BY: Ian Traynor in Berlin
The Guardian, London
July 6, 1999
Two water colours painted by Adolf Hitler when the Nazi leader was a
young dropout in Vienna before the first world war surfaced in Tehran yesterday
after apparently lying for decades in the basement of an Iranian museum.
The two paintings, featuring picture postcard views of Viennese landmarks
of the type that the Fuhrer hawked around the Austrian capital in his early
20s, were said to have been presented by Hitler to the Iranian ambassador
in Germany during the second world war.
Mohammad Reza Javaheri, curator of the Tehran museum run by the Bonyad
Mostazafan foundation, was quoted as saying the two paintings had been
authenticated by 'European experts'.
He told the Iranian state news agency that his foundation intended to
keep the works and would not sell them.
In the early years of the century, Hitler's etchings could be had on
the streets of Vienna for a few Austrian imperial crowns. By the 40s, the
paintings from his youth were being traded for thousands of reichsmarks.
Millionaire enthusiasts from Munich to Texas have built up collections
of Hitler's work over the decades, though it is not clear how much the
two paintings would fetch if put on the market. Konrad Kujau, the legendary
Hitler diaries' forger from the 80s, also faked some 300 Hitler paintings
and drawings.
The two that surfaced yesterday are believed to have been completed
in 1911 or 1912. They feature chocolate-box scenes of 19th-century Vienna
by Hitler, then 22, whose application to study at the Academy of Fine Arts
in the city had been rejected. He was enraged by the rejection and lied
about it.
He moved to Vienna in February 1908, aged 18, and stayed for five impoverished
years, spending much of that time in a working-class dosshouse and absorbing
the end-of-empire anti-semitism rampant under the Vienna mayor Karl Lueger.
'Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough school
of my life,' Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. 'The giant city seemed the embodiment
of racial desecration.' Hitler painted his way through those down-and-out
years, selling the kitschy postcard views for a handful of crowns to stave
off hunger and pay for his board at a hostel on the outskirts of Vienna.
'These were the cheapest items we ever sold,' recalled the daughter
of a Vienna picture frame maker who displayed his wares on some of Hitler's
works. 'The only people who showed any interest in them were tourists looking
for inexpensive souvenirs.'
'He copied nearly all his paintings from originals. But occasionally
he had to draw from nature,' the Viennese historian Brigitte Hamann noted
in her chronicle - Hitler's Vienna: The Dictator's Apprenticeship. The
Nazi leader appeared to be embarrassed when, at the height of his power,
his works fetched high prices.
'These things should not cost more than 150 or 200 reichsmarks. It is
insane to spend more than that on them,' he told the photographer Heinrich
Hoffmann in 1944. 'After all, I didn't want to become an artist. I painted
that stuff only to make a living.'
Yesterday's find coincides with an exhibition in Weimar of 118 works
from Hitler's personal art collection. The collection, found by the Americans
in Austria after the war, has been in a Munich gallery basement for decades.
This exhibition is the works' first.
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