Nefertiti

When I was sixteen and living on an orchard in Manutuki near Gisborne, I, on a burst of inspiration, wrote an earnest letter to the West Berlin Dahlem Museum.

I explained I was sixteen years old. How much the bust of Nefertiti meant to me. I would be so grateful if the museum would post me a poster of the bust.

Boys my age and class in New Zealand were sticking up posters of pop and movie stars – if they were sticking up any posters. I don't know. I had no contacts with boys or girls my age.

A few weeks later I got a letter from West Berlin. Not only did the Egyptology Department send me a splendid poster but also an English language book on the Egyptian Queen. I wrote back an adoring letter to the curator. I still recall the name I addressed him. It was Mr Jahn.

I have no doubt the Department maybe even higher up were greatly enthused with my letter. There is something about earnest sixteen year old boys that delight German scholars and poets. The novels Death of Venice and Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann spring immediately to mind. There are other such controversial and classic German youth-themed books I can also recall. Sixteen year old boys are (or at least should be) charmingly sexually naive.

The year of this extraordinary correspondence was 1970. The year was as distant from the end of World War Two as 2010 is distant from 1985.
1985 is distant in memory yet within an instantly recognised past as I am sure 1945 was to 1970.
I am sure that the Dahlem Museum was consciously cultivating friendships with New Zealand as I was semi-consciously cultivating friendship with Germany. Anyway, my veteran father was greatly astonished, and Mother was somewhat incredulous that the Germans could be so friendly and well, human.

I stuck the poster on my room wall. My younger brother said his mates always glanced at it but never spoke of it.

Now what is it about the Nefertiti bust that could have such an effect on a sixteen year old boy in New Zealand? Quite simply I was not pursuing an idiosyncratic obsession. Ever since its discovery in Egypt it has had an out-of-this-world effect.

The bust belongs to the second millennium BC Tel Armana treasures in Ancient Egypt. In the list of Tel Armana treasures its public fame among English speakers is second only to the Tel Armana death mask of Tutankhamen. In the German speaking world the cultural and mystery significance of the bust towers even over Tutankhamen.

A German archaeological team led by archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered the Nefertiti art works in 1912 in the Egyptian village Armana. They were dispatched to Germany by the archaeologist who seems to have made a sharp deal. Curiously, unlike the rest of the Armana collection this Nefertiti bust was not displayed at the Berlin Neues Museum on Museum Island in 1913–1914. In the first public record of it, it was donated to that Berlin Museum in 1920. Borchardt first records its existence in 1923. It was finally displayed to the public in 1924. The bust was then displayed in Neues Museum until the museum was closed in 1939. With the outbreak of World War Two, the Berlin museums were emptied and the artifacts moved to secure shelters for safekeeping. Nefertiti was initially stored in the cellar of the Prussian Governmental Bank and then in 1941 moved to a bunker in Berlin. In 1945 the bust was moved out of Berlin to a salt mine.

The American army in 1956 returned the bust to Berlin. There it was displayed at the Dahlem Museum. In 2009 the bust returned to its original German Museum home in Neues in former East Berlin as its prime treasure.

From its first public display in 1924, Nefertiti has become an icon of Berlin's culture. 500,000 museum visitors see Nefertiti every year. By 1930 the German press were calling the Nefertiti bust their new Monarch, their Queen of exotic Ancient Egypt. One contemporary German newspaper proclaimed it as,

"The most precious stone in the setting of the diadem from the art treasures of Prussia Germany."

The Egyptian Queen had in spirit been transplanted from her homeland to the Weimar Republic. The struggle in the Republic for the soul of the German nation she was now inextricably involved in. It is by no means all a co-incidence. The striking characteristic of the Tel Armana treasures is their invoking, not of the ancient and remote past, but of the disturbing and often tawdry present. The era of the Egyptian King Akhenaten, the husband of Nefertiti, is viewed by egyptologists as an interesting brief aberration in Egypt's huge history.
Egyptologists are, by the confines of their scholarship, prosaic and conservative people. That was not how the world public universally viewed that era. It was judged by its modernity. The imposition of Akhenaten of a single sun-disc god Aten and official abolishment of polytheism resonated instantly with the great revolutions of the first decades of the twentieth century.

The millennial year old religious order in Egypt was, within a few years, swept aside. The exorbitant wealth of the temples was appropriated by the New Order. So western populations trembled, or were exalted by, the Communist and Fascist revolutions. The New Order in Egypt replaced millennial old art forms with expressionist and distorted art.

Many depictions of the Akhenaten Royal family were discovered in Tel Armana. They all – with the exception of this Nefertiti bust – have this distorted, often grotesque body shape. An attractive art theory has become popular. Akhenaten suffered from a body abnormality disease and the Court artists were constrained to inflict it upon all his family. That has now become established fact in the American History Channel and American fellow sufferers were interviewed to psychoanalyse Akhenaten. That was very interesting in an American pathological way.

But here is the great Nefertiti puzzle. The other depictions of Nefertiti at Tel Armana show this body distortion. Her other busts and statues minimise it. But all show the solid chunky art-form that is the nature of bronze art. She springs, art-form perfected and so European early twentieth-century, out of the Egyptian dust.

Here I am, she seems to say to the astonished world,
Your contemporary Queen of Hollywood, art deco, kitsch, mass art. Even, dare I whisper it, National Socialism.

Within a few years of her first public display her face and coned hair style dominated the first Hollywood Frankenstein movie. She was as the movie title put it, The Bride of Frankenstein.

As I glance at my 2009 online-magazine Earth Times, I am bemused. The magazine has surrounded its article "Nefertiti hidden face proves Berlin bust is not Hitler's fake" with advertising pictures of beautiful women.

"Meet The Hottest Singles on Zoosk," shouts one. "Browse Thousands of Local Singles" shouts another. "Cartoonify Yourself" shouts the third.

These are all commercial spaces purchased from Earth Times. The images are Nordic, Mediterranean, Asian and African women. Astonishingly, they all are photographed in the Nefertiti body style. Her Royal successors destroyed every image and name of Nefertiti and her dynasty they could find. But she won. Nefertiti is in the twentieth and twenty-first-century the Queen of the global images of beautiful women.

The Earth Times magazine splashed its Nefertiti headline with Hitler's name. The world has been relentlessly conditioned to recoil from that name as from a giant evil rat. By coupling his name with Nefertiti's, the magazine makes clear beyond doubt where its dogma lies. The magazine reports a conspiracy theory that has buzzed around the globe in recent years.

Two books by French and Swiss authors, The Bust of Nefertiti – A Fraud in Egyptology and Missing Link in Archaeology claim that the Nefertiti bust is a modern fake. One might note the authors are from countries not involved in the Nefertiti story and always ready to stick the needle in when Germany raises her head. They claim that Borchadt, the German discoverer of the bust, had modelled it himself. The bust was originally created to test ancient paint pigments. The inner limestone core has never been dated. One of the authors argues that Borchardt's wife was the model for the bust.

That does give an explanation why the bust was not revealed to the public until 1924 in Berlin. Borchardt recorded a Nefertiti bust find in 1912 but made only a catalogue of it even though it resembled his wife!

In 1933 the Egyptian Government demanded Nefertiti's return – the first of many demands that continue to this day. German officials negotiated with the Egyptians for its return. An alliance treaty was drawn up between the two countries. It was presented to the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
Hitler read it and nodded until he reached the Nefertiti detail.
 Nein, said the German leader.

Hitler wrote to Egypt that he was a fan of Nefertiti.

I know this famous bust, he wrote.
I have viewed it and marvelled at it many times. Nefertiti continually delights me. The bust is a unique masterpiece, an ornament, a true treasure.

Do you know what I am going to do?
 Hitler mused to his officials,
I'm going to build a new Egyptian museum in Berlin. I dream of it. Inside I will build a chamber crowned by a large dome. In the middle this wonder Nefertiti will be enthroned. I will never relinquish the head of the Queen.

Earth Times continues,
Hitler planned an even larger hall of honour in the Egyptian museum with a bust of himself.

According to Wikipedia, Nefertiti had a place in Hitler's dreams of rebuilding Berlin and renaming it Germania. After reading that, my first thought was this was just another demon or freak take on him. But after reading the present London Lord Mayor Boris Johnson's book, The Dream of Rome, I no longer so lightly dismiss it. Johnson ruminates on the ‘success’ of the Roman Empire. He writes that the many millions of people within and outside the Empire and their myriad races and cultures became fatally drawn to the dream of the Imperial city and its Emperor cult. Johnson despairs that the European Union has never succeed in creating a common European consciousness, a dream of Europe.

Through the book, Johnson treads very warily that Hitler and his circle worked to create this dream of Europe via a sublime common culture both traditionalist and futuristic. As the Augustus court had its court poets, architects and artists, so the Nazi court had its cinema, its great public displays, its vast building constructions.

Augustus proclaimed that he turned Rome from stone to marble. Hitler proclaimed that when he died Germany would be unrecognisable. The Hitler cult would succeed the Emperor cult. Germany traditionally recognised her Imperial dynasties as the natural successors of the Roman Emperors.

The German title for their Emperors, the Holy Roman Emperors, has never been a joke to any German. The Holy Roman Emperors were replaced in the nineteenth century by the Austrian and Prussian Kaisers. Kaiser (Emperor) is a German transliteration of Cæsar. So in the mid-twentieth century, Fuhreprinceps was not such an unnatural progression in German ears and eyes. All the above mentioned Empires (Reichs) flew the double eagle as their emblem.

Therefore to make a Hitler cult in Europe to succeed the cult of Augustus was to square the circle. The pagan Roman religion and the post-Christian German religion would meet in a common bond between leader and his many millions of followers. All Europeans would be remade into ardent Germans.

The unfortunate Jews, who had been the elite classes of Europe, would be cast out into some new homeland. Hitler originally envisaged Palestine. Later he said he would not dump Europe's Jews upon "the noble Arab people". The capital Berlin would be renamed Germania, the Latin name of Germany. All Europe would be Germania as once all people in the Roman Empire came to be called Romans, the name of their capital of dreams. The Queen of Germania would be Nefertiti, the most beautiful and Queenly woman in the world. In a metaphorical sense she would marry the bachelor Adolf Hitler.

Hitler's drawing plans to rebuild Berlin and his home town Linz are not permitted to be made models anywhere in the Western world. They might encourage Neonazis!

Nefertiti remains an enigma. An intelligent observer should intuitively realise that her German bust is of twentieth-century design. It is just not chunky bronze-age art. Only some artistic genius schooled in the art fashions of the early and mid-twentieth century could have fashioned it. Then who was that unsung hero? Earth Times reports "a hidden face" has been discovered sculptured behind Nefertiti's face. It is Nefertiti also. It is much less exquisite and follows the hard geometric forms of Egyptian bronze-age art.

As Earth Times reports,
… dispelling once and for all nagging rumours that the bust might be a duplicate made at the orders of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and that the genuine bust was lost in the chaos following World War Two.

Here we may be drawing close to a solution of the enigma. The bust was not displayed or even mentioned in private records until 1923–24. Germany was then experiencing a general collapse of her middle-class into common destitution. Borchardt, already noted for sharp practices, had what became the hidden face designed and sculptured as the icon of his Egyptology display. Maybe he needed a counterpoint to the contemporary Tutankhamen mania. Maybe he commissioned an art-deco artist to model his wife. A German artist's name has come up, Rolf Hochhuth. He is not listed in Wikipedia.

After Hitler's public stance on the bust, he realised the art level of the bust would not suit his grand purposes. His Nefertiti would have to be more Aryan and more exquisite than any other contemporary portrait of a Queen. No other woman alive or a model would be able to compete with his German Queen.

The original bust was transformed into an "inside face" and over it he designed his own Nefertiti. Are two great nations and international artists today still fighting over Adolf Hitler's original art work? I would say, not exactly. Hitler as an artist and drawer of women was not that good. He could draw dogs and flowers much better. Nor did his talents run to sculpture. Hitler's artistic genius lay in inspiring more talented artists to complete his designs. The history of the Volkswagen is an example of his modus vivendi. Hitler was apparently the first artist to integrate a biological design (the beetle) with mass industrial materials. The legend is he designed the Volkswagen on a table napkin and then handed the design over to German's best industrial designers. He chose the beetle for its insect strength and compactness. Entire families, he wrote, would be able to take safe journeys.

By the 1960s the Volkswagen was one of the western-world lifestyles most famous icons. This Hitler disposition, which resembles Walt Disney, was also carried through to the German banking establishment. German banks were transformed from enriching themselves to enriching their customers. The secret of solving the present day's impending western economic catastrophe is staring at our face. But the western elites dare not look.

Hitler was also credited in his salad days with the powers of necromancy and changing the weather. In one rarely known example, his English lover Unity Mitford, reduced to a vegetable state after shooting herself in the head, was restored to consciousness and semi-health by his spoken words to her. Hitler weather was a common German saying for unexplained sunshine weather that always seemed to happen when he appeared in public. That may explain the Neville Chamberlain umbrella incident in Munich.

Chamberlain explained that he had brought his umbrella because he had followed the German weather forecast. No-one else bothered in Hitler's company. None dared tell the British Prime Minister. It was only when Hitler put on a field-marshall uniform in 1940 in his Russian campaign and therefore got a real job that people lost faith and the Reich was destroyed.

Some years ago a Chinese acquaintance said to me she had asked a German friend about Hitler. She now felt that was rather rude to ask.

“We all really hate him in Germany”, said her German friend.