In particular, a letter from fellow patron Gottfried Grandel suggests the central role that Eckart played in influencing both Hitler and the movement Hitler came to lead. Under Eckart’s tutelage, Hitler was able to assert himself almost immediately after joining the movement.
In January 1920, just two months after Eckart had silenced Karl Harrer with a “gravel voiced” intervention, Hitler forced the party co-founder out of the chairmanship of the party, marginalized Anton Drexler, renamed the party the National Socialist German Workers Party, and framed a twenty-five-point program that would serve as the Nazi Party manifesto for the next quarter century. Hitler’s own sense of authority was cemented by Eckart’s mentoring but also by his ability to draw crowds. Though Hitler held no official decision-making capacity, he was regularly consulted on party decisions, as confirmed by surviving internal documents that bear scribbled comments such as “To be forwarded to Herr Hitler” and “Will be handled personally by Herr Hitler.” In February 1921, Hitler forced the party leadership to cede him significant authority.
When Drexler entered into negotiations to merge the Nazi Party with other nationalist movements, Hitler quashed the plan by threatening to resign from the party. A few weeks later, Hitler again took action when he discovered that Drexler was engaged in another negotiation, this time with Otto Dickel, a professor of philosophy at Augsburg University and a protégé of Gottfried Grandel.
At the time, Hitler was with Eckart in Berlin lobbying members of the conservative National Club for additional financing for the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, which they had acquired the previous December with the financial assistance of Grandel and others. In Hitler’s absence, Drexler invited Dickel to Munich to talk about his book Resurgence of the West, a four-hundred-page paean to resurgent nationalism that had been published a few months earlier and was receiving good press in conservative circles. In Resurgence, Dickel provided a positive, nationalist antidote to the pessimism of Oswald Spengler’s best-selling treatise The Decline of the West. Challenging Spengler’s claim that the Occident was a spent civilization, Dickel argued that a more assertive nationalism, coupled with economic socialism and officially sanctioned anti-Semitism, could revive European culture. The “tyranny” of the Jews, Dickel claimed, was the greatest threat not only to Germany but to the entire continent. “The Jewish question is not just an internal German matter that is more important to one person and less important to the other,” he asserted. “It is at present the most important issue for the Western world.” Dickel claimed that the Jews controlled the press, the arts, and education, and had thereby become the masters and shapers of the Volksseele, the collective soul of the people. Dickel’s solution: purge these mechanisms of control of Jewish influence. Only Aryans should be informing, entertaining, and educating other Aryans. There was not much new here, except that it had been written by a university professor with full academic credentials. The Völkischer Beobachter quickly declared Dickel’s Resurgence “required reading” for all good German nationalists.
On Friday, May 12, 1921, Dickel appeared in the main hall of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus before a packed crowd. Dickel proved to be, in Drexler’s view, not only an insightful intellectual but also an inspiring, even mesmerizing speaker. For two hours, he held the audience captive with his vision for a German future. Afterward, Drexler noted that Dickel, like Hitler, had “a popular touch.” He immediately booked Dickel for several more speaking engagements, and accepted an invitation to bring the Nazi Party leadership to Augsburg to discuss potential cooperation. The journalist Hermann Esser called Hitler in Berlin and informed him of Dickel’s Munich appearance and Drexler’s merger plans. Hitler was furious. He had read Resurgence earlier that year, and had told Drexler it was “rubbish.” Drexler had gone ahead and invited Dickel to speak anyway, and in no less a place than the Hofbräuhaus, the site of Hitler’s own beer hall triumphs. More vexing still, Hitler had not been consulted or even informed about the merger talks. Enraged, he left Berlin for Augsburg.
Hitler arrived to find Dickel holding forth before the assembled Nazi Party leadership. With academic precision, Dickel methodically dissected Hitler’s twenty-five-point party program, underscoring its weaknesses and internal contradictions point by point. He found the party name cumbersome, unwieldly, and, worst of all, misleading. Hitler repeatedly interrupted Dickel with protests and emotional outbursts, and eventually stormed out in a fury. “When, after three tedious hours, I attempted to bring a quick close to these proceedings by exiting the room, the official representatives of the Party who were present not only did not support me, but quite the opposite continued the negotiations,” Hitler complained later. Even Eckart stayed.
When Hitler rose to his feet and fled the meeting room in Augsburg, his instincts almost certainly told him he had no other viable option. His brief political career had been built on bullying, cajoling, and subterfuge. He was a master of the dismissive quip or cutting remark that silenced criticism or diverted attention. When that failed, he drowned dissent in a deluge of rage and rant, or relied on the fisticuffs and boot tips of his brown-shirted storm troopers.
The technique worked well in the overheated clamor of beer halls but was less effective in the more staged setting of a meeting room, especially against rational, measured arguments delivered by an articulate opponent with a demonstrated rhetorical ability. Unlike the professor whom Hitler had chased from the room with his first public tirade back in September 1919, Dickel could match Hitler in word and wit and Hitler knew it. Hitler had shared a podium with him in Augsburg the previous January, and was as aware of Dickel’s strengths as he was of his own limitations, especially when it came to formal education.
Against Dickel’s distinguished academic pedigree, Hitler’s only formal education since dropping out of high school seventeen years earlier had been the crash course in political ideology, recommended by Karl Mayr, at the University of Munich in the spring of 1919. For a full week, commencing Thursday, June fifth, Hitler had sat in the main university lecture hall listening to morning lectures on subjects ranging from “German history since the Reformation” to the “political history” of the Great War to the “economic terms” of the Treaty of Versailles. Afternoons and evenings were devoted to workshops on debating techniques that trained the students in “unified concepts” of German identity and the “sober selection” of facts in framing arguments. “The main part of the course however consists of oral exercises, debating and discussion of catch phrases, and the sequencing of ideas in individual presentations,” the instructions read.
Despite his deficiencies in formal education, Hitler was possessed by a voracious appetite for reading. Some of Hitler’s earliest recollections in Mein Kampf relate to “rummaging” through his father’s library and his own obsession with particular authors. We have similar attestations by Hitler’s acquaintances from his years in Linz, Vienna, and Munich. Hermann Esser recalls that the first piece of furniture for Hitler’s Thiersch Street apartment was a wooden bookcase, which he quickly filled with books from friends and antiquarian bookshops near the Isar River. When this first bookcase was filled, he bought a second, and quickly filled that as well.
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s Harvard-educated associate, remembers surveying Hitler’s bookcases in those years and finding the shelves cluttered with dime-store detective novels, Spamer’s illustrated encyclopedia, a memoir by Sven Hedin, an account of the First World War by Gen. Erich Ludendorff, a copy of Karl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, biographies of Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner, and historical treatises that ranged from a standard world history by Maximilian Yorck von Wartenburg to a treatise by the late-nineteenth-century historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who coined the phrase “Jews are our misfortune,” and a copy of German History, by Heinrich Class, a radical nationalist who wrote under the pseudonym Einhardt.
Friedrich Krohn, who founded a lending library of right-wing literature at the National S
ocialist Institute in Munich, compiled an inventory of titles Hitler borrowed between 1919 and 1921 that suggests a similar eclecticism. The four-page list contains more than a hundred entries on subjects ranging from early church history—Papal Fables of the Middle Ages—to the writings of the acclaimed historian Leopold von Ranke, to firsthand accounts of the Russian Revolution, and numerous works on Austrian territorial sovereignty. There are also works by Montesquieu and Rousseau, Kant’s treatise Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, and Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
Not surprisingly, Hitler devoured the institute’s extensive anti-Semitic holdings, including the classics on the subject: Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, the German translation of Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, condensations of titles such as Luther and the Jews, Goethe and the Jews, Schopenhauer and the Jews, and Wagner and the Jew, and anthologies of anti-Semitic remarks ranging from Martin Luther to Émile Zola. Krohn’s inventory also includes Anton Drexler’s My Political Awakening, Gottfried Feder’s Manifesto for Overcoming the Interest Slavery of Capital, back issues of Dietrich Eckart’s Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German), and a study published by Krohn himself, Is the Swastika Appropriate as the Symbol of the National Socialist Party? “At the time, I became aware of Hitler because of his rather superficial and haphazard choice of readings,” Krohn later observed, “so that I had the impression he could not possibly have ‘digested’ everything that he read.”
Although Krohn’s recollections of Hitler, like those of Kubizek, Esser, and Hanfstaengl, contain questionable assertions, we possess empirical evidence that corroborates their accounts of Hitler’s bibliophilic interests. A rare interior photograph of his Thiersch Street apartment by Heinrich Hoffmann shows Hitler posed in a dark suit before one of his two bookcases—with books piled on top—his arms crossed in an assertively proprietary gesture.
Most significant, of course, we have the books themselves. Of the thirteen hundred or so remnant Hitler volumes in Washington, Providence, and elsewhere, I found at least forty that date from the early 1920s and that provide a snapshot of the intellectual world that lay behind Hitler’s shoulder in the Thiersch Street portrait: biographies of Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Immanuel Kant; a 1919 edition of Heinrich Class’s German History, probably the volume Hanfstaengl noted on Hitler’s shelf; a 483-page treatise on “the future state as a socialist monarchy”; an exposé on British culpability for starting the First World War; a study on the role of destiny in Wagner’s Parsifal; a handful of books on the occult and the mystical, including an interpretation of the prophecies of Nostradamus; a 1918 translation of Nationalism, by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915, with an inscription from an early Nazi Party member indicating the book had been given to Hitler for his thirty-second birthday. And, of course, Hitler’s frontline copies of Osborn and Hymans.
These are the remnant pieces from Hitler’s intellectual world at 41 Thiersch Street, the quiet corner in Munich to which he withdrew after his clamorous beer hall triumphs and street battles. These were the books that fueled his racist tirades, satiated his gnawing intellectual hunger, and bolstered him for his confrontations with the likes of Otto Dickel. In 1921, it was still an unequal fight. Against Hitler’s one-week class at the University of Munich and his two-year crash course in right-wing literature cobbled from the National Socialist Institute’s collection and his own two-bookcase home library, was Dickel, the professor. Against Hitler’s handful of articles for the Völkischer Beobachter, Dickel hoisted a dense three-hundred-page treatise packed with sentences that flaunted his philosophic breadth. “For his part, Schelling, driven by the same dissatisfaction he harbored toward Kant, felt compelled to transcend even Fichte,” Dickel wrote with intellectual sovereignty. At this point, Hitler was still misspelling Schopenhauer with two ps, as indicated in surviving notes to his handwritten speeches.
Hitler’s limitations were not lost on the party members gathered in Augsburg, not even on Dietrich Eckart—in a handwritten note to Eckart the previous December, Hitler had written, “Liber Herr Eckart,” an error equivalent to “Deer Mr. Eckart”—who, for all his loyalty to his “friend,” demonstrably harbored an even greater loyalty to the National Socialist and anti-Semitic causes, as proven by his abandonment of Wolfgang Kapp a year earlier.
After Hitler’s abrupt departure, Dickel continued with his presentation, outlining his vision for the future of a National Socialist movement that could reach beyond Bavaria and lay claim to all of Germany. The party leaders returned to Munich that evening convinced of two things: that Dickel indeed had the capacity to provide both the vision and leadership the Nazi Party needed at the time and, more significant, that Hitler, “as a simple man, despite his diligence,” was not up to the task of leading the movement.
Hitler, with a book at his desk in Nazi Party headquarters, was well aware of his academic deficiencies.
“Hitler was certainly the agitator who knew how to bring in the masses, but not the architect who envisions a plan and form for a new building and undertakes the actual work of placing one stone on top of the next with calm resoluteness,” said Max Maurenbrecher, a pastor and conservative political leader. “He required someone larger behind him whose orders he could carry out.”
Hitler now reread Dickel’s Resurgence with a vengeance, scrutinizing every page for inconsistencies and contradictions, noting specific passages and keeping a running list of Dickel’s ideological, racial, and political transgressions, which he then transcribed verbatim into a blistering refutation. Dickel, he noted, described Karl Marx as an “idealist” and praised Walther Rathenau, Germany’s Jewish foreign minister, for his patriotic inclinations. He observed that Dickel defended the Weimar Republic and denounced the “folly and baseness” of those who sought to undermine its democratic structures.
Hitler found his most damning evidence in a passage on page 81, in which Dickel calls for a moderated form of anti-Semitism, proposing that the German economy be left in Jewish hands. Hitler quoted Dickel: “As businessmen, their sons fertilize the sluggish domestic commerce. They are therefore of inestimable significance for the health of our economy.” Dickel praised Lloyd George for his cooperation with Jewish business interests in London. How, Hitler wondered, could the party leadership “dare to trust” a man who could write such things? “I accuse the Party of not taking the trouble to read through, let alone study, the works of a man to whom you are considering giving such significant influence on the movement,” Hitler raged, and shortly thereafter resigned from the party. “I can and will not be any longer a member of such a movement,” he said.
As intended, Hitler’s resignation precipitated a crisis. The leadership found itself torn between Hitler, with his proven ability to move the masses, and Dickel, with his promise of visionary leadership. They also faced the certainty that Hitler would splinter the party and form his own movement, a potentially fatal blow that might well add the Nazi Party to the long list of other failed political initiatives of those years. The choice was as stark as it was simple: Hitler or Dickel.
On Wednesday, July 13, 1921, Drexler dispatched Eckart to discuss Hitler’s return to the party. The exact details of the discussion between mentor and protégé are not known, but the next day Hitler agreed to rejoin the party, but only on the following terms: “The immediate summoning of a membership meeting within eight days, as of today, with the following agenda: the current leadership of the party will resign and with the new elections I will demand the position of the chairman for myself with dictatorial powers to immediately create an action committee that is to ruthlessly purge the party of the foreign elements that have penetrated it.”
When Gottfried Grandel learned of the Hitler coup, he was dismayed. “I like and value Hitler, but his striving for total power concerns me,” Grandel wrote Eckart in protest. “It’s going to come to a bad end if he doesn’t change his
ways and allow others to share power. We have to keep in mind that violence and cronyism scare away the best comrades and cripple the best forces, and in so doing empowers the less desirable elements.” Grandel argued that Dickel was absolutely vital to the Nazi movement if it ever hoped to extend itself beyond the confines of Bavaria and become a national force. He also expressed concern that the Nazi Party would “degenerate into screaming and destruction,” and that Hitler’s single-minded and fanatical anti-Semitism would bleed attention from more urgent issues. “Anti-Semitism is necessary, but the preparation for the forthcoming German Reich is also important,” Grandel wrote. He urged Eckart to exercise his “sizable and decisive influence” in Munich to bring Hitler into line and the party back into balance.
Eckart was not to be moved. In a front-page editorial in the Völkischer Beobachter, he threw his full ideological weight behind Hitler. “No human being can be more selfless, more willing to sacrifice himself, more devoted, more devout, more upright than Hitler in serving our cause,” Eckart wrote. He praised Hitler for his vehement objections to changing the party name, to altering the party program, to shifting the locus of the Nazi movement away from Munich. “Do we need any further proof as to who deserves our trust, and to what degree he has earned it?” Eckart concluded. “I think not.”
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