Sunflowers (f)or Hitler PART II: Where Vincent and Adolf weren’t so similar
Ward in the Hospital in Arles (1889), Vincent Van Gogh
PART II: PAINTERS, LONERS, LOSERS & WINNERS
While there is so much we don’t and can never know about the lives of these two men become myth, there are facts undisputed.
We know, for instance, that Adolf Hitler never cut off his ear, nor unfortunately did any one else. Not even Quentin Tarantino could work that revenge fantasy into Inglorious Basterds (but then he presumably didn't want to repeat himself). Van Gogh, however ... the popular understanding is that he sliced off his own ear in a manic fit after a fight with Paul Gaugin, who Van Gogh lived with briefly in the famed yellow house in Arles, France.
A few months later “the redheaded madman” (as thirty people in the town described Vincent in a petition that is the reason why he) was sent back to be institutionalized in a hospital in Arles. There he continued to churn out masterpieces at a furious - and clearly dangerous - pace, including the “Ward in the Hospital in Arles”.
Less than a thousand kilometres away, on the German-Austrian border, Adolf Hitler was born.
Hitler’s “success”, first as a soldier, later as a politician, orator and finally as a mass murderer, did not come until later in his life. As is well known, Van Gogh came to painting late. He was thirty-seven when he died, and with the exception of “The Potato Eaters” (1885), the paintings most of us think of when we think of Van Gogh were painted in the Dutchman’s last two years years.
Van Gogh had spent the early years of his adulthood pursing a life of religion. For a time he was a missionary. He only turned to painting when he had failed in achieving success in living a religious life. By then he was already in his thirties (and this at at time when most men were dead in their forties).
The Courtyard of the Old Residency (1914), Adolf Hitler
Hitler meantime thought he would become a great painter. The first time I learned that fact I was sure it referred to a painter of houses. I’m not kidding. How could the greatest monster of a century filled with a few too many monsters have the kind of sensitive soul apt to create things from his imagination? I much preferred to think of him as a nitwit painting houses and living in squalor.
I only got it half right.
What Knausgaard’s final book of his memoir taught me is that Hitler, whilst trying to be a painter, and desperate to be anything but a desk clerk or bureaucrat, lived on very little. He had few friends and had no romantic attachments at all. By Knausgaard’s extraordinarily researched account, Hitler had no physical relations with a woman as a teenager or even into his early twenties. Apparently he loved one woman from a far, but never even approached her, never mind finding the courage or desire to speak to her. A less than comfortable deep-dive into the google searches that included “Hitler and sex”, “Hitler virgin”, and “Hitler and sexuality” reveal that while there have always been rumours of Hitler as gay, as well as what seem slightly more substantiated if never confirmed suspicions he may have engaged in pedophilia, what seems beyond mere internet gossip is that Hitler was a virgin until at least the age of twenty-five and that the his only true love, according to accounts in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was Hitler’s half niece, Angela Maria Raubal. If that weren’t problematic enough Hitler first became close to Raubal when she was seventeen and he was thirty-six. Wait, it gets so much worse. Raubal would then apparently die by suicide (shooting herself with Hitler’s gun) either it is often believed because Hitler would not let her go off and marry another man, or because, other accounts suggest, she was pregnant with Hitler’s baby. Whether it was actually a suicide is yet another question in this sordid story. Some believe Hitler had someone kill her or perhaps did the killing himself. And let’s be honest, being Adolf fucking Hitler, I’m not putting any of it past the guy.
Now then to Van Gogh. While Vincent did not sleep with or potentially murder his half niece, he also had, shall we say, troubles with intimacy. Almost as famous as the ear incident itself is what he did with it afterward. He took his ear to a brothel where he gave it to a chambermaid who worked there.
In the “Meet Vincent” section of the The Van Gogh Museum’s website, there is a subsection enttiled “His Unrequited Loves”. Apparently he proposed to three different women over the course of his life. All were unsuccessful. He did engage in the occasional, if generally short-lived relationship with a woman, but it seemed always to his parents dismay, or else quite simply to someone that was no good for him. In the end, as he became ever more unstable, he turned to prostitutes for the only intimacy that he seemed capable.
Thus we have two young men, both rather lost and clearly unsuccessful in their early pursuits of where they thought their fame and futures lay. Two young men living not so very far apart geographically, and certainly not so far either in terms of when when they were alive, of whom neither could manage or at least maintain any kind of a romantic relationship (Eva Braun was 17 when she met Hitler and their less that traditional “relationship” is itself a thing worthy of far most text than I have here) . These were men with big dreams and massive holes to fill. Lonely young men with next to no money and not nearly enough emotional support, though it must be noted that Van Gogh had his dear brother Theo. Theo who loved Vincent and supported him as best he could, emotionally and financially.
And yet the similarities between Van Gogh and Hitler, at least in my mind, are striking. These two strange European men, for whom so much in early adulthood was nothing but failure and rejection, and yet one would go on to paint “The Starry Night”, “The Bedroom at Arles”, “The Cafe Terrace at Night” and those incredibly famous “Sunflowers”, while the other would choose to commit a holocaust against an entire people, and nearly take down at the very least an entire continent …
I write all this to ask, what was it that allowed the one mentally unstable, loner to create works of such astonishing power, beauty and passion and the other to embody evil in all his most famous and terrible acts?
Two young men without money, two men without much at all in the way of intimacy. Two men so very much alone. Two men rejected so much from their purported early ambitions, professional and romantic. And yet one goes on to give world a swirling painted collection of beauty so astonishing its total value is impossible to measure, while the other … to but speak his first name is enough to make most people shudder with disgust and recoil with the desire to think of anything but.
The choices people make.
The factors involved in what made each what he became are myriad, each one no doubt complex. But like the thesis of one of my all-time favourite novels, what intrigues me most is what Steinbeck so deftly investigated in East of Eden — how each of us is innately capable of such tremendous good and such abysmal evil, but that the one thing we all have is the choice to decide which it will be.
What we do with what we have is the essence of our very lives. The very ability to choose, even if we are seemingly given so little to begin with, as was the case with these two impoverished men.
Cafe Terrace at Night (1888), Vincent Van Gogh