Since I attended a lecture at the San Diego Museum of Art last Friday I have been trying to decide what to do with information I have had for a very long time about one of the worst political monsters of all time, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was an artist.  He was actually pretty good at painting, especially water colors.  The painting I remember best is The Courtyard of the Old Residency in Munich. I am not an art historian or an artist or an art critic, but I find Hitler’s water colors to be at least interesting.  I wonder what he would have become if his application for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna had been successful. Even when he had become the monster that we all knew him to be in the thirties and forties, he always declared himself to be an artist. He is said to have explained that in his old age he wanted to return to being an artist. 

Mother Mary with the Holy Child Jesus Christ was painted in 1913.  It is hard to believe the man who was the mastermind of the holocaust, who declared that his goal was to make Germany great again, could have expressed tenderness when he thought of the child Jesus and his mother. I wrote yesterday in the BLOG that I am determined to give the newly elected Donald Trump the opportunity to show himself to be at least a responsible president. 

My thoughts then go to Adolf Hitler, and I ask myself if I would be one of those saying that there is some good in him, and I ask myself if I would be willing to let things work themselves out.  Would I be a patriot first… and then I find myself hoping I would be on the side of people like Bonhoeffer.