Life, being as it is, I open the latest issue of the London Review of Books, and there’s
Jonathan Meades in full flight, reviewing Hitler
At Home and Speer: Hitler’s Architect.
It’s illustrated with this painting by Luc Tuysmans, titled The Walk in English, originally De wanderling in Dutch – Tuysmans is Belgian.
Meades writes, “Luc Tuymans’s painting The
Walk shows Hitler and Speer silhouetted in early evening light on the
Obersalzberg. The photograph that the painting is based on is mute. Tuymans’s
manipulation of it is anything but. His Hitler, the Führer, the guide, is
indeed guiding, just. He is stumbling awkwardly towards the last of the light
while the upright Speer holds back, following certainly, but cautiously,
tentatively, allowing his idol and besotted patron first dibs on divining the
future – which may prove to be less golden than the sun’s shafts seem to
promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the
entrails?”
Well, this is good stuff, of course, and
only a fool would get into an argument with Jonathan Meades, but I think I’ve
found the original photograph, or a very close variant (on the website
reichinruins.com), and I don’t find it mute at all.
Let’s face it, Ayrian dreams aside,
most walkers look good pretty good and picturesque when walking into the sunset. For that matter most people look pretty good when
walking among snow covered peaks. And I
do find it interesting however, that in the painting Speer has grown to be a
head taller than Hitler.
Does that make the painting pro-Speer? Meades is virulently anti-Speer, as he's absolutely entitled to be.
Speer, as we know, was quite a walker, and
he didn’t let incarceration in Spandau slow him down. In his native Heidelberg there remains the Thingstätte,
an amphitheater which he designed for the Nazi party, built in 1935. It’s a great place for walking these days
apparently. ”Carry a map and watch for the labeled rocks” is the headline on Tripadvisor.
