What it’s about
In this magisterial account of the rise of Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist Party, Cohen reveals how the Nazification of Germany was an aesthetic as much as a political project for the Führer, a frustrated artist whose greatest and most terrifying art project was nothing less than mass extermination.
Why we love it
There's no dearth of docs on the Nazis, but Cohen's enthralling magnum opus offers a truly original spin on Hitlers genocidal ideology, supported by archival photos, never-before-seen footage, and presumably years of toilsome research. We not only see how the absurd, delusional idea of racial purity was born and implemented, but how closely related this scheme was to Hitler's classical idealism and artistic goals for the makeover of Europe. Cohen's great achievement is to make us understand Nazism as an aesthetic program… and then follow its horrific, inevitable logic to the final solution.