The description is so evidently tailor-made for Hitler that it would strain credibility, but there is nonetheless independent evidence of Eckart’s pre-Hitler search for a future leader. In Lorenzaccio, a play that premiered in the autumn of 1916, Eckart recounts the travails of a Florentine prince in search of a leader—Eckart uses the word Führer—who can instill pride and reestablish order in his faltering city-state. Eckart has the Florentine prince despair that there is “no one” (keiner) to be found: “Keiner, keiner, keiner, keiner!” he cries, echoing King Lear’s griefwracked lament “Never, never, never, never, never.”
When Lorenzaccio opened on the stage of the Royal Court Theater in Berlin, the play spoke powerfully to the growing disillusionment with the German leadership, and a war that appeared stalemated in a seemingly permanent and senseless bloodletting.
With the substantial income he received from his theatrical successes, Eckart helped fund right-wing societies such as the Fichte Club in Berlin, and the Thule Society in Munich, which promoted virulent strains of nationalism and anti-Semitism in the guise of Aryan mysticism; Thule was the purported capital of an ancient Aryan empire situated in Scandinavia. In 1917, he financed, with Gottfried Grandel, a wealthy Augsburg businessman, the acquisition of Hoheneichen Verlag and, the next year, he cofinanced Auf gut deutsch.
At the same time, Eckart prowled Munich’s political fringes in search of writing talent. In December 1918, he engaged Alfred Rosenberg, a handsome twenty-one-year-old Baltic German who shared his twin hatreds of Jews and Bolsheviks as well as membership in the Thule Society. The following spring, Eckart hired Hermann Esser, a poison-pen boulevard journalist with an instinct for the scandalous and salacious.
Most notably, Eckart began courting Wolfgang Kapp, a Prussian aristocrat whose bellicose condemnations of the Versailles Treaty and Weimar democracy had made him a leading spokesman of the radical right across Germany. In the same weeks when Eckart and Hitler first met, Eckart traveled to Berlin for a tête-à-tête with Kapp. “I had been admiring your person only from a distance, and suddenly you have become so close to me,” Eckart wrote to Kapp afterward. In March 1920, when Kapp staged a military coup with disaffected units of the German army, Eckart borrowed a plane and pilot from Grandel and flew to Berlin. He invited Hitler to join him.
When the two men arrived at the Hotel Adlon, which was serving as Kapp’s headquarters, Eckart saw Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln, a Hungarian journalist whom Kapp had appointed as press spokesman. Immediately, Eckart knew Kapp was not his man. Trebitsch-Lincoln was a Jew. Eckart took Hitler by the arm. “Let’s go, Adolf,” he allegedly said. “We don’t want anything to do with this sort of thing.” Hitler echoed Eckart’s sentiments in an intelligence report he filed upon his return to Munich. “When I saw and spoke with the press spokesman for the Kapp government,” Hitler wrote, “I knew that this could not be a national revolution and that it would have to fail since the press spokesman was a Jew.”
In the days that followed, Eckart and Hitler watched the Kapp putsch disassemble into chaos and ultimate calamity. Bolshevik strikes paralyzed the city. The rebellious Reichswehr units waffled. The German Reichstag escaped Berlin and reconvened first in Weimar, then in Stuttgart, and continued to run the country. Within a week, the putsch was over. Kapp fled, and the Weimar government returned. Eckart and Hitler remained in Berlin, visiting Eckart’s wealthy friends and, quite likely, attending a performance of Peer Gynt at the National Theater.
Neither Hitler nor Eckart provided details of their time together in Berlin, but subsequent words and actions suggest they established a strong personal bond. “I felt myself drawn to his person, and I soon saw that he was the right man for the entire movement,” Eckart later observed, “and my relationship to him grew more personal during the time of the Kapp putsch.” Though we do not have an equivalent testimonial from Hitler, his actions are as revealing as Eckart’s words. Immediately upon his return to Munich, he resigned his commission in the army, left his quarters at the barracks, and, with a handful of possessions carefully itemized in army records, moved into a second-floor apartment at 41 Thiersch Street, in a quiet neighborhood near the Isar River and just down the street from Eckart’s office.
With Hitler only a few doors away, it was convenient for Eckart to assume a proprietary claim over the younger man’s career. He circulated Hitler among his friends, added his own right-wing gravitas to Hitler’s early beer hall appearances, and stage-managed Hitler’s public persona. With an instinct for the theatrical, Eckart withheld Hitler’s image from the press as a means of heightening the Hitler mystique. Storm troopers were instructed to assault photographers attempting to photograph him; generally, film was merely removed by force, though on occasion, cameras were smashed. When William Randolph Hearst requested a photograph of Hitler to accompany a news story, he was allegedly told it would cost him thirty thousand dollars. If you wanted to see Hitler, you had to go hear him. A more prosaic explanation holds that Hitler’s image was suppressed to avoid his easy identification by the police.
In any event, even as late as 1923, while Hitler was filling the largest venues in Munich and had become a staple in the German press, his physical appearance remained elusive. When the Munich-based political cartoonist Thomas Theodor Heine visited Berlin, he was asked about Hitler’s appearance so frequently that he responded with a full page of Hitler caricatures, rendered in grotesquely overstated dimensions, each focused on a distinctive feature—his mesmerizing gaze, his legendary voice, his fanatic gestures. “But what did Hitler really look like?” Heine mused. “The question must remain unanswered. Hitler does not exist as an individual. He is a condition.”
Most significantly, of course, Eckart scripted Hitler’s role as history’s most infamous anti-Semite. By Hitler’s own admission, he had only passing exposure to anti-Semitic thought or rhetoric before he met Eckart. He claimed that his father would have considered it a sign of “cultural backwardness” to have used the term Jew in the Hitler household. Hitler recalls being “horrified” by the occasional anti-Semitic remark he heard at school. “Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word ‘Jew’ with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions,” Hitler said. “This filled me with a mild distaste, and I could not rid myself of an unpleasant feeling that always came over me whenever religious quarrels occurred in my presence.”
In Vienna, where Hitler was first confronted with the “Jewish question,” he found himself torn between the inbred “tolerance” of his home life and the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the city’s political right, as well as his own firsthand encounters with Jews in the streets of the city. “As always in such cases, I now began to try to relieve my doubts by books,” Hitler observed. “For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life.” He dismissed them as “unscientific.”
Now Hitler’s anti-Semitism took form and fire under Eckart’s tutelage. “Dietrich Eckart himself dealt with the literary and intellectual aspects,” Hitler said, “but mastered the entire subject matter like few others.” In particular, Hitler credits Eckart with forging the link between Jews and Bolshevists.
While there is no way to gauge the specific influences that Eckart had on Hitler’s nascent anti-Semitism, or what Hitler may have imbibed from other associates and his own reading, we are able to gain some sense of the tone and spirit of the Eckart tutelage in a “Conversation” Eckart was writing at the time of his death. In this fragmentary, perverse sort of Socratic dialogue between mentor and protégé, Eckart and Hitler engage in a sparring match of anti-Semitic one-upmanship, each attempting to outdo the other in terms of viciousness. Hitler blames the Jews for the collective excesses and missteps of the Catholic Church: the selling of indulgences is a blatantly “Jewish practice”; the Crusades that allegedly bled Germany of “six million men” and sent “tens of thousands of children” to their deaths were the brainchild of the Jews. “Some religion!” Hitler rage
s. “This wallowing in filth, this hate, this malice, this arrogance, this hypocrisy, this pettifogging, this incitement to deceit and murder—is that a religion? Then there has never been anyone more religious than the devil himself. It is the Jewish essence, the Jewish character, period!”
“Luther expressed his opinion of it plainly enough,” Eckart responds. “He urges us to burn the synagogues and Jewish schools and to heap earth on the remains so that no man would ever again see one stone or cinder of them.”
Hitler adds with conviction, “Burning their synagogues, I am afraid, would have been of damn little avail. The fact of the matter is: even if there had never been a synagogue, never a Jewish school, never an Old Testament, and never a Talmud, the Jewish spirit would still have been there and had its effect.”
Eckart’s “Conversation” runs eighty pages, then ends abruptly. The fragment was published by Hoheneichen Verlag in March 1923, three months after Eckart’s death, while Hitler was on trial following his failed attempt to topple the Bavarian government. Hitler’s biographers have generally disregarded this bizarre document, since it is clearly an invented dialogue, with no evidence that Hitler had a hand in its creation. While there is good reason to dismiss the “Conversation” as a document of record, it not only captures the tone and spirit, if not the verbatim content, of Eckart’s exchanges with Hitler, but also preserves a more significant personal fact: in these eighty handwritten pages, Eckart allows Hitler to match him point for point in terms of fact and vitriol in a rite of passage in which the student shows himself to be every bit the equal of his master.
When Eckart inscribed Peer Gynt to his “dear friend Adolf Hitler” in the autumn of 1921, he had more than two dozen works—plays, poetry anthologies, novels, collections of essays—from which to choose, several of them more appropriate at first glance than the Ibsen epic. He could have presented Hitler a copy of Tannhäuser on Vacation, his 1895 homage to Richard Wagner. And then, of course, there was Lorenzaccio, with its prescient “Führer” references, a copy of which Eckart inscribed to Hitler’s younger sister, Paula, a gift that flattered equally both the giver and the recipient.1 In selecting Peer Gynt for Hitler, however, Eckart intended to be less self-congratulatory than intensely personal. His stage adaptation of Peer Gynt was not only his most successful work, but also the one with which he most closely identified.
When Eckart first read Ibsen’s epic poem in the spring of 1911, he was a forty-four-year-old failed writer who had squandered his artistic promise and his financial resources, and was reduced to sleeping on park benches in Berlin. Only the death of his father and a resulting inheritance delivered him from destitution. The story of Ibsen’s “Nordic Faust” spoke to him. The namesake protagonist sets off into the world brimming with youthful hubris from an isolated Norwegian village intent on becoming “king of the world.” He journeys across Europe and North Africa, through the magical world of trolls and into the courts of kings, leaving ruined lives and betrayed promises in his wake, only to return home at the end of his life in ruin and shame. There he finds his abandoned but faithful lover, Solveig—her name means “path of the soul”—waiting for him and offering him salvation. Eckart was so moved by Peer Gynt’s fate that he wrote to Ibsen’s son in Norway requesting permission to adapt the poem for the German stage.
“I experienced Peer Gynt, not just because of his inner life, but remarkably, to a large degree, by the things that happened to him,” Eckart explained. “Likewise, Solveig’s song plays a melancholy role in my existence, but because that happens to every sensitive soul, there’s nothing unusual about that. It’s only striking in more remote events, for instance with the finger that is cut off—as a dumb boy I once stuck my hand in a lathe so I wouldn’t have to go to school—but most strikingly with the insane asylum. More than twenty years ago I ended up there because of a serious morphine addiction.” Eckart noted a further parallel. In the summer of 1867, while Ibsen was first envisioning his epic hero, Eckart’s parents conceived their son. “Let anyone who wants to laugh about the resulting mysticism,” Eckart wrote. “For me this fact holds a transcendent epiphany, an unshakeable comfort that will endure until the end of my earthly journey.” Eckart went on for fourteen pages like this, noting, in addition, that the authorized German translation by Christian Morgenstern was a travesty of the original. In Eckart’s opinion, Morgenstern, who was Jewish, was little more than a “gravedigger” of language whose lyrics were barely fit for a beer hall newspaper. To underscore his intensely personal identification with the Ibsen character, Eckart had “Peer Gynt” embossed on his stationery. When Eckart gave Peer Gynt to his “dear friend” Adolf Hitler, it was an exceedingly personal gesture.
Hitler, unfamiliar with Peer Gynt when he first met Eckart in the autumn of 1919, would have sensed similar resonances to those that moved Eckart. In his youth, like Gynt, Hitler had been possessed by a wanderlust, fueled in good part by adventure stories such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Karl May’s Ride Across the Desert, and the real-life adventures of the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who in the first decades of the twentieth century traversed some of the earth’s last uncharted regions and returned with riveting accounts of unknown peoples and untold dangers. “As a boy, he often mentioned the name Sven Hedin around the house,” Paula Hitler once recalled.
He followed his explorations through Inner Asia as closely as everything else that seemed of importance for the future of the world. And then—he had barely outgrown his children’s shoes when he was taken with an irrepressible longing for distant places, one after the other, he wanted to go to sea and then into the desert, to throw off the chains that kept his restless wandering spirit contained within a ten-kilometer radius. Initially he remained within these ten kilometers which was a great relief to Mother to whom he was so attached.
Hitler recalled that he first saw Peer Gynt in Berlin, in the company of Eckart, noting with distaste Munich’s preference for the Morgenstern adaptations. Though Hitler mentions nothing more specific about the performance, neither the year nor circumstances, Hitler’s library preserves resonances of that memorable event in the gramophone registry, which lists four separate recordings of Grieg’s incidental music to Peer Gynt, and in the inscribed copy of Eckart’s stage adaptation with its nine woodcut illustrations to individual scenes. Collectively, these artifacts convey the spirit and tone of that evening as Hitler sat with Eckart and listened to the haunting notes of the woodwinds as the curtain rose to reveal a modest hut in the foreground and craggy peaks beyond.
“I want to achieve greatness,” Peer Gynt declares. The opening scene to Dietrich Eckart’s stage adaptation of the Ibsen classic. One of nine etchings included in the edition Eckart inscribed to Hitler.
“I want to achieve greatness,” Peer proclaims to his mother in the opening scene. “I want fame and honor for you and me.” Despite the maternal warning that such ambition must come to no good, Peer sets forth—allegro con brio—into the world to realize his dreams, traversing Europe, voyaging by sea, encountering real men and mythical beasts, and eventually crossing the deserts of North Africa, where he settles in Morocco amid wealth and splendor. Along the way, Peer Gynt forges a path of human destruction in his single-minded bid to become “king of the world.” Gynt betrays friendships, commits murder, and seduces and then abandons Solveig, a village maiden who patiently awaits his promised return. When Peer Gynt finally returns, ruined in body and soul and on the verge of death, he seeks absolution.
“Denounce my crimes!” he demands, as he stands before her. “Denounce my crimes!”
Unaware of the dimensions of his crimes and transgressions, Solveig responds, “I don’t know what you are talking about! You kept your promise, my loved one, you returned.” The rest, she says, must be left to God. As Solveig takes Peer into her arms, he drifts into a delusional state thick with Freudian innuendo. “Lover and mother, so you will protect me from doom?” he gasps. “Tak
e me, protect me within your womb.” Accepting her role as a mother-lover, Solveig absolves Peer of his sins and, in the closing scene, sings a lullaby as a beam of light bathes the couple in a luminous circle.
Excerpt from Hitler’s gramophone registry listing three of his four recordings of Edvard Grieg’s incidental music to Peer Gynt
Eckart generally remains true to the Ibsen original, but in the final scene he adds a theatrical touch that significantly shifts the story’s moral dramaturgy. “Only when he lies dying in Solveig’s lap, illuminated by the rising sun, should he turn his face to the audience,” Eckart instructs. “It’s no longer the tortured, fear-stricken face of the old Peer, but rather the fresh, young, clear countenance of the young Peer.” In that instant, a lifetime of sin has been washed clean. Peer is absolved, restored to the purity and innocence of youth. It proved to be a singularly emotive theatrical turn, as suggested by the reviews of the premiere performance. “When the curtains closed for the last time on the final scene, the audience was so moved that it took some time before they began to applaud,” one critic wrote, noting that the applause then rose to a deafening roar. “It went right to the heart,” noted another critic. “It shook and moved all of one’s emotion.” Two decades later, Hitler was still talking about the performance and in a bizarre reprise, ended his life in a Gyntian mise-en-scène, broken in spirit and body with his companion Eva Braun on a sofa and a portrait of his mother on the wall but without a hint of remorse.
At first glance, there seems to be no readily evident reason why Eckart waited until October 1921 to inscribe a copy of his Peer Gynt to Hitler. By then, the men had known each other for two years. The explanation, as I was to discover among Eckart’s papers, was as much political as it was personal, with Peer Gynt providing a bookend, both literally and figuratively, to the first major crisis of Hitler’s political career in which Eckart appears to have played the role of kingmaker, as suggested from the several dozen Eckart letters, essays, receipts, and other documents from Eckart’s private papers that I was shown in Berchtesgaden.2 “It’s barely a year-and-a-half since I first spoke at the party meeting,” Eckart observes with proprietary ease in an undated letter from mid-1921. “There were about fifteen people present, eight of whom I brought with me, and today every meeting draws thousands upon thousands.” Eckart goes on to detail his central role in the acquisition of the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer) the previous December, noting that he had personally vouched for a 60,000-mark loan from one donor and committed another 50,000 marks of his own money. A number of remnant IOUs from the Nazi Party to Eckart attest to his ongoing patronage of the movement almost until his death in late autumn 1923.
Hitler's Private Library Page 5