Seduction of Germania (54" x 36")
Artist's Comment
The making of Hitler and the seduction of Germania was the direct result of the harsh conditions of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, imposed on Gennany on the insistence of a vengeful France. The treaty was never ratified by the United States Senate.
Hitler blamed all the ills that befell the Weimar Republic in 1922, 1923 and again in 1929 on the punishing conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. He promised. to abrogate the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, restore Germany's national pride, blaming he Jews for the defeat of Germany, by using the canard of the "Stab in the Back"! He promised restoration of the economy and to end unemployment. His rhetoric resulted in large electorial gains, but the Nazis never gained an electorial majority. Only disunity among the opposing parties made possible the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor in 1933.
Docent Guide
Germania was the ancient name for the area inhabited by the Germanic tribes, as described by the Roman Historian Tacitus in his book, Germania. Tacitus noted the following about the German people: The Inhabitants.
0rigins of the Name "Germany." The Germans themselves I should regard as aboriginal and not mixed at all with other races through immigration or intercourse. In their ancient songs, their only way of remembering or recording the past they celebrate an earth-born god Tuisco, and his son Mannus, as the origin of their race, as their founders… The name Germany, on the other hand, they say is modern and newly introduced, from the fact that the tribes which first crossed the Rhine and drove out the Gauls, and are now called Tungrians, were then called Germans. Thus what was the name of a tribe, and not of a race, gradually prevailed, till all called themselves by this self-invented name of Germans, which the conquerors had first employed to inspire terror.
Physical Characteristics. For my own part, I agree with those who think that the tribes of Germany are free from all taint of intermarriages with foreign nations, and that they appear as a distinct, unmixed race, like none but themselves. Hence, too, the same physical peculiarities throughout so vast a population. All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames, fit only for a sudden exertion. They are less able to bear laborious work. Heat and thirst they cannot in the least endure; to cold and hunger their climate and their soil inure them.
On women and warfare: Tradition says that armies already wavering and giving way have been rallied by women who, with earnest entreaties and bosoms laid bare, have vividly represented the horrors of captivity, which the Germans fear with such extreme dread on behalf of their women, that the strongest tie by which a state can be bound is the being required to give, among the number of hostages, maidens of noble birth. They even believe that the sex has a certain sanctity and prescience, and they do not despise their counsels, or make light of their answers. In Vespasian's days we saw Veleda, long regarded by many as a divinity. In former times, too, they venerated Aurinia, and many other women, but not with servile flatteries, or with sham deification."
In Hirschberger's The Seduction of Germania, Germania is depicted as Eve in the Garden of Eden, who has presumably given a can of Zyklon B gas to Adam, dressed in SS Uniform at the instigation of the snake, undoubtedly symbolizing Hitler. The Biblical story of original sin is also connected with the idea of individual freedom. Adam and Eve did not heed God's demands and ate the forbidden fruit, for which they were expelled from paradise. What they received in return was freedom. Freedom, in turn, suggests that moral choices can be made by humankind. During the Holocaust, humans were free to build gas chambers, produce the gas and exterminate the victims.
An underlying question is how was Germany, one of the most sophisticated countries in Europe, with a long tradition of art, religion and culture, seduced into mass murder? One possible answer has been given by the British sociologist Zygmunt Baumann, who has described the Holocaust as something that could happen only because of modernity.
The image in the painting is based on traditional Christian icons and Medieval painting of "The Temptation of Adam," the story of "original sin" in the Christian Bible, when Eve was seduced by the serpent to give Adam the apple. In the Bible, there is a mixed interpretation, as the expulsion from the Garden of Eden led to freedom and responsibility.
In Hirschberger's painting, the serpent in the tree seems to reverse the Bibical story: It is the man to is presenting Germania, a woman, with a can of Zyklon Gas, which the artist in the final version changed to a copy of Adolf Hitler's MEIN KAMPF, the text that helped seduce the German people in accepting National Socialism.
for similar art images, see: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.