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Eschatalogicallandscape, Kirby Farrell Prof

kirby farrell

Nazi obsession with art can be understood as a strategy for managing death-anxiety. The venerable trope of "immortal art" took on fetishistic qualities in the fantasies of the Nazi leadership. For many of them, art compensated for the trauma of World War I by framing idealized vitality invested with visionary self-expansiveness, as in the hyperbolic nudes of Thorak and Brekker, combined with a nostalgic recuperation of lost Victorian-era authority. In Ernest Becker’s terms, as creaturely motives, the manic looting of art works described in Lynn Nicholas’ The Rape of Europa acts out greed for life, appropriating hypostatized vitality as the …