Bryan Ferry ratted himself out over the weekend, dropping unsavory remarks to a German newspaper about his admiration of Nazi aesthetics. His response to a Welt Am Sonntag reporter’s question asking if he has a German work ethic: "The Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves. Leni Riefenstahl's movies and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass parades and the flags--just amazing. Really beautiful."
Could it be that the still-suave-at-61 Roxy Music frontman has a Hitler complex? Yes, actually, he did go on to reveal that he calls his London recording studio the Fuhrerbunker, the subterranean complex in Berlin where Hitler committed suicide at the end of World War II.
Ferry seems to have diffused a media firestorm with a quick and succinct clarification of his remarks Monday morning, saying that he was “deeply upset” by any suggestion he’s a Nazi sympathizer. "I apologize unreservedly for any offence caused by my comments on Nazi iconography, which were solely made from an art history perspective," he said. "I, like every right-minded individual, find the Nazi regime, and all it stood for, evil and abhorrent."
Jewish leaders in the U.K. accepted the prompt apology, and demands to get Marks & Specer, where he models for the men’s clothing line, to drop him have softened. Lord Greville Janner, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, told Reuters: "His apology was total, appropriate and absolutely necessary. I hope that he will never make the same mistake again."
Maybe there’s a lesson here for future foot-in-mouth statements of the Don Imus order.
