Self-Staging: Aura and Appearance

Meeting Hitler and looking into his eyes—the erstwhile Nazi supporter Fridolin von Spaun recalled in an interview with the BBC—“was one of the most curious moments of my life. The gaze, which at first rested completely on me, suddenly went straight through me and into an unknown distance”. The storm trooper Otto Wagener, who in the early 1930s served as economic advisor to Hitler, felt as if the Führer’s gaze “did not come from his eyeballs” but “from somewhere much deeper: I felt as if it came from infinity”. Many other Nazi supporters were likewise captivated by Hitler’s “flaming, steel-blue eyes”. They were the kind of eyes “such as Frederick the Great must have had”, a woman said. For his part, Joseph Goebbels, who joined the National Socialists in 1925 and later became the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister, thought that Hitler’s “big blue eyes” were “like stars”. Yet, strikingly, there were also numerous Germans who remained immune to the famous stare. One of them even described the Führer’s face as completely nichtssagend, blank and unimpressive.