Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  In the visual arts the revolutionary breakthrough had already come about before the First World War, though, as we have remarked, both in Vienna and Munich Hitler had paid scant attention to this development. Before the war the new art could be considered the quirk of a handful of visionaries. But against the background images of upheaval, revolution, and disintegration it took on the cast of an assault upon the traditional European conception of humanity. The Fauves, the Blaue Reiter, the Brücke, or Dada seemed to be as great a menace as the revolution, and in fact were branded by the popular phrase “cultural Bolshevism.” The defensive reaction was therefore just as furious; again what was feared was anarchy, arbitrariness, and formlessness. Modern art was “chaotic hack work”; that was the general opinion.

  The fashionable pessimism of the time found a formula for all this: “the decline of the West.” It was feared the day would come when all these resentments would fuse and lead to exasperated counteraction. For the Germans, with their conservative temperament, reacted violently to these blithe inroads on familiar social and cultural forms. More than elsewhere, their quickly rising opposition could link up with attitudes and arguments of the end of the nineteenth century. The process of technical and economic modernization had been late in coming to Germany, but for that very reason struck with unusual speed and force. In the abruptness, thoroughness, and extent of her industrial revolution, Germany was unexampled among Western nations, as Thorstein Veblen had noted.9 The pace of change consequently stirred violent anxieties and reactions. Yet in contrast to the usual cliché, the Germany that united achievement with neglect, feudal elements with highly progressive measures, authoritarianism with state socialism, in a unique and variegated pattern, must be considered as probably the most modern industrial state in Europe on the eve of the First World War. In the previous twenty-five years it had more than doubled its gross national product. The proportion of the population earning the minimum income subject to taxation had risen from 30 to 60 per cent. Steel production, for example, which had amounted to only half of British production in 1887, had attained nearly double the British production. Colonies had been conquered, cities built, industrial empires created. The number of corporations had risen from 2,143 to 5,340, and the tonnage handled in the port of Hamburg had moved up to third place in the world, still behind New York and Amsterdam, but ahead of London. Along with this, the country was governed soberly and frugally. Despite certain areas of autocracy, it provided a high degree of domestic freedom, administrative justice, and social security.

  There were anachronistic features in the total picture of imperial Germany, but these came from a quarter other than the economic or social reality. Over this hard-working country, seemingly so sure of its future, with rapidly growing metropolises and industrial areas, there arched a peculiarly romantic sky whose darkness was populated by mythic figures, antiquated giants, and ancient deities. Germany’s backwardness was chiefly ideological in nature. A good deal of professorial obscurantism and Teutonic folklorism was involved. So also was the desire for self-improvement on the part of a middle class that longed for “the higher things” even as it so dynamically pursued material goals. Underlying these tendencies on the part of the cultivated middle class was an antagonism to the very modern world it was creating so energetically and successfully. This opposition produced defensive gestures against the new, antipoetic reality, gestures springing not from skepticism but from romantic pessimism. An impulse for counterrevolutionary protest could be detected in these ambivalent attitudes.

  Such writers as Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Eugen Dühring became spokesman for a widespread mood hostile to modern civilization. This mood was not confined to Germany. Elsewhere, too, there was a reaction against the unimaginative, life-affirming optimism of the age, and the present was fiercely condemned both from the right and from the left. Around the turn of the century this note was sounded in the United States as well as in the France of the Dreyfus case. It inspired the formation of the Action Française and the manifestos of Maurras and Barrés. Gabriele d’Annunzio, Enrico Corradini, Miguel de Unamuno, Dmitri Merezhkovski and Vladimir Soloviev, Knut Hamsun, Jacob Burckhardt and D. H. Lawrence, for all their individual differences, became spokesmen for similar fears and antagonisms. But the sharpness of the change in Germany, which shot the country so abruptly from Biedermeier to modernity, with all the painful breaches and partings that such precipitation involves, gave to the protest an especially nysterical high pitch in which anxiety and disgust with modern reality mingled with romantic yearnings for a vanished Arcadia.

  This tradition, too, went far back. Such pangs at the onslaughts of civilization could be traced back to Rousseau or to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, whose hero had already sensed the mighty force approaching “like a thunderstorm, slowly, slowly, but… it will come and strike.” In Germany the spokesmen for this attitude despised progress and professed themselves, with a good measure of pride, unworldly reactionaries; they preferred to be, in Nietzsche’s phrase, untimely onlookers who, as Lagarde charged, longed for a Germany that had never existed and perhaps never would exist. They treated the facts that were held up to them with haughty contempt and roundly ridiculed “one-eyed reason.” With no regard for logic but with flashes of considerable shrewdness, they opposed the stock exchange and urbanization, compulsory vaccination, the global economy and positivistic science, “communistic” movements and the first attempts at heavier-than-air flight. In brief, they were against the whole concept of modern improvement, and summed up all efforts in that direction as a disastrous “decline of the soul.” As “prophets of enraged tradition,” they invoked the day when the mad whirl would be checked and “the old gods would once more rise out of the waves.”

  The values they opposed to the utilitarian ones of the modern age included the sacredness of nature, the loftiness of art, the value of the earthy. They extolled the past, aristocracy, the beauty of death, and the claims of the strong, Caesarean personality. They lamented the decay of German culture while at the same time they were filled with an imperialistic missionary fervor: fear was translated into aggression, and despair sought comfort in the idea.of greatness. The most famous book expressive of this trend, Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher (“Rembrandt as Educator”) had a spectacular success when it was published in 1890 and went through forty printings within two years. The widespread approval for this curious document, approval deriving from panic, antimodernity, and nationalistic missionary delusions suggests that the book itself was an expression of the crisis it so furiously deplored.

  The alliance between these anticivilizational sentiments and nationalism was to have grave consequences. Nearly as portentous was the link between those sentiments and antidemocratic ideas. In opposition to democracy, the anticivilization people joined hands with the theoreticians of Social Darwinism and racism. For both groups saw no good in the liberal Western society which traced its beginnings to the principles of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This antidemocratic current was present, again, in all of Europe but was especially strong in France and Italy. In those countries, as Julien Benda later wrote, the writers around 1890 “realized with astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of arbitrary authority, discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, association of the morality of war and slavery were opportunities for haughty and rigid poses infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple souls than the sentimentalities of Liberalism and Humanitarianism.”10 And although all literary successes not withstanding, unhappiness with modernity remained the affair of a sensitive intellectual minority, these attitudes—to revert to Germany—gradually produced a lasting effect. The youth movement particularly was identified with them and gave them a pure and ardent expression. Friedrich Nietzsche described the tendency as follows: “The whole great tendency of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment, and to the revolution of society, which, by a crude misunderstanding, was considered its consequence
: piety toward everything still in existence sought to transform itself into piety toward everything that has ever existed, only to make heart and spirit full once again and to leave no room for future goals and innovations. The cult of feeling was erected in place of the cult of reason.”11

  Finally, the anticivilizational mood of the period struck up an alliance with anti-Semitism. “German anti-Semitism is reactionary,” wrote Hermann Bahr, the Austrian journalist, in 1894, after intensive study of the question. “It is a revolt of the petty bourgeois against industrial development.”12 In fact, the equating of Judaism and modernity, like the thesis, that Jews had a special talent for the capitalistic free-enterprise economy, was not unfounded. And modernity and capitalistic competition were the very things on which anxiety about the future centered. Werner Sombart, the noted economist, actually spoke of “a Jewish mission to promote the transition to capitalism… and to clear away the still preserved remnants of pre-capitalistic organization.”13 Against the background of this economic development, the old hatred of Jews, which had had a religious basis, evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century into an anti-Semitism built on biological and social prejudices. In Germany the philosopher Eugen Diihring and the failed journalist Wilhelm Marr popularized these attitudes. (The latter wrote a pamphlet significantly titled, “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, Regarded from a Non-denominational Point of View. Vae Victis!”) Anti-Semitism in Germany seemed hardly more intense than in France, let alone in Russia and Austro-Hungary. The anti-Semitic publications of the period repeatedly complained that their ideas, despite their wide dissemination, were not being taken seriously enough. But while irrational nostalgias were skulking about “like masterless dogs,” anti-Semitism served as the vehicle for widespread discontent, precisely because of the half-truths contained in it. With the numerous current theories of a conspiracy of dark powers, or a malignant world-wide disease, the figure of the “Wandering Jew” had a curious credibility. In fact, it was still another embodiment of generalized anxiety. And, on another plane, there were the music dramas of Richard Wagner, which restated the problems of the age in mythic terms. The misgivings about the future, the awareness of the dawning age of gold, racial fears, antimaterialistic impulses, horror of an era of plebeian freedom and leveling, and premonitions of impending doom—all this expressed in highly sensuous art spoke to the cultivated middle classes struggling in the toils of their malaise.

  The war unleashed and radicalized these manifold hostilities of the bourgeois age toward itself. Life seemed bogged down in the banalities of civilization. Now once again great exaltations were possible; the war sanctified violence and wrought glories of destruction. As Ernst Jünger wrote, its flame throwers accomplished a “great cleansing by Nothingness.” War was the perfect negation to the liberal and humanitarian ideal of civilization. The tremendous impact of the war experience, felt throughout Europe and recorded by an extensive European literature, came from this liberating sense of renewal by destruction. Those who considered themselves children of the war had learned the worth of swift, solitary decisions, absolute obedience, and the power of large numbers united by a single idea. The compromising temper of parliamentary systems, their feeble capacity for decision making and frequent self-imposed paralysis invalidated them to a generation that had come away from the war with the myth of a perfect military machine operating at peak performance.

  This complex of attitudes helps explain the stubborn resistance of the Germans to their newly established democratic republic and the roles which had been assigned it within the Versailles peace-keeping system. Still haunted by their anticivilizational philosophies, they could not see the republic and the Versailles Treaty as mere aspects of an altered political situation. To them all this was a fall from grace, an act of metaphysical treason and profound unfaithfulness to true selfhood. Only treachery could have delivered Germany, romantic, pensive, unpolitical Germany, into servitude to that idea of Western civilization which threatened her very essence. Significantly, the Völkische Beobachter called the Treaty of Versailles a “syphilitic peace,” which, like the disease “born of brief, forbidden lust, beginning with a small hard sore, gradually attacks all the limbs and joints, even all the flesh, down to the heart and brain of the sinner.”14 The passionate opposition to “the system” sprang directly from the refusal to participate in the hated “imperium of civilization” with its blabber about human rights, its progressivistic demagoguery, its craze for enlightenment, its superficiality, its corruption, and its vulgar worship of prosperity. The stern German ideals of loyalty, divine rights, love of country, were, as one of the many pamphlets of the time put it, “extinguished mercilessly in the storms of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period.” In their place had come “democracy, the nudist movement, arrant naturalism, and companionate marriage.”

  Throughout the years of the republic the intellectual Right, which continued to hold to the anticivilizational views of the Wilhelmine era, showed a notable tendency toward alliance with the Soviet Union. Or rather, with Russia, regarded as maternal soil, heartland, the “fourth dimension,” the object of indefinite expectations. While Oswald Spengler was calling for struggle against “the England within us,” Ernst Niekisch, another defendant of the nation’s psychological identity, was writing: “To turn our eyes toward the East is already a sign of Germany’s awakening…. The movement toward the West was in itself Germany’s descent; veering to the East will once again be an ascent to German greatness.”

  To “shallow liberalism” Niekisch opposed “the Prusso-Slavic principle”; as against Geneva, headquarters of the League of Nations, he proposed “the Potsdam-Moscow axis.” To the conservative, nationalistic camp, fear that Germanism would be overwhelmed by the materialistic, demythologized threat to world domination. One might speak of this group as national-conservative Bolshevists.

  This first phase of the postwar era was characterized both by fear of revolution and anticivilizational resentments; these together, curiously intertwined and reciprocally stimulating each other, produced a syndrome of extraordinary force. Into the brew went the hate and defense complexes of a society shaken to its foundations. German society had lost its imperial glory, its civil order, its national confidence, its prosperity, and its familiar authorities. The whole system had been turned topsy-turvy, and now many Germans blindly and bitterly wanted back what they thought had been unjustly taken from them. These general feelings of unhappiness were intensified and further radicalized by a variety of unsatisfied group interests. The class of white-color workers, continuing to grow apace, proved especially susceptible to the grand gesture of total criticism. For the industrial revolution had just begun to affect office workers and was reducing the former “non-commissioned officers of capitalism” to the status of last victims of “modern slavery.” It was all the worse for them because unlike the proletarians they had never developed a class pride of their own or imagined that the breakdown of the existing order was going to lead to their own apotheosis. Small businessmen were equally susceptible because of their fear of being crushed by corporations, department stores, and rationalized competition. Another unhappy group consisted of farmers who, slow to change and lacking capital, were fettered to backward modes of production. Another group were the academics and formerly solid bourgeois who felt themselves caught in the tremendous suction of proletarianization. Without outside support you found yourself “at once despised, declassed; to be unemployed is the same as being a communist,” one victim stated in a questionnaire of the period. No statistics, no figures on rates of inflation, bankruptcies, and suicides can describe the feelings of those threatened by unemployment or poverty, or can express the anxieties of those others who still possessed some property and feared the consequences of so much accumulated discontent. Public institutions in their persistent weakness offered no bulwark against the seething collective emotions. It was all the worse because the widespread anxiety no longer, as in the time of L
agarde and Langbehn, was limited to cries of woe and impotent prophecies. The war had given arms to the fearful.

  The vigilante groups and the free corps that were being organized in great numbers, partly on private initiative, partly with covert government support, chiefly to meet the threat of Communist revolution, formed centers of bewildered but determined resistance to the status quo. The members of these paramilitary groups were vaguely looking around for someone to lead them into a new system. At first there was another reservoir of militant energies alongside the paramilitary groups: the mass of homecoming soldiers. Many of these stayed in the barracks dragging out a pointless military life, baffled and unable to say good-bye to the warrior dreams of their recent youth. In the front-line trenches they had glimpsed the outlines of a new meaning to life; in the sluggishly resuming normality of the postwar period they tried in vain to find that meaning again. They had not fought and suffered for years for the sake of this weakend regime with its borrowed ideals which, as they saw it, could be pushed around by the most contemptible of their former enemies. And they also feared, after the exalting sense of life the war had given them, the ignobility of the commonplace bourgeois world.