Flowers for Hitler

Flowers for Hitler is Canadian poet and composer Leonard Cohen's third collection of poetry, first published in 1964 by McClelland & Stewart.[1]

Flowers for Hitler
First edition
AuthorLeonard Cohen
LanguageEnglish
GenrePoetry
PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
Publication date
1964

Like other artworks regarding Adolf Hitler as a subject, it was somewhat controversial in its day.[2][3] Cohen's original title, Opium and Hitler, was rejected by the publisher.[4] The inscription on its initial page reads "In an earlier time this would be called Sunshine for Napoleon, and earlier still it would have been called Walls for Genghis Khan." It features an opening quote from Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz.[4]

Flowers for Hitler contains 95 rhymed and free-verse poems, avant-garde texts, and pictorial elements. It was the first of his books to include Cohen's drawings. Only 20 of the poems directly address World War II and the Holocaust. In the poems, Cohen explores the banality of evil, "using the Holocaust as the highest known point of human evil". There are few allusions to the Bible in Flowers for Hitler, unlike Cohen's previous books.[4]

Critic Sandra Djwa wrote that Flowers for Hitler "is a movement from a qualified acceptance of the romantic ideal as it is embodied in art ... to the decadent romanticism of a fin de siecle aesthetic in which the ugly replaces the beautiful as the inspiration for art".[5]

References
  1. 1964 Review Archived 2013-02-22 at archive.today excerpted from Morton Wilson, "Letters in Canada: 1964, Poetry", University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIV No. 4, July 1965, pp. 352–354.
  2. Simmons, S., I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (New York: Random House, 2012).
  3. Kubernik, H., Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows (London: Omnibus Press, 2014), p. 34.
  4. Vesselova, N., “The Past is Perfect”: Leonard Cohen’s Philosophy of Time Archived December 4, 2017, at the Wayback Machine (PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, 2014).
  5. Wynands, Sandra (Winter 1999). "The Representation of the Holocaust in Flowers for Hitler". Essays on Canadian Writing (69): 198.


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