Quote:There was once a time when soldiering and artistry were considered incompatible. That was when saber-wielding militarism was considered one thing and slanting bohemianism another. In reality, these supposed expressions of two worlds were merely caricatures of each other. The true nature of the soldierly and artistic worlds is completely different; for at their core, soldiering and artistry have much in common; indeed, they fundamentally share a common origin, namely, the race that produces both the soldier and the artist from the same blood. Anyone who can see into the depths of this world will not be surprised that our most brilliant soldiers also possessed an artistic nature, and that our greatest artists also possessed a soldierly nature. Frederick the Great not only created Sanssouci, but he fertilized all the arts of his time and nourished them with his own ideas. We know something similar about the great Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II. And it was no coincidence that Prince Eugene came across the greatest architects and artists of his time when he commissioned Lukas von Hildebrandt and Fischer von Erlach to build the Belvedere in Vienna. He himself was an artist. Leonardo da Vinci, the most versatile artist of all time, was as sought after by his princes as a fortress architect, inventor of weapons, and advisor in planning innovative military operations as he was as an artist.

But we also have plenty of examples where we must assume a talent for soldierly behavior without it directly becoming a soldierly act. We cannot imagine the works of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Kleist, in which warlike actions occur, without a lively, genuine familiarity with the soldierly world arising from empathy. In both cases, however, when great soldiers revealed artistic genius and when great artists proved themselves to be outstanding soldiers, this was never a one-sided professional interest; rather, both worlds were merely different expressions of one great idea for these creative individuals. Ideas, however, are nothing other than reflections of the soul, expressions of essence. The great idea of the dawning millennium is National Socialism. Its creator, the Führer Adolf Hitler, himself a soldier and artist, had already inscribed the contours of this idea with an iron pen on the threshold of the new era—both the soldierly and the artistic. If the Jf, the Order of the Führer, which, as the Waffen-JJ, has the honor of representing the soldierly image of our worldview, feels called upon to play an active and stimulating role in shaping the artistic form of the emerging era, this is deeply rooted in the nature of National Socialism as a creative idea and in the nature of the artist as the shield-bearer of this idea. The exhibition "The Artists and the Weapons" in Breslau is just the beginning. The fact that this beginning is being made in the fifth year of the war is crucial. It is a call to all artists in the Reich, both established and emerging, to increasingly choose the idea of the Reich as the idea of truth and order as the formal and objective content of their works, so that the soldierly expression of the Reich, which is being shaped on a unique scale on all fronts, can find an equally worthy artistic image.