Paintings, poems, violins and film reels: the strange creative lives of dictators. Watercolours, poetry, cinema, music and romance novels sit oddly amid the uniforms, propaganda and violence. But for some of history’s most brutal despots, they were part of the picture too.
The dictator of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, before his rise to power and notoriety, was an aspiring artist who had been rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He tried to earn a living by selling paintings to tourists in Vienna. He mostly painted oil and watercolour paintings of Vienna’s grand architecture, and managed to earn enough to move out of a homeless shelter.
In his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, Hitler also wrote that the rejection struck him “as a bolt from the blue”, as he had been so convinced of his success.
According to the website History, “In the decades that followed, Hitler’s formative years in Vienna and his frustrated art career became part of the myth-making, by Hitler himself and by his followers, that helped drive his fateful rise to power in Germany. As Führer, Hitler railed against modern art, calling it the ‘degenerate’ product of Jews and Bolsheviks and a threat to German national identity.”
When in power, he had his artworks collected and had some destroyed, though many still exist.
In Germany, there is no legal repercussion for selling paintings by Hitler as long as they do not contain Nazi symbols, but his name remains controversial.
In 2015, 14 paintings and drawings by Hitler fetched around $450,000 at an auction in Nuremberg.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is said to have been a talented violinist who appreciated the arts. He is said to have begun his day by reading a canto of Dante. Mussolini once described playing the violin as taking him “to a glimpse of eternity”, adding that when he played, “the world slips away from me”. He would play duets with his son, Romano, during the years when Fascism was imposed on Italy. His violin was made by the Italian luthier Hieronymus Amati in 1700.
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein wrote novels and poems. In 2000, he published an allegorical romance novel called Zabibah wal-Malik, or Zabiba and the King. It is said to be one of four novels written by the dictator and former president of Iraq.
“After a United States government interpreter scrutinised the novel for three months, the C.I.A. has become increasingly convinced that Mr Hussein probably did not write it, but that he carefully supervised its production and suffused it with his own words and ideas. Even so, United States officials have pored over every detail of the book and then some, reading between the lines of its sometimes rambling, overheated prose to find what they say is an intriguing window into Mr Hussein’s thinking,” wrote Elaine Sciolino for The New York Times in 2001.
During his final years in prison in the United States, Hussein turned to poetry. Unbind It is said to be the last poem written by Hussein.
North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-il was an avid cinema lover, and Elizabeth Taylor was his favourite actress. He had an enormous collection of video cassettes and also wrote several treatises on cinema. But they often read like a rulebook for dictators.
According to the BBC, in 1987, he decreed: “No production of high ideological and artistic value can evolve out of a creative group whose members are not united ideologically and in which discipline and order have not been established.”
In 1978, before coming to power, he even had South Korean film star Choi Eun-hee and her director husband, Shin Sang-ok, kidnapped. They were asked to revamp North Korea’s film industry. They were kept under house arrest and produced films such as Pulgasari, a communist version of Godzilla, as well as a drama that included the country’s first on-screen kiss. In fact, Pulgasari is among the few North Korean films readily available to watch on YouTube, and its credits carry an executive producer credit for Kim Jong-il.
Mao Zedong, the controversial architect of modern China was a passionate poet. His poems followed the traditional forms of Chinese poetry, drawing on landscapes, ancient legends, war heroes and the country’s literary heritage. He continued writing throughout his political career, sometimes composing poems during party meetings before dismissing them as mere “doodles”.
Though poems by him divided literary scholars. Some have argued that Zedong might have become a celebrated poet even without his political career. Literary scholar and translator Willis Barnstone described him as a “major poet” and an “original master”, while acknowledging that his historical legacy can overshadow the literary qualities of his work. His poems were often elegant and accessible, but closely followed established traditions, with references to works written centuries earlier.
One of his best-known poems, In Praise of the Winter Plum Blossom, draws on the work of 12th-Century Chinese poet Lu You, who wrote extensively about plum blossoms. Mao’s use of nature often carried political and personal meanings, turning landscapes and the changing seasons into metaphors for revolution, violence and renewal.