On November 23, 1939, when his faith in his own power was at its height, he himself made the astonishing remark to his military commanders that in 1919 he had entered politics only after a long struggle with himself. That had been, he said, “the most difficult decision of all.” And although this was said to emphasize that beginnings are always the hardest part of a venture, it also reveals his strong inner reservations about a political career. One element may have been the traditional German contempt for politics as something by nature lower than creative activity. He would have thought a political career demeaning by comparison with his unattainable youthful dream of becoming “one of the foremost architects of Germany, if not the foremost architect.” Even at the climax of the war he remarked that he would far sooner have gone to Italy as an “unknown painter” and that only the deadly menace to his own race had forced him on to the road of politics, which was fundamentally alien to him.
If this was so, we can understand why not even the revolution drove him to enter the fray on one side or the other. The November events, the collapse of all authority, the downfall of the dynasties and the prevailing chaos had certainly challenged his conservative instincts. But even these violent changes did not rouse him to active protest. Even stronger than his contempt for political affairs was his repugnance for riot and rebellion. Bourgeois that he was, he was not one to go into the streets. Even twenty-five years later, he told his dinner companions, referring to his experiences at the time of the November revolution, that rebels were no more or less than criminals. He could see in them nothing but an “asocial lot”; the best thing to do with them was to kill them.
Only when he discovered his own oratorical powers did he overcome his qualms against the political life and his fear of odium as a disturber of public order. Even so, when he leaped on the stage as a revolutionary personality, he became, as he justified himself four years later in his trial before the Munich People’s Court, a revolutionary against the revolution. But was he any the less an unsociable, easily depressed artist personality whom the peculiar circumstances of the times, together with a monstrous special gift, had propelled into a realm for which he was never intended? The question will arise repeatedly in the course of this biography, and repeatedly we will be tempted to ask whether politics ever meant more to him than the means he employed to practice it: rhetorical overpowering of his enemies, for example; the histrionics of processions, parades, and Party Days; the spectacle of military force applied in war.
There is no denying that the collapse of the old order opened the way for him to enter politics. As long as the bourgeois world persisted and politics was a bourgeois career, he had few prospects of winning a name in it. The formal strictures of that sphere would all have operated against him.
The year 1918 brought down the barriers. “I could not help but laugh at the thought of my own future which only a short time ago had given me such bitter concern,” Hitler wrote.72
And so he set foot on the political stage.
Interpolation I
The Great Dread
It is repeatedly charged that we are seeing ghosts.
Völkischer Beobachter, March 24, 1920
At the end of the First World War the victory of the democratic idea seemed beyond question. Whatever its weaknesses might be, it rose above the turmoil of the times, the uprisings, the dislocations, and the continual quarrels among nations as the unifying principle of the new age. For the war had not only decided a claim to power. It had at the same time altered a conception of government. After the collapse of virtually all the governmental structures of Central and Eastern Europe many new political entities had emerged out of turmoil and revolution. And these for the most part were organized on democratic principles. In 1914 there had been only three republics alongside of seventeen monarchies in Europe. Four years later there were as many republics as monarchies. The spirit of the age seemed to be pointing unequivocally toward various forms of popular rule.
Only Germany seemed to be opposing this mood of the times, after having been temporarily gripped and carried along by it. Those who would not acknowledge the reality created by the war organized into a fantastic swarm of völkisch [racist-nationalist] parties, clubs, and free corps. To these groups the revolution had been an act of treason; parliamentary democracy was something foreign and imposed from without, merely a synonym for “everything contrary to the German political will,” or else an “institution for pillaging created by Allied capitalism.”1
Germany’s former enemies regarded the multifarious symptoms of nationalistic protest as the response of an inveterately authoritarian people to democracy and civic responsibility. To be sure, the Germans were staggering beneath terrible political and psychological burdens: there was the shock of defeat, the moral censure of the Versailles Treaty, the loss of territory and the demand for reparations, the impoverishment and spiritual undermining of much of the population. Nevertheless, the conviction remained that a great moral gap existed between the Germans and most of their neighbors. Full of resentment, refusing to learn a lesson, this incomprehensible country had withdrawn into its reactionary doctrines, made of them a special virtue, adjured Western rationality and humanity, and in general set itself against the universal trend of the age. For decades this picture of Germany dominated the discussion on the reasons for the rise of National Socialism.
But the image of democracy victorious was also deceptive. The moment in which democracy seemed to be achieving historic fulfillment simultaneously marked the beginning of its crisis. Only a few years later the idea of democracy was challenged in principle as it had never been before. Only a few years after it had celebrated its triumph it was overwhelmed or at least direly threatened by a new movement that had sprung to life in almost all European countries.
This movement recorded its most lasting successes in countries in which the war had aroused considerable discontent or made it conscious of existing discontent, and especially in countries in which the war had been followed by leftist revolutionary uprisings. In some places these movements were conservative, harking back to better times when men were more honorable, the valleys more peaceable, and money had more worth; in others these movements were revolutionary and vied with one another in their contempt for the existing order of things. Some attracted chiefly the petty bourgeois elements, others the peasants, others portions of the working class. Whatever their strange compound of classes, interests, and principles, all seemed to be drawing their dynamic force from the less conscious and more vital lower strata of society. National Socialism was merely one variant of this widespread European movement of protest and opposition aimed at overturning the general order of things.
National Socialism rose from provincial beginnings, from philistine clubs, as Hitler scornfully described them, which met in Munich bars over a few rounds of beer to talk over national and family troubles. No one would have dreamed that they could ever challenge, let alone outdo, the powerful, highly organized Marxist parties. But the following years proved that in these clubs of nationalistic beer drinkers, soon swelled by disillusioned homecoming soldiers and proletarianized members of the middle class, a tremendous force was waiting to be awakened, consolidated, and applied.
In Munich alone there existed, in 1919, nearly fifty more or less political associations, whose membership consisted chiefly of confused remnants of the prewar parties that had been broken up by war and revolution.
They had such names as New Fatherland, Council of Intellectual Work, Siegfried Ring, Universal League, Nova Vaconia, League of Socialist Women, Free Union of Socialist Pupils, and Ostara League. The German Workers’ Party was one such group. What united them all and drew them together theoretically and in reality was nothing but an overwhelming feeling of anxiety.
First of all, and most immediate, there was the fear of revolution, that grande peur which after the French Revolution had haunted the European bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth century. The notion that revolutions w
ere like forces of nature, elemental mechanisms operating without reference to the will of the actors in them, following their own logic and leading perforce to reigns of terror, destruction, killing, and chaos—that notion was seared into the public mind. That was the unforgettable experience, not Kant’s belief that the French Revolution had also shown the potentiality for betterment inherent in human nature. For generations, particularly in Germany, this fear stood in the way of any practical revolutionary strivings and produced a mania for keeping things quiet, with the result that every revolutionary proclamation up to 1918 was countered by the standard appeal to law and order.
This old fear was revived by the pseudorevolutionary events in Germany and by the menace of the October Revolution in Russia. Diabolical traits were ascribed to the Reds. The refugees pouring into Munich described bloodthirsty barbarians on a rampage of killing. Such imagery had instant appeal to the nationalists. The following article from one of Munich’s racist newspapers is a fair example of the fears of the period and the way these were expressed:
Dreadful times in which Christian-hating, circumcised Asiatics everywhere are raising their bloodstained hands to strangle us in droves! The butcheries of Christians by the Jew Issachar Zederblum, alias Lenin, would have made even a Genghis Khan blush. In Hungary his pupil Cohn, alias Bela Kun, marched through the unhappy land with a band of Jewish terrorists schooled in murder and robbery, to set up, among brutal gallows, a mobile machine gallows and execute middle-class citizens and peasants on it. A splendidly equipped harem served him, in his stolen royal train, to rape and defile honorable Christian virgins by the dozen. His lieutenant Samuely has had sixty priests cruelly butchered in a single underground room. Their bellies are ripped open, their corpses mutilated, after they have been plundered to their blood-drenched skin. In the case of eight murdered priests it has been established that they were first crucified on the doors of their own churches! The very same atrocious scenes are… now reported from Munich.2
Yet the horrifying reports of atrocities in the East were not unfounded and were confirmed by credible witnesses. One of the chiefs of the Cheka, the Latvian M. Latsis, at the end of 1918 established the principle that sentences were not to be determined by guilt or innocence but social class. “We are engaged in exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. You need not prove that this or that man acted against the interests of Soviet power. The first thing you have to ask an arrested person is: To what class does he belong, where does he come from, what kind of education did he have, what is his occupation? These questions are to decide the fate of the accused. That is the quintessence of the Red Terror.”3
In what may have been a direct rejoinder to this, National Socialist Party headquarters issued the following proclamation: “Will you wait until you see thousands of people hanging from the lamp posts in every city? Will you wait until, as in Russia, a Bolshevistic murder commission sets to work in every city…? Will you wait until you stumble over the corpses of your wives and children?” The threat of revolution no longer had to be pictured as emanating from a few lonely, harried conspirators. It could now be seen coming from great, uncanny Russia, the “brutal power colossus,” as Hitler called it.4 Moreover, Bolshevik propaganda heralded the imminent conquest of Germany by the united strength of the international proletariat; this would be the decisive step on the road to world revolution. The obscure activities of Soviet agents, the continual unrest, the soviet revolution in Bavaria, the Ruhr uprising of 1920, the revolts in Central Germany during the following year, the risings in Hamburg and later in Saxony and Thuringia, were all too consistent with the Soviet regime’s threat of permanent revolution.
This threat dominated Hitler’s speeches of the early years. In garish colors he depicted the ravages of the “Red squads of butchers,” the “murderous communists,” the “bloody morass of Bolshevism.” In Russia, he told his audiences, more than thirty million persons had been murdered, “partly on the scaffold, partly by machine guns and similar means, partly in veritable slaughterhouses, partly, millions upon millions, by hunger; and we all know that this wave of hunger is creeping on… and see that this scourge is approaching, that it is also coming upon Germany.” The intelligentsia of the Soviet Union, he declared, had been exterminated by mass murder, the economy utterly smashed. Thousands of German prisoners-of-war had been drowned in the Neva or sold as slaves. Meanwhile, in Germany the enemy was boring away at the foundations of society “in unremitting, ever unchanging undermining work.” The fate of Russia, he said again and again, would soon be ours!5 And years later, when he was already in power, he spoke again of “the horror of the Communist international hate dictatorship” that had preyed on his mind at the beginning of his career: “I tremble at the thought of what would become of our old, overcrowded continent if the chaos of the Bolshevistic revolution were to be successful.”
National Socialism owed a considerable part of its emotional appeal, its militancy, and its cohesion to this defensive attitude toward the threat of Marxist revolution. The aim of the National Socialist Party, Hitler repeatedly declared, “is very brief: Annihilation and extermination of the Marxist world view.” This was to be accomplished by an “incomparable, brilliantly orchestrated propaganda and information organization” side by side with a movement “of the most ruthless force and most brutal resolution, prepared to oppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater terrorism.” At about the same time, for similar reasons, Mussolini was founding his Fasci di combattimento. Henceforth, the new movements were to be identified by the general name of “Fascism.”
But the fear of revolution would not have been enough to endow the movement with that fierce energy, which for a time seemed to stem the universal trend toward democracy. After all, for many people revolution meant hope. A stronger and more elemental motivation had to be added. And in fact Marxism was feared as the precursor of a far more comprehensive assault upon all traditional ideas. It was viewed as the contemporary political aspect of a metaphysical upheaval, as a “declaration of war upon the European… idea of culture.” Marxism itself was only the metaphor for something dreaded that escaped definition.
Anxiety was the permanent emotion of the time. It sprang from the intuition that the end of the war meant not only the end of familiar prewar Europe with its grandeur and its urge to world domination, its monarchies, and gilt-edged securities, but also the end of an era. Along with the old forms of government, the accustomed framework of life was being destroyed. The unrest, the radicalism of the politicalized masses, the disorders of revolution were interpreted as the afterpains of the war and simultaneously as harbingers of a new, strange, and chaotic age. “That is why the foundations of life quake beneath our feet.”6
Rarely has any age been so aware of its own transitional state. In accelerating the process, the war also created a general consciousness of it. For the first time Europe had a glimpse of what awaited it. Pessimism, so long the basic attitude of an elite minority, abruptly became the mood of the whole period.
The war had led to gigantic new forms of organization, which helped the capitalistic system attain its full development. Rationalization and the assembly line, trusts and tycoons pitilessly exposed the structural inferiority of smaller economic units.
The trend to bigness was also expressed in the extraordinary increase in cartels—from several hundred to approximately twenty-five hundred—so that in industry “only a few outsiders” remained unattached to some cartel. The number of independent businesses in the major cities had diminished by half in the thirty years before the World War. Now that war and inflation had destroyed their material base, their number dwindled more rapidly. The cruelty of the corporation, which absorbed, consumed, and dropped the individual, was felt more keenly than ever before. Fear of individual economic disaster became generalized. A considerable literature grew up around the theme that the individual’s function was disappearing, that man was becoming a cog in a machine he could not understan
d. “In general, life seems full of dread.”7
This fear of a standardized, termitelike existence was expressed in the hostility to increasing urbanization, to the canyon streets and grayness of the cities, and in lamentations over the factory chimneys cropping up in quiet valleys. In the face of a ruthlessly practiced “transformation of the planet into a single factory for the exploitation of its materials and energies,” belief in progress for the first time underwent a reversal. The cry arose that civilization was destroying the world, that the earth was being made into “a Chicago with a sprinkling of agriculture.”.
The early issues of the Völkische Beobachter give shrill voice to this panic. “How large must our cities still grow before a retroactive movement sets in, before the tenements are torn down, the accumulations of stone shattered, the caves ventilated and… gardens planted among the walls so that men can catch their breath again?” Prefabricated housing, Le Corbusier’s machines for living, the Bauhaus style, tubular steel furniture—the “technical matter-of-factness” on which such creations plumed themselves were a further threat to the traditionbound, who spoke of all this as “jailhouse style.” The romantic hostility to the modern world also gave rise to a large back-to-the-country movement in the twenties. The Artaman Leagues contrasted the earthbound happiness of the simple life to the woes of “asphalt civilization” and hailed the comfort of natural ties against the alienation of the urban world.
The abrupt and challenging breach with previous standards of morality touched people at their most sensitive point. Marriage, as a book titled Sexual Ethics of Communism (by E. Friedländer) stated, was nothing but the “evil spawn of capitalism”; the revolution would do away with it along with any prohibition against abortion, homosexuality, bigamy, or incest. But many of the members of the respectable middle classes still felt themselves guardians of time-honored morality and took such attacks as personal threats. In their minds marriage as a mere matter of civil registration, as it was understood in the Soviet Union, was just as intolerable as the “glass of water theory” that sexual desire, like thirst, was a natural appetite and should be satisfied without fuss. The fox trot and brief skirts; pleasure seeking in “Berlin, the national sewer”; the “swinish pictures” of Magnus Hirschfeld, the scientific explorer of sexual pathology; or the prototype of the stylish young man about town (“the rubber cavalier with sleeked-back hair, crepe-soled shoes and Charleston trousers”) aroused a shocked resentment in the popular consciousness, which in hindsight is hard to grasp and requires some effort on the historian’s part. The theater during the twenties staged celebrated provocations, treating of parricide, incest, and crime. There was a strong streak of self-mockery, typified by the final scene of the Brecht-Weill opera Mahagonny, where the actors step up to the footlights and raise placards reading “Up with the chaotic state of our cities,” “Up with love for hire,” “Up with honor for assassins,” or “Up with the immortality of vulgarity.”8
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