Controversies and Viewpoints
Page 35
Hitler, however, does not sever his ties to the ‘mass’. Raymond Cartier856 observes:
The Marxist explanation that longs to turn Hitler into an invented instrument, one that is financed and imposed by the capitalist forces that alone govern the world, does not stand up to our knowledge of the facts. If Hitler was indeed an instrument (all historical figures are, to some extent), then he was an instrument of the German masses (Le Crapouillot,857 issue number 31, July 1974).
Throughout the two volumes that make up his book, Joachim Fest quotes the words of architect and former minister Albert Speer858 quite extensively. Speer’s memoirs, published in 1971 (Erinnerungen,859 Fayard), have caused quite an uproar, a fact which may, incidentally, conjure up a smile. Has it not been whispered, on the other side of the Rhine, that Joachim Fest was not foreign at all to the drafting of these memories? (Ever since, Albert Speer has been encouraging people to vote for Willy Brandt’s party, a party whose leader allowed Speer to reclaim all the possessions that had previously been confiscated.)
According to Fest, Hitler had more than just ‘set ideas’; for he had also understood how to accomplish them. In this regard, what he represented was ‘an exceptional case of an intellectual who enjoyed a practical understanding of power’.
The formula has startled some people. Hitler, explains Joachim Fest, has ‘refuted the experimental principle according to which all revolutions swallow up their children’. Indeed, he was his own revolution’s Rousseau, Mirabeau, Robespierre and Napoleon, its Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. This proves that he perfectly understood the forces that he was unleashing’.
During an interview, Fest specified the following:
It is an unpleasant realisation, but it was time to depict the Hitlerian phenomenon as it ultimately was and to put a stop to the travesties. Hitler was not Chaplin’s dictator;860 he was, in fact, the very opposite.
‘Grandeur belongs to the very needs of the most dreadful eras’, Jacob Burkhardt861 once said. As for Joachim Fest, who declares himself a Christian Democrat, he is inclined to think that any ‘great man’ partakes of Evil in some way; that there is Evil in all grandeur. Hitler was a truly great man because he bore a great deal of Evil within himself. He states:
I believe that although great men exert great influence, their grandeur is measured in accordance with the degree of independence that they maintain in relation to the circumstances. And it does seem to be the case that, on this level, the “action range” available to them is ever on the decrease. It is in this respect that Hitler was, perhaps, the last man to have attempted to make history.
In 1970, Mr Rudolf Augstein862 had already remarked in Der Spiegel:
Today, the individual that stands at the top no longer enjoys any genuine decision scope, tempering, at best, his own decisions. Only long-term projects are worked on. One thus has every right to think that Hitler was, indeed, the last representative of great politics in the classical sense.
‘The phenomenon of great men is of an aesthetical nature and is hardly ever moral in essence’, notes Mr Fest. This claim is a far-reaching one. The ‘meta-moral’ character of any and all exceptional historical deeds does, of course, seem obvious; but it is particularly pronounced in the case of National Socialism due to the great significance that one attached in this system to both style and spectacle (which observers have always considered a striking feature), as well as to its leader’s very personality.
The Ability to Harmonise Completely Irreconcilable Notions
In yet another book dedicated to the founder of National Socialism (Prénom: Adolf. Nom: Hitler863 ), German historian Werner Maser writes:
Hitler viewed his Führer and Reich chancellor functions, as well as both politics and political power, as mere means enabling the realisation of his own artistic ideas.
He then goes on to say:
Prior to becoming an orator, a politician, a soldier, a warlord and a party leader, what Hitler was (or wanted to be) was, above all, an artist. The values that governed his own worldview were “aesthetical” ones, those of an aesthetic that belonged to him. In his eyes, the supreme purpose behind political action lay not in the accomplishment of the common good but in a “total” sort of undertaking in which the darkest notion of beauty merged with the most savage desire for grandeur.
It is in this regard, as affirmed by Fest, that Hitler was an ‘inhuman character, one that had the ability to harmonise, without the slightest hint of moral conflict, notions that were completely irreconcilable’.
Had he not undertaken, to use the words of his childhood friend August Kubizek, to ‘tranquilly invert millennia’?
Already in 1909–10, at a time when he resided in Vienna, the ‘city of Phaeacians’ (of ‘happy mortals’), as is stated in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes a living by selling his paintings and drawings. The few paintings that he did from life, says Maser, ‘reveal an exceptional talent’. At a later point, while on the battlefront, he would paint some aquarelles.
At the time, his favourite German painters were Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885) and Eduard Grützner (1846–1925). What he valued above all else, however, was Graeco-Roman statuary art. Once he had attained the peak of power, painting, sculpture, architecture and music would continue to fascinate him beyond all expression. In January 1942, he declares:
Politics is but a means to me. There are some who say that I shall, one day, have great difficulty in abandoning the active life that I now lead; but they are mistaken! Wars come and go, and the only thing that remains are cultural values.
The former Viennese aquarellist, who knew the Opéra de Paris inside out and never grew weary of listening to Wagner, invested as much passion into architecture and art as he did into military operations and the running of the state. One day, upon hearing one of his subordinates discussing the price of a sculpture that he had commissioned, he immediately interrupted him and said: ‘Nothing is ever too expensive for an artist!’.
Werner Maser writes:
At times, one might be led to believe that Hitler had only chosen the political path so as to achieve his gigantic and immoderate architectural projects.
The fact is that architects Paul Troost, Paul Giesler and Albert Speer spoke to him as if he were their ‘colleague’, and André François-Poncet, the French ambassador, once wrote that, in some respects, Adolf Hitler reminded him of Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Books, Nothing but Books
Today, I consider it a sign of my destiny that fate chose Braunau-am-Inn to be my birthplace; for this small town is situated just on the border of the two German states whose reunification represents, at least to us, the new generation, the objective to which we should devote our entire existence and in pursuit of which all the means at our disposal should be employed.
Such are the first lines one reads in Mein Kampf. Hitler did not believe in God. What he did believe in, however, was Providence (Vorsehung), the providentia of the Ancients which shaped people’s destinies and saw to their fulfilment.
Hitler perceived history as ‘the summary of everyone’s struggle against everyone else’. His ‘conception of the world’, in fact, was set as early as 1918. It was the result of an entire series of reflections in which Maser detects the respective influences of Plato, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Stewart Chamberlain, Leopold von Ranke, Treitschke, Goethe, and Dietrich Eckart, perhaps even Ibsen and Zola. He specifies:
Schopenhauer was one of the thinkers to whom Hitler referred most often. He recommended him in terms of style and readily quoted entire passages he had memorised from his books.
His historical doctrine reflects his reading of the works of Malthus, Darwin, Carlyle, Ploetz, and Edward Gibbon, all of whom belonged, save for Gibbon, to the 19th century, a century he viewed as that of ‘the heroes of the spirit’.
As for his military conceptions, they largely stemmed from his intensive studying of Clausewitz.864 On 8th November, 1934, he hurls the following at his opponents of the Bürgerkellerbraü, in M
unich:
You have not read Clausewitz! And even if you have, you still do not know how to apply his doctrine to the present!
His reading experiences, which reached into the most various domains, were supported by an extraordinary sort of memory and accounted for the knowledge that the Führer’s interlocutors were always struck by.
His childhood friend, August Kubizek, recounts:
I cannot imagine Adolf without any books. At home, he always stacked them up around himself. Whenever a book obsessed him, he felt the need to always have it on hand, and even if he was not reading it, he insisted on having it close by. Such was my friend’s life — books, nothing but books!
Werner Maser adds:
However, he never studied anything sine ira et odio.865 To him, it was always a matter of accepting or dismissing, and he always read precisely what he needed to support his own concepts.
Among those who exerted some influence upon Hitler, a special position must be reserved for writer and publicist Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923), who adapted Peer Gynt866 into German and ran the Auf gut Deutsch weekly before becoming the first editor-in-chief of the Völkischer Beobachter. In the closing lines of Mein Kampf, Hitler writes that Eckart had been ‘the man who devoted his life to reawakening his people, our people, through both his writings and ideas and, ultimately, through his actions’.
Peppered with a huge number of references, charts, tables and maps, Fest’s and Maser’s works allow one to unquestionably gain a more accurate understanding of Hitler’s life; yet in no way do they elucidate the ‘enigma’ of his personality. After reading more than a thousand pages, one is still left in the dark in this regard and, paradoxically, the whole’s very vacuity stems from the wealth of details. For it takes more than such an amount of documentation to define a character. What this documentation depicts is a well-constructed dummy whose strings are pulled but which never comes across as being real. Hitler never surfaces, despite always being at the heart of the subject.
The fact is that one learns a great deal about Hitler, but it may still be too early for us to understand who he was.
An Untenable Dilemma
With thousands of books dedicated to him over the past forty years, there is perhaps no other man that has been the focus of so much writing as the Führer of the Third Reich. Yet one has hitherto failed to shed light upon his person. We are all familiar with the events, with thousands of documents, letters and speeches having been discovered, leaving no missing details whatsoever. When one proceeds to assemble the lot, however, what emerges is an artificial figure; a figure that keeps its secret and is never understood. At times, one is under the impression that the more intense the light becomes, the more the shadow zone grows.
Is this due to the fact that history is only weaved by the unique and unexpected? That history is nothing more than destiny, and ‘human sciences’ are incapable of faithfully restoring the very being of an uncommon sort of man? Or is there another reason for it? Is it all simply the result of our lack of objectivity? Or do the attempts made by historians and their subsequent failures demonstrate the actual superiority of intuition over deduction, of the lively and comprehensive synthetic method over the analytical one, which gathers and classifies facts without ever managing to bring them to life?
Goebbels867 once said to his aide de camp, the prince of Schaumburg-Lippe:
I have been working with Hitler for years and meet him on an almost daily basis, yet there are moments when he is completely beyond my understanding. Who could ever claim to see him as he truly is? In the realm of absolute inevitability which he inhabits, nothing makes sense anymore, whether it be good, evil, time or space, and what people term success can no longer serve as a criterion. You will perhaps take me for a fool, but listen to what I am about to tell you: it is likely that Hitler will lead us to a catastrophe, but his transformed ideas will only gain new strength through it. Around the world, Hitler has enemies who sense his greatness, but I personally doubt that any of his friends are aware of it, apart from myself. And yet, in spite of all this, what he ultimately is, I do not know. Is he really a man? I personally could not swear to it. There are times when he gives me the shivers.
Hitler once made the following declaration to Hermann Rauschning, the former head of the National Socialist government of Danzig:
Whosoever views National Socialism as a mere political movement does not, so to speak, know it at all. For our movement is even more than a religion: it is the will to bring about a new creation.
To which he then added:
The immense significance of our long and hard struggle for power lies in the fact that it enables the birth of a new generation of masters that are called upon not only to take charge of the destinies of the German people, but also those of the entire world.
Based on all of this, could one undertake to explain Hitler without being Hitlerian oneself? To explain him is to understand him, i.e. to enter his system, his worldview. And how could one genuinely enter it without having first espoused it? It is an untenable sort of dilemma, one whose consequences are of a grave nature. For by striving to ascertain things and shed light upon the matter, all one does is reinforce the darkness and give birth to a legend.
It is furthermore clear that one cannot discuss a phenomenon from a historical perspective until the phenomenon itself is already part of history, when it has ceased to arouse such immediate passions (Otherwise, any and every criticism will always comprise an a priori tendency to view the historian as a partisan). With regard to Nazism, however, we are not that far yet, and are even less so because the opponents and partisans of National Socialism find themselves united in the effort to prevent the phenomenon from being discarded into history, i.e. into an anterior domain which could be discussed objectively yet would, for this very same reason, no longer resonate so much in today’s minds.
From this perspective, any book that is currently published on Hitler can only serve to reinforce the ‘Hitlerian myth’. Not only that: any criticism, however violent it may be, implies an updating of the system, and thus the fact of turning the ‘past’ into an eternal present.
Author Golo Mann868 once stated:
In the space of ten pages, or a hundred, it is quite possible to demonstrate that Hitler was the most repugnant and the pettiest villain in our entire European history. The moment one scrutinises him across more than a thousand pages, however, as Fest himself does so as to study his hero’s motivations and psyche, one is soon tempted to try and understand it. Once you have reached this point, justifying his behaviour, and perhaps even admiring it, is no more than a step away.
What results from this are the most contradictory sort of appreciations.
Action in the Military Domain
In the eyes of the Italian historian Renzo De Felice (Intervista sul fascismo. Laterza, Bari, 1975), National Socialism is the very archetype of archaic resurgence, with fascism, on the contrary, having to be considered a ‘progressive’ phenomenon, one that conveys the very spirit of the ‘national Left’.
Robert Aron, by contrast, sees things differently:
One can safely say that Hitlerism represents the ultimate result of our modern times. It is not, as Hitler himself claimed, a response to rationalism, but instead, a corruption of the latter. It is the demented conclusion of the great human saga of technological crusading preached by Descartes and his successors for the past three centuries. Rarely has more effort and more faith, more intelligence and more courage, more glorious conquest and a more sensational blitzkrieg against routine and ignorance ever transformed the very shape of the world as during these 300 years. And rarely have the excesses stemming from these conquests ever threatened the Western civilisation more profoundly. (Retour à l’éternel869 . Albin Michel, 1946)
On the military level, Hitler saw an alliance of three factors rise up against him, just as Napoleon once did — the resistance of conquered adversaries, Anglo-Saxon power and the Russian steppe.
In the preface he wrote for the shorthand reports of the conferences held by Hitler in his headquarters from 1942 to 1945 (Hitler parle à ses généraux.872 Albin Michel, 1964), Mr Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who authored an authoritative History of the German Army (Albin Michel, 6 volumes, 1936–1966), expresses a completely different opinion. He quotes Helmut Heiber,873 according to whom ‘it is not true that the ever correct and promising conceptions elaborated by the military staff were always shattered by the ignorant stupidity of a dilettante whose abilities were restricted to making absurd plans and demanding the unreasonable’.
He adds:
When the leader of the Third Reich ordered his divisions to invade Russia, it was not because he had chosen to ignore the risks involved in waging war on two simultaneous fronts, but because he wanted to avoid it.
This opinion is shared by the victor of Stalingrad, Marshal Andrei Ivanovich Eremenko, who has stated in his memoirs that Hitler had been right to stubbornly pursue the conquest of Stalingrad in 1942 and that if the Germans had persisted in the execution of their initial plan (a concentrated attack against the north), they would have succeeded in turning the events to their advantage.
On his part, Raymond Cartier declares:
My own personal conclusion, one that is, I dare say, founded upon a very attentive study of the matter, is that Hitler was a great captain and must unreservedly be credited with the major victories achieved by Germany during the first phase of the war, including the Sedan manoeuvre. (As stated in the previously-mentioned text.)