919-925

It is interesting that, while many people will say that through art they discovered the meaning to their lives, for Adolf Hitler, it was the German army, not the artistic route, that allowed him to "finally [find] meaning in his life" (919). Art typically serves as a free expression of oneself in which one attempts to depict a personal emotion, event or opinion--an artist's work ultimately defines him or her and serves as the thread that pieces the artists life together. While the army typically is associated with having little to no freedoms, much like art, it too is an expression of self. Whereas art demonstrates how one lives one's life, the army provides a reason to live ones life. While the Austrian Adolf Hitler had moved to Vienna to become an artist, he was only able to find himself (or understand himself) upon joining the German army--a country that he was not associated with and therefore should not "naturally" have had any reason to sympathize with or understand. However, it was in the foreign German territory and as a member of the restrictive German army that Hitler began to truly define himself and his beliefs, as his autobiography Mein Kampf demonstrates. While this autobiography lays down Hitler's political foundation, it also manipulates the German nationalist sentiment against the rest of the continent (Germany was pretty mad about the results of the Treaty of Versailles, 1918) to further his anti-Semitic perspective. Is it fair for Hitler, a stranger in German land, to use German nationalism as a tool to further his own beliefs and to also further his own political popularity and power?