Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  During the same era many Fascist or Fascist-oriented movements came to power—in Italy, Turkey, Poland, Austria, and Spain, for example. What was peculiarly German about National Socialism emerges most clearly by comparison with the systems in these other countries: it was the most radical, the most absolute manifestation of Fascism.

  This fundamental rigor, which came out on the intellectual as well as the administrative plane, was Hitler’s personal contribution to the nature of National Socialism. In his way of sharply opposing an idea to reality, of elevating what ought to be above what is, he was truly German. The failed local politician, subletting a room on Thierschstrasse, sketched triumphal arches and domed halls that were to assure his posthumous fame. Ignoring mockery, the Chancellor did not reckon in generations, but in millennia; he wanted to undo not merely the Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s impotence but nothing less than the consequences of the great migrations. Whereas Mussolini’s ambition aimed at restoring a lost historical grandeur, whereas Maurras called for a return to the ancien regime and the “gloire de la Deesse France,” whereas all the other Fascisms could do no better than invoke a past golden age, Hitler set himself a goal more grandiose than anything the world had ever seen: an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals and from Narvik to Suez. His pure master race seeking its rightful place would fight for and win this empire. Would other countries oppose him? He would crush them. Were peoples located contrary to his plans? He would resettle them. Did the races fail to correspond to his image? He would select, breed, eliminate until the reality fitted his conception. He was always thinking the unthinkable; in his statements an element of bitter refusal to submit to reality invariably emerged. His personality was not without manic characteristics. “I confront everything with a tremendous, ice-cold lack of bias,” he declared. He seemed authentically himself only when he spoke and acted with the utmost radicality. To that extent, National Socialism cannot be conceived apart from Hitler.

  Among the things that set Nazism apart from the Fascist movements of other countries is the fact that Hitler always found obedient instruments to carry out his eccentric radicalism. No stirrings of pity mitigated the concentrated and punctilious harshness of the regime. Its barbarous features have often been ascribed to the deliberate application of cruelty by murderers and sadists, and such criminal elements continue to loom large in the popular mind. To this day types of this sort appear in literary works, whip in hand, as the personifications of Nazism. But the regime had quite another picture of itself. No question about its making use of such people, especially in the initial phase; but it quickly realized that lasting rule cannot be founded upon the unleashing of criminal instincts. The radicality that constituted the true nature of National Socialism does not really spring from the license it offered to instinctual gratification. The problem was not one of criminal impulses but of a perverted moral energy.

  Those to whom Nazism chiefly appealed were people with a strong but directionless craving for morality. In the SS, National Socialism trained this type and organized it into an elite corps. The “inner values” that were perpetually being preached within this secular monastic order—the theme of many an evening meeting complete with romantic torchlight—included, according to the prescript of Heinrich Himmler, the following virtues: loyalty, honesty, obedience, hardness, decency, poverty, and bravery. But all these virtues were detached from any comprehensive frame of reference and directed entirely toward the purposes of the regime. Under the command of such imperatives a type of person was trained who demanded “cold, in fact, stony attitudes” of himself, as one of them wrote, and had “ceased to have human feelings.”7 Out of his harshness toward himself he derived the justification for harshness toward others. The ability to walk over dead bodies was literally demanded of him; and before that could be developed, his own self had to be deadened. It is this impassive, mechanical quality that strikes the observer as far more extreme than sheer brutality. For the killer who acts out of an overpowering social, intellectual, or human resentment exerts a claim, however small, upon our sympathy.

  The moral imperative was supplemented and crowned by the idea of a special mission: the sense of taking part in an apocalyptic confrontation, of obeying a “higher law,” of being the agent of an ideal. Images and slogans alike were made to seem like metaphysical commandments, and a special consecration was conferred upon relentlessness. That is how Hitler meant it when he denounced those who cast doubt on his mission as “enemies of the people.” This fanaticism, this fixation upon his own deeper insight and his own loftier missionary aims, reflected the traditional German false relationship to politics, and beyond that the nation’s peculiarly distorted relationship to reality in general. The real world in which ideas take form and are experienced by people, in which thoughts can be translated into despairs, anxieties, hatreds, and terrors, simply did not exist. All that existed was the program, and the process of putting it across, as Hitler occasionally remarked, involved either positive or negative activity. The lack of humanitarian imagination (which comes to the fore whenever Nazi criminals are brought to trial, from the Nuremberg Trials on) was nothing but the expression of this loss of a sense of reality. That was the characteristically German element in National Socialism, and there is reason to believe that various connecting lines run far back into German history.

  According to a paradoxical epigram, the most significant event in modern German history was “the revolution that did not take place.”8 Often this incapacity for revolution has been seen as the expression of a particularly submissive character. For a long time the type of good-natured, dreamy, unwarlike German served as a kind of laughingstock for more self-assured neighbors. But in reality the profound suspicion of revolution was only the reaction of a nation whose historical experiences were largely dominated by the sense of being menaced. Due to her central position geographically Germany early developed defensive and encirclement complexes. These seemed to be all too justified by the horrible, never to be forgotten experiences of the Thirty Years’ War, when the country was transformed into an underpopulated wasteland. The most momentous legacy of that war was the traumatic feeling of helplessness and a deep-seated dread of all chaotic conditions. This feeling was perpetuated and used to good advantage by Germany’s rulers for generations. Keeping the peace was regarded as a citizen’s foremost duty; but peace and order in turn became the citizen’s foremost demand upon his government. The role of the authorities was to keep out fear and misery; the Protestant view of governmental authority accorded well with this.

  The tendency of the Enlightenment throughout Europe was to challenge existing authorities. But the spokesmen of the Enlightenment in Germany refrained from criticizing the government of princes; some even lauded it—so ingrained were the terrors of the past. The German mind accords unusual respect to the categories of order, discipline, and self-restraint. Idolization of the state as court of last resort and bulwark against evil, and even faith in a leader, have their origin in such historical experiences. Hitler was able to play on such attitudes and use them to further his plans for dominion. Thus he created the cult of obedience to the Führer or staged those militarylike demonstrations whose precise geometry offered protection against the chaos so feared by all and sundry.

  The epigram about the German revolution that did not take place contains only half the truth. For the nation whose past is devoid of beheaded kings or victorious popular risings has contributed more than any other to the revolutionary mobilization of the world. It supplied the most provocative insights, the most trenchant revolutionary slogans, for the so-called Age of Revolutions. It heaved up rocky masses of ideas, out of which future ages built their houses. In intellectual radicalism Germany has had no match; and this, too, is part of a heritage that has conferred greatness and a characteristic bravura upon the better minds in Germany. But this again had little to do with the ability to assume pragmatic attitudes in which thought and life became reconciled and reason
turned rational. The German mind had small concern with that; it was asocial in the literal sense of the word and thus basically oriented neither to the right nor the left but, rather, chiefly to the celebrated antithesis to life: uncompromising, always taking the “I can do no other” position, revealing a nearly apocalyptic “tendency toward the intellectual abyss.”

  The process of alienation from reality was intensified by the many dis-illusionments the bourgeois mind experienced in the course of its efforts to achieve political emancipation during the nineteenth century. The traces of this process can be seen on almost every plane: in the unreal character of political thought; in the mythologizing of history by Winckelmann and Wagner; and in the German adulation of culture. The superior man was supposed to live in the phantom realm of art and the sublime. The realm of politics was situated off to one side, and finer spirits would not venture there.

  The social type in whom these tendencies became concentrated has enjoyed the highest prestige to this day. We recognize him, for his professorial face conforms to those old portraits of withdrawn, thoughtful men, whose features are imprinted with high-minded austerity and adherence to principle, though there could be some strange strains within their depths. They thought in sweeping terms, toppled or erected systems; they gazed toward remote horizons. At the same time, they were surrounded by an atmosphere of intimacy and cozy domesticity and led what would seem happy private lives. Books and dreams, as Paul de Lagarde has remarked, were their element. Their imaginations made up for their distance from reality. They had a good opinion of themselves, feeling themselves ennobled by their intellectual occupation, and were on the whole content with civilization and their own contribution to it.

  Contempt for reality corresponded to an increasingly overt belittling of politics. Politics was reality in the bluntest, most obtrusive sense: the “rule of the inferior,” as the title of a celebrated book of the twenties put it.9 Aside from a thin minority that was forever being forced into isolation, the public in Germany did not know what to make of politics. The German world was oriented toward private concepts, aims, virtues. No social goals could match the rewards of the private world: family happiness, the emotions aroused by nature, the quiet passions of the study. Joys such as these made a whole world of intelligible satisfactions, and no one was going to abandon them, exchanging the mystery of the forest for the “din of the market place” and the freedom of dreams for constitutional rights.

  This feeling also was driven to an extreme. “A political person is repulsive,” Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt. One of his admirers has remarked: “If Wagner was in any way an expression of his nation, if there was anything in which he was German, humanistically German and bourgeois German in the highest and purest sense of those words, he was so in his hatred for politics.”10 The antipolitical bias tended to be dressed up as defense of morality against power, of humanity against socialistic trends, of the intellect against public life. From these pairs of opposites, constantly elaborated by new profundities and polemical ponderings, the favorite themes of bourgeois self-examination developed. The supremely brilliant expression of the general attitude, in the form of a complex confession and profession of faith, was Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (“Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”), published in 1918. It was intended as a brief on the part of culture-proud Germany against the “enlightened,” Western “terrorism of politics.”

  This attitude was also evident in the way the Germans responded when war and the postwar era confronted them squarely with politics. They reacted to the “dirty” revolution with passionate disdain and made a scramble for the traditional escape route that led into aesthetic or mythological realms. In their inability to make any sense of political facts, they spawned all the conspiracy theories that thickened the air during the Weimar years: the myth of the stab in the back, for example, or the theory of the dual menace by a Red (Communist) and a golden (capitalist) International. Anti-Semitism and the widespread anxiety complexes about Freemasons and Jesuits also sprang from the same source. In short, the Germans’ abhorrence of politics drove them into an imaginary world full of the romantic concepts of treason, loneliness, and deceived greatness.

  What political thought there was was also marked by nonpolitical images. Ideologies were constructed out of “the war experience” and out of such notions as “young nations,” “total mobilization” or “barbaric Caesarism.” The vast flood of nationalistic and utopian schemes and catchword philosophies of the so-called Conservative Revolution aimed at dressing up the world in the costume of irrationalism. These ideologies pitted their radical slogans against the toilsome compromises of political reality. They passed judgment on everyday life in the name of grandiose myths. It is true that they exerted little direct influence. But by presenting confusing romantic alternatives they contributed to the process of intellectually starving out the republic. This was all the easier because reality had become so hateful that “disgust with politics” could be aroused far more effectively than ever before. While the advocates of Weimar often seemed like apologists for a corrupt system, the attackers of the Right seemed imaginative, overflowing with projects, as they constructed out of mythology, sentimentality, and concentrated bitterness an anti-image to the republic. Among their most contemptuous slurs aimed at the “system” was that it had nothing to offer to the nation but “domestic bliss,” consumption, and petty bourgeois epicureanism. Adventure, tragedy, doom—such words fascinated the age. Among Germany’s intellectuals, Carl von Ossietzky found many “altruistic lovers of every catastrophe, gourmets of world-political misfortunes.” Meanwhile, a French observer at the beginning of the thirties wondered whether Germany’s “present crisis is not too passionately and violently felt.”11 In fact, it was this tendency toward melodrama that gave the crisis its hopeless, desperate cast. This in turn made the craving to escape from reality a mass phenomenon and the idea of a heroic leap into the unknown the most familiar of all thoughts.

  The phenomenon of Hitler must be seen against this ideological milieu. Sometimes he actually seems the artificial product of these attitudes and complexes: he illustrates so neatly the combination of mythological and rational thinking, the extreme radicality of the socially alienated intellectual. His speeches contain the stock in trade of antipolitical bias as he pours out his hatred for parties, for the compromises of the “system,” for the republic’s lack of “grandeur.” To him politics was a concept closely related to fate, incapable of producing anything of its own accord, needing to be liberated by the strong man, by art, or by a higher power called “Providence.” In one of the key speeches he made during the course of the seizure of power—the speech of March 21, that famous “day” of Potsdam—he dealt with the very question of the relationship between political impotence, surrogate reveries and redemption by art as follows:

  The German, at odds with himself, with deep divisions in his mind, likewise in his will and therefore impotent in action, becomes powerless to direct his own life. He dreams of justice in the stars and loses his footing on earth…. In the end, then, only the inward road remained open for German men. As a nation of singers, poets and thinkers they dreamed of a world in which the others lived, and only when misery and wretchedness dealt them inhuman blows did there perhaps grow up out of art the longing for a new rising, for a new Reich, and therefore for new life.12

  Once he had given up his dream of being an artist, he came to regard himself as the savior the nation awaited. He considered politics principally as a means to achieve greatness, allowing him to compensate for his inadequate artistic talent by entering upon another grandiloquent role. For all his bathos about art, “the humanities” left him indifferent. The documents that reveal him at his most spontaneous, his early speeches and the table talk at the Fuhrer’s headquarters, are convincing evidence of this. Probably few tributes gratified him so much as the remark of Houston Stewart Chamberlain in a letter of October, 1923, hailing him as “the opposi
te of a politician.” Chamberlain had added: “The ideal of politics would be to have none; but this non-politics would have to be frankly acknowledged and imposed upon the world.” In this sense Hitler actually had no politics; what he had, rather, was a large, portentous idea of destiny and the world. And with manic persistence he made it the goal of his life to attain that ideal.

  Walter Benjamin called Fascism the “aestheticizing of politics.” The German conception of politics had always been infected with aesthetics, and Nazism gave a central place to this quality. One of the reasons for the Weimar Republic’s failure was that its representatives did not understand the German psychology and thought of politics solely as politics. It remained for Hitler to endow public affairs with the necessary eclat. This he did by his endless obfuscations, his theatrical scenarios, the storms of ecstasy and idolization. Those vaults created by massed searchlight beams were the fitting symbol for it all: walls of magic and light erected against the dark menace of the outside world. And if the Germans did not share Hitler’s hunger for space, his anti-Semitism, his vulgar and brutal qualities, they applauded him and followed him because he had once more restored passion to politics, and overlaid it with a note of dire significance.

  In keeping with the theory of the unpolitical “aesthetic state,” Hitler regarded his artistic and political ideas as a unity and was fond of repeating that his regime had at last reconciled art and politics. He considered himself a ruler in the mold of Pericles and was wont to draw parallels; Albert Speer recalls that he regarded the Autobahnen as his Parthenon.13 He declared quite seriously that neither Heinrich Himmler nor Rudolf Hess could succeed him because they were “totally unartistic,” whereas Speer rose so high and was for a while actually the intended successor to the Führer chiefly because he ranked in Hitler’s mind as an “artistic person,” an “artist,” a “genius.” Characteristically, at the beginning of the war, Hitler exempted the artists from military service, but not the scientists and technicians. Even when being shown new weapons, he seldom overlooked the aesthetic form. He was capable, for example, of praising the “elegance” of the barrel on an artillery piece. There was absolutely nothing that mattered outside of art, he would say; even as a general, only an artistic person could be successful. After the victory over France he preferred to enter Paris not as a conqueror but as a sort of museum visitor. His early yearnings for retirement, which later on he expressed with increasing urgency, also sprang from this basic attitude. “I became a politician against my will,” he remarked repeatedly. “For me politics is only a means to an end. There are people who think that I would find it hard someday to be no longer active as I am now. Not at all! It will be the best day of my life when I drop out of political life and leave all the worries, the troubles and the vexation behind me…. Wars come and go. What remains are the values of culture alone.” Hans Frank regarded such sentiments as expressing the tendency of the age: “To be able to banish everything that is connected with governments, war, politics, etc., and to subordinate these to the high ideal of cultural activity.” In this context it is significant that the top Nazi leadership consisted of a disproportionately large number of inchoate, frustrated, or failed semiartists. Aside from Hitler, Dietrich Eckart is a case in point. Goebbels had tried his hand as a novelist. Rosenberg had started out as an architect, von Schirach and Hans Frank as poets. Funk dabbled in music. Speer, too, in his determinedly individualistic and nonpolitical stance, may be counted among them. The same is true for that type of intellectual whose aestheticizing pronunciamentos, at once vague and unqualified, accompanied and furthered the rise of National Socialism.