@amerika @Flick @amerika @sim Not to interrupt this, as it's fascinating, but:

> seemed to want to go out in a Wagnerian moment

Gabriel d'Annunzio, a good friend of Mussolini and probably his chief influence, was the one that articulated fascism. He wrote that one of the issues with democracy is that it "lacks a dramatic arc". There was less war (necessary for a dramatic arc), no main character, and no real opportunity for heroics.

If you recast Hitler as a guy that was trying to put on a good show, you look at his speeches, you look at his wartime strategy, how carefully staged everything was, the photographs and videos, then I think it clicks. I mean, the war's going poorly and he has someone with a video camera staging a shot, he's in a dress uniform on the balcony of his retreat in the mountains, and he's looking off into the distance and being pensive and he's perfectly framed up. (A video camera was very obtrusive in 1944, so it must have taken some effort to ignore it.)

Augustus's last words were, allegedly, "Acta est fabula. Plaudite." "The play is over. Applaud."