Famous Moustaches in History

Young Nietzsche set the academic world alight with his revolutionary whiskers. As an academic he was expected to maintain more rigorous control of his facial hair, but young Friedrich refused to do so. In keeping with his philosophical writings, Nietzsche demonstrated a will to grow his moustache as he saw fit. Old has-beens such as Plato and Aristotle would not dictate his personal style. This attitude was reinforced by his follow up to "Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer" entitled "Personal Grooming, or, How to Shave with a Curling Iron".
His famous split with Wagner over his mature moustache presaged a madness that was to allow his facial hair to grow unkempt. Whereas Nietzsche fell into obscurity behind his unfeasibly large moustache, Wagner became renowned for his most excellent muttonchop side whiskers, a couple of operas and an irrational hatred of Jews.

Unlike Nietszche, Hitlers notariety derives mostly from his being a fanatical anti-Semite, mass murderer, and catalyst of the single greatest episode of human slaughter in history. But his moustache has contributed to his reputation. Like his name, Adolf, the style of Hitlers moustach has been eradicated from the pages of history. Not even the most ardent neo-Nazi would try to wear a similarly antisocial, introverted extravagance on his face. Researchers have theorized that Hitler's manias may have derived from the ridicule he suffered during WWI as a corporal in the Austrian army. His love of cream cakes is well known, and it is thought he suffered great torment when cream got stuck in his younger, bushier, moustache. This may have occasioned a breakdown that saw him shave off most of his moustache in order to reduce the comical effect. The result was a ludicrous moustache that survived ridicule only because those who ridiculed Hitler ended up at the Russian Front to meet with another of our famous moustache bearers, Josef Stalin. Hitler's moustache remains one of the most important in history, not beacuse of its trend-setting greatness but because no-one would be seen dead wearing one. This is astounding proof that humankind did learn something from the second world war.

Josef Stalin is the second of our trio of mass murderers. His moustache was inspired by the Soviet dream of peasant labouring stock, from which he hailed (but never tell him that or he'll send you to the Gulag), and the well known psychoanalytical truth that moustaches make it easier to lie to other people by obscuring one's words. The greatest lie Stalin ever told was to his good friend Trotski when he promised to meet him in Mexico for a camping trip in the Siberian Alps. His second big lie was to his old buddy Lenin as he gave him his afternoon cup of tea with hemlock. The third and most devastating lie was to the people of the Soviet Union when he promised them a Soviet Paradise of Freedom and Equality. Stalin's moustache has been preserved in perpetuity, along with the rest of his body in some mausoleum in Russia. It is thought to be the last testament to the dream of Soviet Communism, and along with Kruschev's shoe banging, the least dignified expression of a noble art.

Lord Kitchener was a career warmonger, and is the third in our line up of mass murderers. Not content to interfere with the running of many wars in which the British Empire participated, he often offered to fight in others as well. It is not known is he ever indavertently fought on both sides of a war, but its often thought he may as well have. He is most famous as the poster boy of World War One, inviting young men to die in many and various ways, none of them nice, in the French countryside. Kitchener's moustache is a classic example of aloof, arrogant and patriarchal egoism. His sense of superiority oozes from the end of every hair (hence the pointy bits at the ends). Throughout his career he wore the same style - a sign of his stubbornness in the face of a world changing around him. It is this intransigence and refusal to change his mind that cost the lives of many soldiers in World War One.

Widely know as uncle Albert (mostly by his sister's children), Albert Einstein was a lovely and smart bloke. Everything in his demeanour showed he was a deeply thoughtful and caring character. He usually forgot to put his socks on, and gave away much of his money (he promised and eventually gave his Nobel prize winnings to his ex-wife and children). His moustache echoes his unkempt hair and general disregard for his personal appearance. Sometimes mistaken for a bum, he was in fact one of the greatest theoreticians of all time. Whilst he did not pay much attention to his moustache, he spent an awful lot of time doing physics. By explaining Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and redefining the classical view of relative motion, Einstein stood on the cusp of modern indeterminate and classical determinate physics. In his writings he tied the notions of space to time , matter to energy and eccentricity to genius. He also overthrew Newton's ludicrous notion of action at a distance as expressed in the inverse square law. Newton was very smart, but he did not have a moustache. None of Einstein's achievements were due to his moustache, but it is such a famous moustache that it cannot be ignored.