show them looking slightly upward, as though seeing something others do not). This also disconnects him from the immediate surroundings. Like in the case of many European royal family portraits where the monarch does not look at his immediate family but ahead to indicate his distancing from the family in favour of the subjects and the country, Hitler is of nature but not entirely of it. He transcends; he moves beyond.

The machinery’s visual conditioning of the German population meant that you could not avoid Hitler’s steadfast gaze, or steal your own gaze away from him. He beckoned you, drew you in. Visual conditioning driven by the nonstop bombardment by Hitler images spread the belief that the Führer is “endowed with qualities lacking in ordinary mortals” and “superhuman qualities emanate from him”, as Arthur Schweitzer describes it in ‘Theory and Political Charisma’ (1974).

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Hitler was everywhere, calling on you to follow him, even if it was to follow him, as it emerged, into a war that Germany could not have won, into genocide, and into the ignominy of history.

This was the face that launched a million and more kills.

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