The Canvas of Berlin

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With an unsteady hand he took up his brush and tried to ease his nerves before he had even dipped it into the hollow of his palette. Adolf's brows furrowed deep as his free hand gripped the wrist of his first in a further effort to steady it.

Cursing the adrenaline that was flowing through his veins and with a throat that suddenly dawned to him was parched, his newly freed hand moved forward as his other reached for the handkerchief in his pocket.

Again, hesitation. The canvas laid out before him was blank and yet each line and grainy indentation of the material bored into his eyes as barbed wire might upon skin. The thought brought forth the welling of a tear in each eye. A welling that instead blurred his vision just as he was about to commit his first stroke.

Blinking and snorting in frustration, Adolf's sleeve whisks past his watery eyes, quite absent minded of the handkerchief grasped in the hand at its very end. Only as an afterthought does its silky feel dab the remaining moisture, his paint brush still but inches away from the canvas surface.

Vision restored, the canvas dared him anew... and now he could feel the icy stare of the statue bust at the wall to his left. Retreating for but a little, Adolf pockets his handkerchief briefly to use the renewed freedom of that hand to grab the bust firmly by the head, before turning it round to face the other way.

For but a moment he paused, reflecting upon the absurdity of his situation, a near grown adult in an attic in Berlin, body but stretched across the space between a painting yet to be begun and a bust that he felt was mocking him.

Were his teachers right? Did he really have no talent? What was he to do?

So many questions... but the most important one to answer to was the paint drying upon his brush. Dipping it briefly into the water basin and tapping it upon his pallet with haste and irritation, Adolf found himself drawn to the small window at the end that overlooks the square.

Absent-mindedly continuing to tap his paint brush upon the palette in his other hand of many talents, Adolf gazed. In the street below people were busying about their daily business. It was mid-morning after all and the cool light of the day played upon the muddied puddles with islands of cobblestones that a small child, hair the colour of harvested wheat and pale skin that contrasted so well with her black and red parka dress and boots went splashing about in her imaginary game of hopscotch. Adolf's features softened, his odd yet petite mustache straightening as his self-reproaching scowl melted away with his earlier frustration, his lungs able to more fully breathe the life of the World around him.

His eyes wondered and his expression froze. A peddler and a gentleman who had clearly seen better years haggled over one of a series of rolled blankets that the foreign individual had before him.

While a part of him told him to turn around and return to his canvas, the situation held the rest of him captive. Mesmerized he watched as the peddler's expression changed from shallow greeting to hollow grimaces, his theatrical hand gestures conveying the whole of the conversation that Adolf could not hear.

He watched as the gentleman tensed and emptied the few contents of his man purse onto his palm and shrugged with futility as the eyes of the peddler followed his money-adorned hand as a cat might a cornered mouse.

Finally the two shook hands, one of the blankets now tucked under the arm of the gentleman and the money clutched safely within the peddler's hand. They parted ways and the last thing that Adolf saw was the toothy grin as the money was sorted and placed into two pouches, one a lot smaller and regular-looking than the other.

With a deep breath and realizing that he had been tapping a now mostly dry paintbrush into his palette, Adolf let out another heavy sigh as he got to work re-moistening his brush. Once he had re-immersed the brush into the paint and withdrew it he raised it up before his eyes.

His hand no longer trembled.

He looked to the canvas that had but moments before intimidated him so. Unlike before it shrank before his steady gaze. No longer did it leap forward and threaten to swallow him along with the rest of the room.

A step and a decisive stroke.

The gash of black upon the canvas screamed back at him. He stared it down with steeled eyes as a second strike followed and then a third and then a forth.

Brush now dispensed of some of its moistness, with it he traced over the first three of his strokes again, ensuring that the paint was slicked even and did not run.

Perhaps if his teachers were right and he truly did not have a future in art... he'd try his hand at politics...

But for the rest of that morning he painted like a man possessed, canvas held in rapture, the silence of its screams echoing through time as a possibility that could have been but was not.

...

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The original theme was to be concerning a generic struggling artist and the war within himself - to conquer his inability to create. However as I wrote I could not help but have my mind wander to the situation of Adolf Hitler in the years before he went into politics - and how history might have turned out had he not been discouraged from pursuing a career in art.

As such I have no idea (and kind of doubt) whether he spent any time painting in an attic or if he spent those formative years in Berlin, so historical accuracy is kind of thrown out the window. This is but a more human depiction of a man generally considered to be an irredeemable monster during years before he became so.

I personally do wonder if a sliver of that earlier idealistic self with paint rather than blood on his hands remained within 'the Fuhrer' in those final dark days when a human maelstrom of his own making came round full circle to claim him.

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I am generally quite open on the kind of comments that I'd like to hear about. Of course this time I feel it necessary to request that commentators abstain from bashing Jews and the like. Actually I'll extend this request also to abstaining from bashing Germans. Let us have a little oasis of tranquility where we spare a moment to see the humanity in each other.

Thank you for any comments and, if you liked this, feel free to resteem as such is always appreciated!

Sincerely,

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