The seed of artist Tom Duncan’s Hitler collection was planted when he was a small boy.
He remembers a family friend, a butcher, taking him and his brother into his shop, saying he was going to show them something.
When Duncan and I meet at his New York apartment over 60 years later, the artist recreates what happened next, presenting me—as the butcher had done with him so many years ago—with a small box with ‘Hitler’s Finger embossed on it, sliding it open to reveal a finger, nestling on dirty cotton wool.
After a nano-second of shock, I realized Duncan had stuck his own finger in the box.
As a boy, Duncan—like me—had experienced the same visual trick, as performed by the butcher.
“My brother and I knew it wasn’t Hitler’s finger,” he recalled. “But he was a butcher, so we thought he had probably cut a real finger off. Your mind takes over. You know it’s not real but you really want to see it.”
Today the Scottish-born Duncan makes polychrome sculpture based on childhood memories. It is fertilized by his collection of World War II memorabilia which crowds his 800 square foot apartment, much of which deals with the Germans, some with the Führer himself.
“When I was a little boy in Edinburgh all the men had gone away to fight,” he says. “The only grown-up men I saw were German POWs on the streets outside the prison.”
Duncan began collecting in the US. He kept comics sent from Scotland. “Like Lord Snooty and His Pals in the Beano, going over to kick Hitler in his pants,” he says.
It became serious when he was an adult. At first it startled Duncan’s long-time partner, the artist Lisa Dinhofer, who is Jewish.
“Here’s a little Hitler statue that I bought out in a fair in a pasture in Lambertville, New Jersey,” Duncan says. “Usually I run things by Lisa. And I said, ‘Do you like this?’ And she said ‘No!’
“I said, ‘Really? Why’? She said, ‘I hate it!’ So I went back two minutes later. I said, ‘Are you sure you don’t like this?’ And the people that were selling it, they were on the floor, laughing. And she said, ‘No! I don’t like it!’
“I went back a third time and asked her. She said, ‘What do I have to tell you? I HATE IT! No!’ And I bought it anyway.” He says Dinhofer is now at peace with his project.
Today, Duncan keeps his evocative figurines in a venerable display case. He indicates a mini-warrior. “This one I bought last year at a train show,” he says. “See it says ‘NEW ERA.’ It’s definitely a reproduction. Some of these brownshirts, these are from the '30s, and these three are authentic. They were made with sawdust composition, with glue. If the British and Americans had paid attention to the kind of toys that the Germans were making for children in the '30s they would have known about all the tanks and about all the airplanes that they were going to make because the kids were playing with pretty much realistic reproductions of what was coming down the pike.
“Here’s Lenin, Stalin … Mussolini … Here’s a Hitler figure … here’s another one. Rommel’s just behind him. And the rest of them are basically different figures … these ones are definitely brownshirts from the 1920s … ”
There is a Hitler mask on the wall with an curious mouth, like a letter box. “That’s the most recent piece I bought. It’s a target from a shooting gallery.”
And the mouth?
“There might have been something moving inside. I don’t know. Maybe there was a wagging tongue or something. It was actually never used. I would have preferred to have bought it used. It’s metal, it’s very heavy. I thought it would be really cool to have a lot of pings in it. The guy had had two other heads, Mussolini. And I guess maybe Hirohito? I would have bought the Hirohito one. But I wasn’t particularly interested in Mussolini.”
Duncan, a rangy fellow in his early 70s, is an artist, and an excellent one. His collecting doesn’t end with the figurines. He has a complete set of the Eagle, a UK comic book of yore, and miniature train sets.
But for the most part he focuses on warfare, especially World War II. He has a lot of Trench art, which, despite its name, refers to any art made by soldiers or POWs in any war, usually using military materiel, such as used shell casings. He has a hefty library, including a volume relating to military architecture, such as bomb shelters.
Duncan was born in 1939 in Shotts, a small Scottish mining town, but the family moved to Edinburgh. “The first German bomber to be shot down over Great Britain was in our neighborhood,” he says.
“Hitler sent over four bombers to attack the Firth of Forth Bridge the day after Britain declared war.”
The German prisoners of war on the streets scared him. “They had long red beards,” he says. “So for many years I was terrified of people with beards. So they looked old. But some were probably just seventeen.”
His mother took Duncan and his brother back to Shotts to get away from the war. It didn’t work. “I was out in a cow pasture when my mother heard the sirens and ran to get me,” he says. “By the time she got there the plane was flying over and strafed both of us.”
Twice in our conversation Duncan mentions John Boorman’s movie Hope And Glory and the scene in which a German bomber blows up a school in what looks like his old Edinburgh neighborhood—and how happy this makes the kids who won’t need to go to school.
After the war ended his mother upped and took her sons to the US, partly to join her sisters, who had emigrated before the war, and partly to get away from her husband.
“He was violent,” Duncan says. “The three of us had to get away as soon as possible.”
Why do the Nazis fascinate him in particular, why Hitler? It’s time travel. These images suck Duncan back into the past. “I think Hitler is iconic,” Duncan says. “And he was trying to kill me. So that made it much more powerful. I have a great admiration for Churchill. But I never felt I needed anything about him. A sculpture or whatever.”
His art today—he shows at the Edlin Gallery in New York—is steeped in such early memories as his father’s returns on leave.
“I remember him playing with his weapons… his rifle, his bayonet, his helmet… My brother and I, we have a very close bond about military tanks. We study them and talk about them all the time.” Kids had few toys in war time. “My father made me things,” Duncan says. “He made me a green machine-gun and that was like my security blanket. I just felt more secure walking around with it. And ever since then I collect toy machine guns.”
Duncan also collects real guns. One he shows me, he says, is from the 10,000 Mile March in China with Mao Tse-tung in 1948. “So I think it’s quite a rare rifle.”
It was ready to use. How could he buy a usable gun in a flea market?
“I couldn’t believe it,” agrees Duncan. “I paid $30 for it. I just assumed that the barrel was filled with lead and that they had removed the firing pin. They hadn’t. I got one block carrying this and a cop car came around, did a U-turn on 23rd Street, pulled me over, and put me up against the wall.
“They said, ‘What are you doing, carrying a rifle?’
“I said, well, I’m an artist. I collect things.”
“So one of the guys says, ‘I’m going to let you go. Because I’m a gun collector also. But if it was any other cop they would have taken you to the station.’ They disarmed the firing pin. But I have a neighbor who’s really into guns and he repaired it for me. But of course I don’t have any ammunition. And I don’t have the clip.”
Duncan has put a Hitler in one of his own sculptures. “It’s based on those glass menagerie things you see in a train station, where you put a penny in and you turn a crank and a claw comes down. And you pick up a camera if you are lucky, that kind of thing. So I made it a game called Kill Hitler. And I had a little statue of him inside this construction of a train station. In the background I had German prisoners of war marching by with MPs.”
Other elements in Duncan’s Nazi-era collection include a sheet of Hitler stamps he snapped up when he and Lisa went to Munich in 2002. I pass a stamp store,” he says. “And at eye level are all these Hitler stamps. I’ve got to buy these! So I go in. I bought them. I have a whole bunch of them. Lisa thought she was going to have a hard time in Munich, but she was fine. I was the one who had nightmares being there. Somehow seeing children speaking German freaked me out. I couldn’t care less about the adults. But somehow seeing little kids walking around, speaking German, really scared the shit out of me. I had horrible nightmares and everything. Amazing.”
Has Duncan used the figurines in pieces of his own?
“I used a lot of them. I did a concentration camp piece. Here are the Chinese and the Bolsheviks. This is a military policeman. And I love those Nazi uniforms. I always thought the Roman legions had the most beautiful uniforms. The armor and everything. But I think the Third Reich beats everybody hands down as far as beautiful uniforms go. And they gave everybody a medal for everything, you know.”
Duncan struggles to describe why he collects all this stuff.
“I hate to use the word nostalgia. Nostalgia doesn’t work for me. There’s something deeper. Because nostalgia evokes sweet and gentle, kind of schmaltzy! But there’s definitely something about looking at something, when it’s so evocative. It brings up memories that are so powerful that they are amazing. Nostalgia just doesn’t cover it.”
