Mijn fascinatie voor Hitler is weer op volle toeren aan het draaien. “What if” indeed:

Young Adolf’s bid to become an artist is a sorry, almost poignant episode of his biography, as well as providing one of history’s great ‘what if’? scenarios. His early lonely infatuation with Wagner, the timid, characterless efficiency of his architectural drawings and paintings (sold at reasonable prices by friendly Jewish dealers), his rejection by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts – all these elements suddenly flipped into psychotic and paranoid resentment of a Bolshevist, Modernist, Semitic establishment.

[…]

He wanted grandiose, late-19th-century realism to flourish, but to his rage it somehow never did. His own insipid youthful efforts were not promoted – in fact, he made embarrassed efforts to suppress them. Despairing of all schools of modern German painting, from the avant-garde to the blatantly fascistic, he came to prefer sculpture of a potently homoerotic flavour.  [The Spectator]