Two totalitarian regimes, as different from each other as revolutionary Russia and Nazi Germany could be, find a common ground (not the only one) in Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead.”

Starting with Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also known as Vladimir Lenin or Nikolai Lenin, seemed to have an obsessive connection with that painting, a connection that might have influenced him throughout his life, albeit mostly in unconscious ways. Marco Dolcetta, an author, producer, and director of cinema, television, and radio programs, spent some time delving into the presence of Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” in the lives of several early 20th-century personalities, including Vladimir Lenin. He states in his text:

It’s not without interest to recall that various political figures, among those who marked the century, had a particular bond with “The Isle of the Dead,” a bond where, one might risk thinking, early and terrifying affinities with extreme lethal violence are announced and realized. For a long time, Lenin in Zurich went to bed in “Mirror Alley,” under the Böcklin painting hanging above his bed. In “Lenin in Zurich,” the title of Solzhenitsyn’s work, the author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” briefly describes “Spiegelgasse,” and also Lenin’s room: “Spiegelgasse is a donkey’s back, a small hill apart… His room: a jail cell for two. Two beds, a table, chairs. A cast-iron stove. The pipe inside the wall… a book crate turned upside down serves as a shelf.” Solzhenitsyn mentions the Böcklin painting. The Russian writer does not doubt that “The Isle of the Dead” would later inspire him some long pages with dark prophetic resonances. Solzhenitsyn was unaware that Rachmaninoff had composed a symphonic poem titled “The Isle of the Dead” in 1908. However, he evokes the “heavy effluvia of the apartments” and “the heavy gaze of death” that Nadia perceives in her partner in a state of rumination on the great revolutionary project. One can then wonder what signals or effluvia, in the manner of Swedenborg or Strindberg, could have skimmed along the wall to reach the bald, overheated skull of the Bolshevik leader whose triumph would, under Stalin’s iron fist, transform Russia, now the USSR, into a gigantic archipelago of death.

From “Arrival at the Isle of the Dead,” an essay by Marco Dolcetta.

It could well be a suggestion based on hindsight, that is, knowing that Lenin, like Hitler, whom we will discuss shortly, tied his name to terror and fear as a way of resolving conflicts. Lenin is credited with the establishment of the gulag and was the one to argue that, given the situation (i.e., the difficulties shown in the Russian advance towards the application of the revolution), terror imposed itself as a means of solution.

Similarly, the concept of terror or, if we may say better, of madness as a way of opposition and control, was nurtured by Adolf Hitler himself, who, according to the best conspiracy theories of the old and new century, targeted the mental stability of the population (see what concerns the tuning of instruments to 440 Hertz in this article).

Hitler also fell in love with “The Isle of the Dead,” particularly the third version, the 1883 one made for Gürlitt, which gave the painting its famous name. Hitler, an avid follower of occultism, saw the symbolism of the painting in perfect alignment with the supernatural that he himself frequented. He purchased it at an auction in 1933, presenting himself in civilian clothes to those present who, certainly, must not have felt very comfortable (allow me a little romance) having him nearby.

The one considered the emblem of the darkest totalitarianism, kept the painting in a room, the study of the Reich Chancellery, where a couple of things happened: the first, the meeting between Hitler, the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the President of the People’s Commissars of Russia Vyacheslav Molotov. The three signed on November 12, 1940, the rectification and fine-tuning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the non-aggression treaty between the Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which had already been signed in 1939. Let’s remember this agreement between Nazis and Russians, when today the aggressors launch disinformation in the information-cyber ether against an attacked people. The second, at 3:30 PM on April 30, 1945, having lost the war, Hitler shot himself in the head right in that room. The painting was stolen by the Soviets who entered the bunker and took it to Moscow, where it remained until 1979, when it was returned to Berlin.

A dark trail, that linked to Böcklin’s painting, which seems to tap into the most hidden and/or unconscious dynamics of human beings, as we will see in the next article dedicated to Freud and Dalí.