Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

That was all still in the future. In spring 1913, after three years in the Men’s Home, Hitler was still drifting, vegetating – not any longer down and out, it is true, and with responsibility to no one but himself, but without any career prospects. He gave the impression that he had still not given up all hope of studying art, however, and told the writing-room regulars in the Men’s Home that he intended to go to Munich to enter the Art Academy.325 He had long said ‘he would go to Munich like a shot’, eulogizing about the ‘great picture galleries’ in the Bavarian capital.326 He had a good reason for postponing any plans to leave for Munich. His share of his father’s inheritance became due only on his twenty-fourth birthday, on 20 April 1913. More than anything else, it might be surmised, the wait for this money was what kept Hitler so long in the city he detested.327 On 16 May 1913 the District Court in Linz confirmed that he should receive the sizeable sum, with interest added to the original 652 Kronen, of 819 Kronen 98 Heller, and that this would be sent by post to the ‘artist’ (Kunstmaler) Adolf Hitler in Meldemannstraße, Vienna.328 With this long-awaited and much-welcome prize in his possession, he needed to delay his departure for Munich no further.

  He had another reason for deciding the time was ripe to leave Vienna. In autumn 1909 he had failed to register for military service, which he would have been due to serve the following spring, after his twenty-first birthday.329 Even if found unfit, he would still have been eligible in 1911 and 1912 to undertake military service for a state he detested so fervently.330 Having avoided the authorities for three years, he presumably felt it safe to cross the border to Germany following his twenty-fourth birthday in 1913. He was mistaken. The Austrian authorities had not overlooked him. They were on his trail, and his avoidance of military service was to cause him difficulties and embarrassment the following year.331 The attempt to put any possible snoopers off the scent in later years is why, once he had become well known, Hitler persistently dated his departure from Vienna to 1912, not 1913.332

  On 24 May 1913, Hitler, carrying a light, black suitcase containing all his possessions, in a better set of clothes than the shabby suit he had been used to wearing, and accompanied by a young, short-sighted, unemployed shop-assistant, Rudolf Häusler, four years his junior, whom he had known for little over three months in the Men’s Home, left the co-residents from the writing-room who had escorted them a short distance, and set off for Munich.333

  The Vienna years were over. They had indelibly marked Hitler’s personality and the ‘basic stock of personal views’ he held.334 But these ‘personal opinions’ had not yet coagulated into a fully-fledged ideology, or ‘world-view’. For that to happen, an even harder school than Vienna had to be experienced: war and defeat. And only the unique circumstances produced by that war and defeat enabled an Austrian drop-out to find appeal in a different land, among the people of his adopted country.

  3

  ELATION AND EMBITTERMENT

  ‘Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time… There now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence.’

  ‘And so it had all been in vain… Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland?… In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.’

  Hitler in Mein Kampf, on his feelings at

  the beginning and end of the First World War

  I

  The First World War made Hitler possible. Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social drop-out would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue. And without the trauma of war, defeat and revolution, without the political radicalization of German society that this trauma brought about, the demagogue would have been without an audience for his raucous, hate-filled message. The legacy of the lost war provided the conditions in which the paths of Hitler and the German people began to cross. Without the war, a Hitler on the Chancellor’s seat that had been occupied by Bismarck would have been unthinkable.

  Hitler, it was once commonplace to presume (at least outside Germany itself), was the logical consequence of deep-seated flaws in the German national character, the culmination of a malformed history, misshapen through a propensity for authoritarianism, militarism and racism. There was never much to be said for such a crude misreading of the past. To be taken far more seriously was the view that the failure of liberalism following the Revolution of 1848, when pressure for sweeping constitutional reform eventually collapsed in disarray, had left the forces of authoritarianism, represented above all by the pre-industrial military-landholding caste, with unshaken dominance and prepared to use any methods, however unscrupulous, to defend their position of power against the pressures for democratization. Hitler’s triumph was accordingly traced back to the legacy of Bismarck’s ‘revolution from above’ – political transformation through war and Unification that left social bases of power intact – producing continuities that linked the Second Reich with the Third, straddling the ill-fated Weimar experiment of a democracy without democrats. The explanation of Hitler was located in a society whose path to modernity had been peculiar, a ‘faulted nation’1 whose institutions, structures, power-relations and mentalities had remained pre-modern, at odds with the swift encroachment of the modern world, the rapidity of competing (and menacing) modern economic, cultural, and political forces.2

  Much of this seems plausible, even persuasive. But as it stands the argument is too neat, too self-contained, ultimately too simple to be compelling. For it has become much clearer that Germany’s social and economic development in the late nineteenth century were far more similar to those of Britain and France – the countries with which it has so often been contrasted – than was once thought. Its problems, by and large, were those of a modern, highly developed, culturally advanced, industrial society. Certainly, Germany encountered tensions in coping with rapid economic and social change. Some were profound. But few were peculiar to Germany, though they did often find acute expression there.

  The constitutional framework of the German Reich did, on the other hand, differ sharply in key respects from that of Britain and France, whose diversely structured but relatively flexible parliamentary democracies offered better potential to cope with the social and political demands arising from rapid economic change. In Germany, the growth of party-political pluralism, which found its representation in the Reichstag, had not been translated into parliamentary democracy. Powerful vested interests – big landholders (most of them belonging to the aristocracy), the officer corps of the army, the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy, even most of the Reichstag parties – continued to block this. The Reich Chancellor remained the appointee of the Kaiser, who could make or break him whatever the respective strength of Reichstag parties. The government itself stood above the Reichstag, independent (at least in theory) of party politics. Whole tracts of policy, especially on foreign and military matters, lay outside parliamentary control. Power was jealously guarded, in the face of mounting pressure for radical change, by the beleaguered forces of the old order. Some of these, increasingly fearful of revolution, were prepared even to contemplate war as a way of holding on to their power and fending off the threat of socialism.

  It is, perhaps, less obvious than was once thought that the very real constitutional and political problems faced by Germany on the eve of the First World War would have been insurmountable without the massive gamble of a war aimed at saving the old order. The prospect, without war, of a gradualist conversion into a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy was not completely illusory.3 But a betting man would probably not have wagered too much on this as the likely outcome. It is hard to see how a gradual change to parliamentarism – something ultimately conceded by Germany’s rulers onl
y when the war had been given up as lost – could have come about when the constitution was so inflexible and the resistance to democratization among powerful groups so entrenched. The rigidly authoritarian political system was ill-equipped to introduce the fundamental reform of its own structures.4

  In short, Germany in the years before the calamity of 1914–18 was in some – though only some – ways more ‘normal’ than was once thought. The Second Reich was not the Third Reich waiting to happen. At the same time, even features common to much of Europe had a flavour or colouring shaped by the particular political culture and social fabric of the German nation-state. While it took the catastrophe of a first world war to produce conditions in which a Hitler was even thinkable, a specifically German political culture that had emerged in the Wilhelmine era (or at any rate strains of it which, however, had before 1914 by no means been dominant) provided the soil in which the seeds of the ideas that National Socialism would later harvest could germinate and then sprout rapidly. Even here, the developments were often shaded rather than clear-cut.5 It would be a mistake to present selectively a catalogue of extremist opinions and attitudes as if they were representative of a whole society. But just as it is a distortion to read into German history an inexorable pattern of development culminating in Hitler, so it would be misleading to imply that Hitler was a bolt from a clear blue sky, that nothing in Germany’s development had prepared the ground for the catastrophe of Nazism; and dangerous to presume that a single individual had so hypnotized the nation that he had driven its otherwise healthy progress off the rails.6

  It was more than anything else the ways in which nationalism had developed in late nineteenth-century Germany that provided the set of ideas that, if often in distorted – even perverted – form, offered the potential for Nazism’s post-war appeal. In particular, the years between 1909 and 1914 saw a strengthening and regrouping of the radical Right that formed a bridge spanning the war to the post-war political world.7 Crucial to the character of German nationalism was the pervasive sense, present already long before the war, of incomplete unity, of persistent, even widening division and conflict within the nation. What, in the changed conditions after the war, Hitler was able most signally to exploit was the belief that pluralism was somehow unnatural or unhealthy in a society, that it was a sign of weakness, and that internal division and disharmony could be suppressed and eliminated, to be replaced by the unity of a national community. The desire for national unity to supplant internal dissension and overcome division was a hallmark of all shadings of nationalist feeling in Imperial Germany. The very superficiality of the unity that Bismarck had constitutionally forged in 1871 and superimposed upon a highly fragmented society – divided by religion, class, and region – encouraged the deliberate ‘nationalisation of the masses’,8 not least through the manufacture of a sense of nationhood which was exclusivist, ringed off against those who did not ‘belong’ to it. Leading historian Heinrich von Treitschke, a prominent spokesman of a sharpened, aggressive national consciousness, an integral nationalism excluding ‘enemies of the Reich’, was one of many well-known intellectuals who helped inordinately to strengthen such ideas among the educated bourgeoisie.9 ‘The Jews are our misfortune’ was among the influential sentiments to which Treitschke lent his weighty name.10 Poles and Jews, Catholics, and especially Social Democrats were all targeted ‘outsiders’ under Bismarck. But the discrimination and repression backfired. The Kulturkampf – Bismarck’s attack on Catholic education, institutions and clergy in Germany during the 1870s – substantially strengthened Catholicism, while the twelve years of the Socialist Law, which imposed bans on socialist associations, meetings and publications, produced a greatly enlarged Social Democratic Party committed to a Marxist programme. By the eve of the First World War, following the 1912 Reichstag election, the SPD was easily the largest party in the Reichstag, provoking alarm and deepening hatred in the upper and middle classes. By this time, the largest socialist movement in Europe, whose Marxist programme sought the demolition of the existing state, stood opposed by a highly aggressive integral nationalism aiming to destroy Marxist socialism.

  That the German nation-state arose from the unification of a number of individual states further encouraged a sense of nationhood which had gained definition from culture and language rather than attaching itself to and emerging from the institutions of a pre-existing unitary state as in the case of England or France. This promoted an ethnic definition of nationhood which could easily slide over (though it by no means always did so) into forms of racism, especially when, as was the case in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, nationalism blended into imperialism and was directed aggressively outwards as well as defensively inwards, voicing shrill demands for a colonial ‘place in the sun’.

  All nationalisms need their myths. In this case, a powerful one was the ‘Reich myth’.11 The very name of the new nation-state, ‘German Reich’, evoked for many the mystical claim to reinstate the first Reich of Frederick Barbarossa – sleeping, according to the saga, in his holy mountain beneath the Kyffhäuser in Thuringia until the rebirth of his medieval Reich. The new aesthetics of nationalism called for the continuity to be symbolized in the gigantic monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I, mainly funded by veterans’ associations, erected on the Kyffhäuser in 1896.12 The ‘Reich myth’ linked national unity and the ending of division to heroic deeds and individual greatness, interpreting previous German history as the prelude to the ultimate attainment of national unity. Schoolbooks glorified the exploits of a pantheon of national heroes, filled with warriors reaching back to the legendary Hermann the Cherusker, the name attached to Arminius, the Germanic leader who inflicted a crushing defeat on three Roman legions in 9 AD. His colossal monument in the Teutoburger Wald, and that of Germania on the Niederwald Monument near Rüdesheim on the Rhine, which so impressed Hitler when he saw it for the first time in 1914, en route for the battlefields of Flanders,13 gave granite expression to the ‘Reich myth’. And once the foundation of the German Reich itself passed from current politics into history, and its architect’s contentious career had been peremptorily ended by the new Kaiser, Bismarck himself became the focal point of a cult which eulogized him as the greatest hero of all, statesman and warrior combined. Hundreds of ‘Bismarck Towers’, initiated by student bodies and erected the length and breadth of the country, represented the national hero as the intended symbol of nation, state and people.14 And the more, after Bismarck’s departure, the Reichstag – initially, together with the monarchy, the embodiment of national unity – came to be seen as the barometer of national division, a house of squabbling politicians and competing parties, the more there appeared to be the need for a new Bismarck, a new national hero.

  A claim to such a role was initially advanced by no less than the Kaiser himself. The caesaristic tendencies, increasingly a feature of German nationalism towards the end of the nineteenth century, were deliberately furthered after 1890 by the promotion of a Hohenzollern cult, focused on the new and ambitious Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and intended to represent in his person ‘the two images of the governing statesman and the sleeping Hero-Kaiser’.15 The new Kaiser, it was implied, would lead Germany to external greatness and eliminate divisions within. Increasingly shrill voices on the nationalist Right demanded nothing less. However, the gap between words and deeds was too great. Disappointment and disillusionment in the Kaiser both helped promote the Bismarck cult and led to increasingly vociferous nationalist opposition, its most radical voices demanding the extension of German power and greatness through expansion and conquest of inferior peoples.

  The assertiveness of German nationalism at the turn of the century was in no small measure aggression born of fear – not just the traditional antagonism towards the French and the growing rivalry with Great Britain, but also the presumed threat seen in the Slavic east, and, internally, the perceived looming menace of Social Democracy, and culturally pessimistic worries about national degeneration and decline.

  In a
climate shaped by an often irrational fear of enemies, within and without, who allegedly threatened the future of the nation, it is not surprising that alongside extreme anti-Marxism, racial ideologies – not just antisemitism, but social Darwinism and eugenics – should increasingly gain currency. None was confined to Germany, of course. Social Darwinism was influential in Britain; the classic lands of racial antisemitism around the turn of the century were Austria-Hungary and France; the region of the most vicious physical persecution of Jews, Russia.16 But in the German context the racial ideas of the populist radical Right, taken over in good part by conservatives, acquired a level of backing that necessarily posed a substantial threat to individuals and minorities.17 The supremacy of the nation over the individual, the stress on order and authority, opposition to internationalism and equality, became increasingly pronounced features of German national feeling.18 With them grew demands for ‘racial consciousness’, and antagonism towards the tiny Jewish minority, overwhelmingly seeking assimilation, increased.19

  Jews could be described, as they were in a widely-read text of the 1890s, as ‘poison for us and will have to be treated as such’, and, in increasingly common bacteriological language, as a ‘pest and a cholera’.20 Such extreme views were by no means representative. Most Jews in Imperial Germany could feel reasonably sanguine about the future, could regard antisemitism as a throwback to a more primitive era that was on the way out.21 But they underestimated both the pernicious ways in which modern racial antisemitism differed from archaic forms of persecution of Jews, however vicious, in its uncompromising emphasis upon biological distinctiveness, its links with assertive nationalism, and the ways it could be taken over and exploited in new types of political mass movements. And they were too ready to overlook the appeal of racist classics like Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the 19th Century), a bestseller since its appearance in 1900, and Theodor Fritsch’s popularizing ‘catechism for antisemites’, his Handbuch der Judenfrage (Handbook of the Jewish Question), which went through twenty-five editions within seven years of publication in 1887.22 While purely antisemitic parties proved too narrowly focused and were in decline in the late Imperial era, racial antisemitism had by then been increasingly taken over by parties, associations, pressure-groups, student unions and interest organizations, and intermingled with the rest of the package of anti-Marxist, imperialist, militaristic, radical nationalism.