July 17, 2007
At Home With Hitler
The following article appeared in Homes & Gardens magazine in its November, 1938 issue. From wow.blogs.com:
Hitler's Mountain Home
A visit to 'Haus Wachenfeld' in the Bavarian Alps, written and illustrated by Ignatius Phayre
It is over twelve years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian border, barely ten miles from Mozart's own medieval Salzburg. At first no more than a hunter's shack, "Haus Wachenfeld" has grown until it is to-day quite a handsome Bavarian chalet, 2,000 feet up on the Obersalsburg amid pinewoods and cherry orchards. Here, in the early days, Hitler's widowed sister, Frau Angela Raufal, kept house for him on a "peasant" scale. Then, as his famous book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") became a best-seller of astonishing power (4,500,000 copies of it have been sold), Hitler began to think of replacing that humble shack by a house and garden of suitable scope. In this matter he has throughout been his own architect.
There is nothing pretentious about the Führer's little estate. It is one that any merchant of Munich or Nuremberg might possess in these lovely hills.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 09:35 PM | Permalink
Comments
I love telling my vegetarian friends that Hitler was one of them: "A life-long vegetarian at table, Hitler's kitchen plots are both varied and heavy on produce." (To be honest, I used to be one myself and wish I still was)
Posted by: brock samson | Jul 18, 2007 3:03:56 AM
Between this and Morgan's posting "Heidegger's Hut", one can't help but wonder if there's a series in this; "Lifestyles of the Reich and Infamous".
Reading this piece to the end there's a brief account of the original poster's run in with the "House and Garden" legal department. Oh, to be a fly on wall at the editorial offices when this little item shuffled out of the crypt.
To paraphrase one of Adolf's more eloquent adversaries, "Some skeleton! Some closet!"
Enough with the cheap shots; one can only be a little surprised and more so that it took this long to surface than the fact that it existed. As a teenager (in the Sixties), I heard an otherwise liberal radio commentator reminiscing about how good Benito Mussolini's writing was in the Saturday Evening Post.
Those interested can find them at:
yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/benito/paths.html
Personally, I've always been partial to the idea that those articles were ghosted by Gabriele d'Anunnzio. I mean; "Il Duce" just doesn't look like a writer to me. But then the worst monsters don't always look like monsters, do they?
Posted by: Pete Chapman | Jul 18, 2007 10:01:15 AM
Il Duce might not look like a writer (how does a writer look, anyway?), but he sure was one. I can't judge on literary quality of his writing, though. I've seen his novel, translated and published in Russian in the early 1920s, but didn't have a chance to read it ... or wanted to.
There's nothing strange in the old, pre-war articles on Hitler or Mussolini: they were political celebrities, after all. The perverse interest in all things Nazi among the Brits and the Americans NOW I find rather strangier.
Posted by: Serge | Jul 18, 2007 11:07:14 AM
In 1938 Hitler was man of the year for 1937. If only someone could post a scanned image of the front page of Time with Hitler on it.
Posted by: name | Jul 26, 2007 9:04:24 PM
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