In terms of art, Hitler and Lenin shared the same passion for a painting that also dazzled other characters such as Sigmund Freud or Thomas Mann. And not only them, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita's father, wrote in 1934 that every house in Berlin had a copy hanging within its four walls.
The fascination that this painting aroused from the end of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th went even further, inspiring other artists such as Dalí, Magritte, Delvaux or Ernst. August Strindberg used it as the final image of his play The Ghost Sonata and Rachmaninoff dedicated a symphonic poem with the same name The Island of the Dead, by the Swiss Arnold Böcklin, although it was not he who baptized his own work , but the art critic Fritz Gurlitt.
The oil shows a disturbing scene. A boat driven by an oarsman and with a single passenger, a figure dressed in a white shroud in front of a coffin, heads for a small island surrounded by rocks within which stand tall cypresses. Böcklin never explained the meaning of his work, which contributed to further fuel the halo of mystery that surrounds it.
The most common interpretation takes as a reference one of the best known episodes of Greek mythology. The oarsman would be Charon, the ferryman who transported souls to the kingdom of Hades in exchange for a coin; while the character that stands at the bow would represent the deceased who is arriving at his final destination after crossing the Styx lagoon.
Another of the unknowns that surrounds the work focuses on identifying the landscape that inspired the symbolist artist and that Böcklin never revealed, even leaving the door open for it to be the product of his own imagination. However, different locations have been speculated, such as an islet on the island of Corfu, the island of Ponza or San Michele in Venice, the peninsula of San Vigilio in Lake Garda or the castle on the island of Ischia.
Böcklin painted the painting in 1880 in Florence and went on to execute up to four more versions. The last one, signed in 1901. That is why perhaps the theory that places this island of the dead in the English cemetery in Florence, near the studio where he worked and where he buried a daughter, who died in childhood, gains strength.
Hitler came to own one of these paintings. Specifically, the third version that Böcklin painted in 1883 and which is currently in the Old National Gallery in Berlin after it strangely reappeared in 1979. Considered the Führer's favorite painter, Nazism appropriated his work as it did with the of Wagner or Nietzsche.
Lenin did not have the same luck and settled for a copy that, like the German, he hung in his office. Except for the fourth version, destroyed during World War II, the enigmatic painting is available to any viewer in museums in Berlin, New York, Basel and Saint Petersburg, ready to continue seducing anyone who ventures into its secrets.
