zikoff: 'The Island of the Dead' ('Die Totenins

'The Island of the Dead' ('Die Toteninsel') from the Swiss symbolist painter
Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) was Führer's favorite painting.
The artist painted five versions of it around 1880. Appearently, the painting was
also liked by Freud (who posessed numerous reproductions of it) and Lenin (who kept
a copy in his bedroom). There is a reference to it in a Strindberg play (Ghost Sonata)
and the title reappears in a symphonic poem by the Russian composer Rachmaninoff
from 1909.

Hitler bought the painting at an auction in 1936 and kept it in his office until
his death in 1945. The painting then 'dissapeared' from Berlin after the fall
of the Third Reich, only to recently reappear in Leipzig, Germany, where it can
be admired at the Museum der bildenden Künste.

The voyage of the dead souls over a body of water to their final resting place
is a recurrent theme in Aryan mythologies. The Greek myth of Charon (fierce
brightness), the ferryman of Hades (the god of underworld) is believed to have
inspired the painting. Charon took the newly dead from one side of the river
Acheron ("river of woe") to the other if they could pay for the ride (the dead
in ancient Greece were always buried with a coin underneath their tongue to pay
Charon).

Adolf Hitler was an excellent painter himself and an extremely cultured person
with impeccable aestethic instincts. His favorite painting will always remind me
of a Valhalla for the fallen NS comerades of WWII.

Here Hitler, the German foreign minister Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart
Molotov, finalizing the Soviet-German non-aggression pact in August, 1939.

The painting can be seen in the background.