ADOLPH HITLER’S MOTHER Lately, I’ve been going through a creative dry patch. This happens to me regularly, and my first response is almost always to despair that I’ll never do anything meaningful again. Then I flop onto the couch with a gothic novel, and eventually I think of some quirky thing I’ve often wondered about but never had time for, and go look it up on Google. This time, it was Hitler’s mother. Who was this woman who bore such a son? What was he like as a baby? Did he drive everyone crazy? What I learned was that they were ordinary folks living a fairly comfortable life in a little town in Austria and he was a pretty well-adjusted child. His mother was apparently quite loving to her 2 living children, and his father was older and had a bad temper. Not all that unusual a story. So how did this person precipitate a global catastrophe? As I look for clues to the psychopath he later became, I find one provocative hint that could be more than a coincidence: he was an artist thwarted from practicing his art. Against his father’s wish that he go into civil service he left home, went to Vienna, applied to the Art Academy and was rejected, applied to a different art school and again was rejected. Of course, being discouraged as an artist would not turn everyone into an evil tyrant, but I wonder if it did not play some significant part in the twisting of his character? I’ve known my own frustrations at being thwarted, because as a child my deepest wish was to be a dancer and my parents forbade it. Granted, I never became the megalomaniac he did, but I know in my bones what it’s like to have one’s creative impulses ignored. The flow gets jammed and good energy is siphoned into mischief and self-dislike. The creative mind gets diverted like a stream overflowing its banks and dreams up tricks, often self-destructive ones starting with the phrase, “I’ll show them…” and then acts them out. I did some pretty shameful things until, sidestepping my outrageous bids for attention, I settled down and babysat until I earned enough to pay for my own lessons. But that’s a whole other story. Years ago, while preparing an art show on Creation Myths with the wonderful Boston artist, Adrienne Robinson, we had the amazing opportunity to interview Yo-Yo Ma on his creative process at his home in Cambridge. We were terribly nervous waiting for him, but he arrived carrying a tea tray, tripping heavily against the door to his study with a bang and clatter of cups and saucers. Adrienne and I both leapt to the rescue, grabbing the tray to steady it and each other, all of us convulsed with laughter and all nervousness gone. Only later did I realize that his tripping was probably a well-practiced ruse, his way of relaxing star-struck visitors. It worked like a charm, this playful, creative device for bypassing awkwardness, and certainly saved us a lot of time. We talked about creation and the creative impulse, what it feels like in the body and how important it is to foster in children. We spoke about creation as on-going, not a one-time thing, but as what is happening continuously in the universe - is the universe, he insisted. We agreed that everyone, deep down, is an artist of life and that we can learn to respond with an artist’s imagination to every new situation, even when it is tough- luck stuff. “Everything can be a collaboration,” he told us, “every experience can be used as an opportunity to learn something new, do something new. The more unlikely it is, often the more interesting.” At the time, he was pairing the Bach cello suites in very unlikely collaborations: with ice skaters, landscape designers, Butoh dancers…His creativity seemed to have no limits and it was clear he was having a whale of a time. (Oh, to ice-skate to Bach…) His focus was music and his collaborator was the world–at-large, whoever and whatever interested him, wondering how this might fit with Bach, how could we transform that, could it happen in the middle of New York City traffic, in a Japanese tea-house? This particular man is the quintessential creator, putting together things that have not been put together before and revitalizing everything he touches. And teaches us in the process. I wonder, what if his father had forbade him to play the cello? No, I believe he would not have cracked, but would have made an art of whatever he was allowed to do. As I did not crack. Created to be creative, something goes sour when we do not exercise that muscle. In creation myths from all over the world, the First People have to continue the creation every day, learning how to provide for one another, to love one another, to acknowledge the gift of life they have been given and to pass it on, using the world well for all the generations to come. That is what we have been put on earth for, every single myth says in one way or another; to all be the artists we were born to be - “feeding the world with beauty” is the way the Mayans put it. But still, something in me longs to feel compassion for the young Adolph – Adi, he was called. Can a baby be intrinsically evil? Might history have gone entirely differently had his creative propensity been recognized and encouraged, and he had been celebrated rather than humiliated for it? After all, what he ended up doing was undeniably some form of creative destruction on the grand scale. How and when did evil find its way in to what might have otherwise been an artist’s visions? Herb says no, Hitler was probably biologically impaired from the start, whatever else happened to him growing up, and that the evil he committed was ultimately his responsibility, no excuses - along with those unimpaired but did his bidding anyway, I would add. But it still makes me wonder…what if…?
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 05:53:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015