The Architecture of Doom (1989)

Having taught college prep American high school seniors for over a decade in Western Philosophy and Ethics, and doing so employing the effective example of educated, even sophisticated, WWII-era Germans in the Nazi Party as proof of what even the elite are capable of affecting in a civilized, enlightened society, I find this film to be a powerful editorial addition to any serious study of the infamous, failed regime.

Parallels to Al Qaida's political and theatrical motivation in attacking the World Trade Center's Twin Towers help us frame the motivations behind the grandiose fantasy ideology of the narcissistic, megalomaniac Adolf Hitler whose aesthetic sensibilities, bloated and unrealistic as they were, rivaled his misguided zeal for imposing his narrow, ill-informed Classical Romantic nostalgia on mid-20th Century Germany. Kids hear a lot about "hatred" and "anti-Semitism" when encountering the Nazis. Tell them something they don't know. Tell them that the rise of the Third Reich and the atrocities of the Holocaust were obviously political and militaristic, but "artistic"...? Now you have their attention, thanks to Peter Cohen's unique, insightful, and circumspect work.

I think Cohen nails it as far as pinpointing the broad motivations of those whose work inspired the zeal surrounding the Third Reich's master plan of world domination. From the Romantic sensibilities informing Wagner's inflated humanistic vision to Schopenhauer's Power of the Will, and ultimately to Hitler's bizarre and unprecedented rise to power and his successful employment of extreme propaganda, one must strongly consider the culmination and synthesis of the propagandistic zeitgeist in the aesthetic drive behind the Reich's successful wielding of the Aryan myth and its associated Jewish problem, articulated and sold to a proud, yet deeply bruised, threatened, and nationalistic Germany.

Cohen fully captures such a nightmare by means of an elevated, shrewd, often deft aesthetic in this hauntingly beautiful, craftily subtle film... by an aesthetic that Hitler was neither intellectually nor artistically capable of conspiring to create, much less to imagine.

S. Clay Smythe