Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  It remained for Hitler to bring together these feelings and to appoint himself their spearhead. Indeed, Hitler regarded as a phenomenon seems like the synthetic product of all the anxiety, pessimism, nostalgia, and defensiveness we have discussed. For him, too, the war had been education and liberation. If there is a “Fascistic” type, it was embodied in him. More than any of his followers he expressed the underlying psychological, social, and ideological motives of the movement. He was never just its leader; he was also its exponent.

  His early years had contributed their share to that experience of overwhelming anxiety which dominated his intellectual and emotional constitution. That lurking anxiety can be seen at the root of almost all his statements and reactions. It had everyday as well as cosmic dimensions. Many who knew him in his youth have described his pallid, “timorous” nature, which provided the fertile soil for his lush fantasies. His “constant fear” of contact with strangers was another aspect of that anxiety, as was his extreme distrust and his compulsion to wash frequently, which became more and more pronounced in later life. The same complex is apparent in his oft-expressed fear of venereal disease and his fear of contagion in general. He knew that “microbes are rushing at me.”15 He was ridden by the Austrian Pan-German’s fear of being overwhelmed by alien races, by fear of the “locust-like immigration of Russian and Polish Jews,” by fear of “the niggerizing of the Germans,” by fear of the Germans’ “expulsion from Germany,” and finally by fear that the Germans would be “exterminated.” He had the Völkische Beobachter print an alleged French soldier’s song whose refrain was: “Germans, we will possess your daughters!” Among his phobias were American technology, the birth rate of the Slavs, big cities, “industrialization as unrestricted as it is harmful,” the “economization of the nation,” corporations, the “morass of metropolitan amusement culture,” and modern art, which sought “to kill the soul of the people” by painting meadows blue and skies green. Wherever he looked he discovered the “signs of decay of a slowly ebbing world.” Not an element of pessimistic anticivilizational criticism was missing from his imagination.16

  What linked Hitler with the leading Fascists of other countries was the resolve to halt this process of degeneration. What set him apart from them, however, was the manic single-mindedness with which he traced all the anxieties he had ever felt back to a single source. For at the heart of the towering structure of anxiety, black and hairy, stood the figure of the Jew: evil-smelling, smacking his lips, lusting after blonde girls, eternal contaminator of the blood, but “racially harder” than the Aryan, as Hitler uneasily declared as late as the summer of 1942.17 A prey to his psychosis, he saw Germany as the object of a world-wide conspiracy, pressed on all sides by Bolshevists, Freemasons, capitalists, Jesuits, all hand in glove with each other and directed in their nefarious projects by the “bloodthirsty and avaricious Jewish tyrant.” The Jew had 75 per cent of world capital at his disposal. He dominated the stock exchanges and the Marxist parties, the Gold and, Red Internationals. He was the “advocate of birth control and the idea of emigration.” He undermined governments, bastardized races, glorified fratricide, fomented civil war, justified baseness, and poisoned nobility: “the wirepuller of the destinies of mankind.”18 The whole world was in danger, Hitler cried imploringly; it had fallen “into the embrace of this octopus.” He groped for images in which to make his horror tangible, saw “creeping venom,” “belly-worms,” and “adders devouring the nation’s body.” In formulating his anxiety he might equally hit on the maddest and most ludicrous phrases as on impressive or at least memorable ones. Thus he invented the “Jewification of our spiritual life,” “the mammonization of our mating instinct,” and “the resulting syphilization of our people.” He could prophesy: “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”19

  The appearance of Hitler signaled a union of those forces that in crisis conditions had great political potential. The Fascistic movements all centered on the charismatic appeal of a unique leader. The leader was to be the resolute voice of order controlling chaos. He would have looked further and thought deeper, would know the despairs but also the means of salvation. This looming giant had already been given established form in a prophetic literature that went back to German folklore. Like the mythology of many other nations unfortunate in their history, that of the Germans has its sleeping leaders dreaming away the centuries in the bowels of a mountain, but destined some day to return to rally their people and punish the guilty world. Into the twenties pessimistic literature repeatedly called up these longings, which were most effectively expressed in the famous lines of Stefan George:

  He shatters fetters, sweeps the rubble heaps

  Back into order, scourges stragglers home

  Back to eternal justice where grandeur once more is grand,

  Lord once more lord. Rule once more rule. He pins

  The true insigne to the race’s banner.

  Through the storms and dreadful trumpet blasts

  Of reddening dawn he leads his band of liegemen

  To daylight’s work of founding the New Reich.20

  Around the same time, Max Weber also sketched a picture of the towering personality of the leader with what he termed “plebiscitary legitimacy” and the claim to “blind” obedience. But Weber saw such a leader as a counterforce to the inhuman bureaucratic organizational structures of the future. We would have to probe more deeply than is possible within the present context if we were to examine all the many sources from which the idea of the leader took support.

  It is clear, however, that within the Fascistic movements the idea was again heavily influenced by the war. For those movements did not think of themselves as political parties in the traditional sense, but as militant ideological groups, as “parties above the parties.” And the struggle they took up with their sinister symbols and resolute miens was nothing but the prolongation of the war into politics with virtually unchanged means. “At the moment we are in the continuation of the war,” Hitler repeatedly proclaimed. The leader cult, viewed in terms of the “fiction of permanent warfare,” was in one sense the translation of the principles of military hierarchy to political organization. The leader was the army officer lifted to superhuman heights and endowed with supernal powers. Those powers were conferred by the craving to believe and the yearning to surrender self. The tramp of marching feet on all the pavements of Europe attested to the belief in militaristic models as offering a solution to the problems of society. It was the future-minded youth in particular who were drawn to these models, having learned through war, revolution, and chaos to prize “geometrical” systems.

  The same factors underlay the paramilitary aspects of the Fascistic movements, the uniforms, the rituals of saluting, reporting, standing at attention. The insigne of the movements all came down to a few basic motifs—various forms of crosses (such as the St. Olaf’s cross of the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling and the red St. Andrew’s cross of Portugal’s National Syndicalists), also arrows, bundles of fasces, scythes. These symbols were constantly displayed on flags, badges, standards, or armbands. To some extent they were meant as defiance of the boring old bourgeois business of tailcoats and stiff collars. But primarily they seemed more in keeping with the brisk technological spirit of the age. Then, too, uniforms and military trappings could conceal social differences and bring some dash to the dullness and emotional barrenness of ordinary civilian life.

  The combination of petty bourgeois and military elements gave the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) a peculiar dual character from the very start. This duality was apparent in the organizational division between the Storm Troops (SA) and the Political Organization (PO). It was apparent also in the confusing disparate character of the membership. For the party was made up of idealists as well as of social outcasts, of semicrimi
nals as well as of opportunists. The oddly equivocal conservatism of most Fascistic organizations can also be traced to this initial dualism. For although these organizations were officially bent on preserving the troubled and violated world order, they nevertheless manifested—wherever they had the power—a desire for change without regard to tradition. An odd mixture of medievalism and modernity was typical of them all: they considered themselves a vanguard but stood with their backs to the future; they would plant their folkloristic villages on the asphalt pavements of a coercive totalitarian state. Once again, they dreamed the faded dreams of their forefathers and hailed a past in whose mists they saw glimmerings of a glorious future of territorial expansion: a new Roman Empire, a Spain of Catholic majesty, a Greater Belgium, Greater Hungary, Greater Finland. Hitler’s fling at hegemony, carefully planned, cold-blooded, and realistic as it was, and dependent on the most modern weaponry, was justified in the name of a quaint and vanished Germanism. The world was to be conquered for the sake of thatched roofs and an upright peasantry, for folk dances, celebrations of the winter solstice, and swastikas. Thomas Mann spoke of an “explosion of antiquarianism.”

  But behind it there was always more than muddled reactionary impulses. Hitler was by no means interested in bringing back the good old days. The sentimental reactionaries who in persistent blindness supported him thought he would reinstitute the old feudal social structure. Hitler had no such ideas. What he proposed to overcome was the sum of human alienation caused by the development of civilization.

  He was not counting on doing so by economic or social means, which he despised. Like Marinetti, one of the spokesmen of Italian Fascism, he regarded European socialism as a “despicable fuss over the rights of the belly.” Instead, he aimed at inner renewal out of the blood and the dark realms of the soul. What was wanted was not politics but the restoration of instinct. In its aims and slogans Fascism was not a class revolution but a cultural revolution; it claimed to serve not the emancipation but the redemption of mankind. One reason for its considerable appeal may well have been that it sought utopia where all paradises are located by the natural inclination of the human mind: in mythic, primordial states of the past. The prevailing fear of the future only strengthened the tendency to shift all apotheoses backward. In Fascistic conservatism, at any rate, the desire was to reverse historical development and to return once more to the starting point, to those better, more nature-oriented, harmonious times before the human race began to go astray. In a 1941 letter to Mussolini, Hitler wrote that the last 1,500 years had been nothing but an interruption, that history was on the point of “returning to the ways of yore.” Without attempting, perhaps, to restore the conditions of the past, it craved the past’s system of values, the style, the austerity, the morality, as a defense against the forces of dissolution thrusting from all sides. “At last a bulwark against approaching chaos!” as Hitler exclaimed.

  In spite of all its revolutionary rhetoric, National Socialism could never conceal its basically defensive attitude, which contrasted perceptibly with the brash gladiatorial poses its advocates loved to adopt. Konrad Heiden called the Fascistic ideologies “boasts while in flight”; they were, he said, “fear of ascent, of new winds and unknown stars, a protest by the flesh, craving its rest, against the restless spirit.” And Hitler himself, soon after the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, remarked that he now understood how the Chinese had come to surround themselves with a wall. He, too, was tempted “to wish for a gigantic wall to shield the new East against the Central Asiatic masses. In spite of all history, which teaches that a people’s vigor slackens off in a bulwarked area.”

  The success of Fascism in contrast to many of its rivals was in large part due to its perceiving the essence of the crisis, of which it was itself the symptom. All the other parties affirmed the process of industrialization and emancipation, whereas the Fascists, evidently sharing the universal anxiety, tried to deal with it by translating it into violent action and histrionics. They also managed to leaven boring, prosaic everyday life by romantic rituals: torchlight processions, standards, death’s heads, battle cries, and shouts of Heil, by the “new marriage of life with danger,” and the idea of “glorious death.” They presented men with modern tasks disguised in the costumery of the past. They deprecated material concerns and treated “politics as an area of self-denial and sacrifice of the individual for an idea.” In taking this line they were addressing themselves to deeper needs than those who promised the masses higher wages. Ahead of all their rivals, the Fascists appeared to have recognized that the Marxist or liberal conception of man as guided only by reason and material interests was a monstrous abstraction.

  Thus Fascism served the craving of the period for a general upheaval more effectively than its antagonists. It alone seemed to be articulating the feeling thai everything had gone wrong, that the world had been led into an impasse. That Communism made fewer converts was not due solely to its stigma of being a class party and the agency of a foreign power. Rather, Communism suffered from a vague feeling that it represented part of the wrong turn the world had taken and part of the disease it pretended it could cure. Communism seemed not the negation of bourgeois materialism but merely its obverse, not the superseding of an unjust and inadequate system, but its mirror image turned upside down.

  Hitler’s unshakable confidence, which often seemed sheer madness, was based on the conviction that he was the only real revolutionary, that he had broken free of the existing system by reinstating the rights of human instincts. In alliance with these interests, he believed, he was invincible, for the instincts always won out in the end “against economic motivation, against the pressure of public opinion, even against reason.” No doubt the appeal to instinct brought out a good deal of human baseness. No doubt what Fascism wanted to restore was often a grotesque parody of the tradition they purported to honor, and the order they hailed was a hollow sham. But when Trotsky contemptuously dismissed the adherents of Fascistic movements as “human dust,” he was only revealing the Left’s characteristic ineptness in dealing with people’s needs and impulses. That ineptness led to a multitude of clever errors of judgment by those who purported to understand the spirit of the age better than anyone else.

  Fascism satisfied more than romantic needs. Sprung from the anxieties of the age, it was an elemental uprising in favor of authority, a revolt on behalf of order. Such paradox was its very essence. It was rebellion and subordination, a break with tradition and the sanctification of tradition, a “people’s community” and strictest hierarchy, private property and social justice. But whatever the slogans it appropriated, the imperious authority of a strong state was always implied. “More than ever the peoples today have a desire for authority, guidance and order,” Mussolini declared.

  Mussolini spoke of the “more or less decayed corpse of the goddess Liberty.” He argued that liberalism was about to “close the portals of its temple, which the peoples have deserted” because “all the political experiences of the present are antiliberal.” And in fact throughout Europe, especially in the countries that had gone over to a liberal parliamentary system only after the end of the World War, there had been growing doubts of adequacy of the parliamentarism. These doubts became all the stronger the more these countries moved into the present age. There would be the feeling that the country lacked the means to meet the challenges of the transition: that the available leadership was not equal to the crisis. Witnessing the endless parliamentary disputes, the bitterness and bargaining of partisan politics, people began to long for earlier days, when rule was by decree and no one had to exercise a choice. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, the parliamentary system collapsed throughout the newly created nations of eastern and central Europe and in many of the countries of southern Europe: in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Austria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and finally in Germany. By 1939 there were only nine countries with parliamentary regimes. And many of th
e nine, like the French Third Republic, had stabilized in a drôle d’état, others in a monarchy. “A fascist Europe was already a possibility.”21

  Thus it was not the case of a single aggrieved and aggressive nation trying to impose a totalitarian pattern on Europe. The liberal age was reaching its twilight in a widespread mood of disgust and the mood manifested itself under all kinds of auspices, reactionary and progressive, ambitious and altruistic. From 1921 on, Germany had lacked a Reichstag majority that professed faith in the parliamentary system with any conviction. The ideas of liberalism had scarcely any advocates but many potential adversaries; they needed only an impetus, the stirring slogans of a leader.

  II. THE ROAD TO POLITICS

  A Part of the German Future

  I would have burst out laughing if anyone had predicted to me that this was the beginning of a new era in history.

  Konrad Heiden, looking back on his student years in Munich

  No other city in Germany had been so shaken by the events and emotions of the revolution and the first postwar weeks as excitable Munich. On November 7, 1918—two days before anything happened in Berlin—the zeal of a few leftists had toppled the thousand-year-old Wittelsbach dynasty. To their own surprise the insurgents found themselves in power. Under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, a bearded bohemian and theater critic of the Münchener Post, they had tried—in all too complete faith in Woodrow Wilson’s statements—“to prepare Germany for the League of Nations” by a revolutionary change of conditions and “to obtain a peace which will save the country from the worst.”