Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  In reality the prospect of the future horrified him. He was glad, he commented at the dinner table in the Führer’s headquarters, that he was experiencing only the beginnings of the technological age. Later generations would no longer know “how beautiful the world once was.”8 In spite of all his deliberately progressivist gestures, he was profoundly retarded, a captive of the images, standards, and impulses of the nineteenth century—which in fact he considered to be, alongside classical antiquity, the most important era in history. Even his death, trivial and botched though it may seem, reflected both aspects of the era that he admired and once again represented: something of its sonorous splendor, as expressed in the Götterdämmerung motifs of the staging, but also something of its trashiness, when he lay dead on the bunker sofa like a ruined gambler of the opera-hat era beside his newly wedded mistress. It was a finale in which he dropped out of the period and once again revealed the antiquated basis of his nature.

  The rigidity we have noted so often in the course of his life can be seen in its real significance only against this background: he wanted to cling fast to the unique moment in which the world had presented itself to him during his formative years. Unlike the Fascist type in general, he was not seduced by history but by his own educational experience, the shudders of happiness and terror that had been his in puberty. The salvation he wanted to bring about was therefore always aimed at restoring something of the great nineteenth century. Hitler’s entire vision of the world, his manias about the fight for survival, race, space, his never-questioned admiration for the idols and great men of his youth, and in fact for great men in general (so that history seemed a mere reflection of their will, as was shown by his absurd hopes at the death of Roosevelt)—all this and much else may serve to define the extent of his fixation. All sorts of mental blocks restricted him to the horizon of the nineteenth century. For example, the supposedly dire figure of 140 inhabitants per square kilometer, which continually recurs in his speeches to justify his claims to Lebensraum, reveals his inability to grasp the modern solutions for exploiting what land is available and unmasks his modernism as mere rhetoric. The world was standing on the threshold of the atomic age, but he could still say, as he did in February, 1942, that he was grateful to the author of boys’ fiction, Karl May, for having opened his eyes to the nature of the world.

  He understood the nature of greatness itself in picture-book terms, in the vein of old adventure novels, embodied in the figure of the solitary superman. Among the constants of his thought was the desire to be not only great in himself, but also great in the manner, style, and temperament of an artist. When, in one of his speeches, he proclaimed the “dictatorship of genius,” he was obviously thinking of the artist’s claim to dominion. Significantly, he chose as his examples the persons of Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner, who both bestraddled the artistic and the political realms. Theirs was what he called “heroism”—and the gravest charge he hurled at his early opponent, Gustav von Kahr, was that Kahr was “not a heroic figure.” To us the psychopathic nature of this attitude is only too apparent; we are repelled by the naive, puerile nature it betrays, and its strained, artificial quality. The imperious pose he had adopted was also only a sham; and we will recall how much apathy and nervous weakness were concealed behind his posturings, what artificial stimulants he required for those grand gestures of energy he practiced—in which, however, the mechanical twitching of galvanized muscles can always be detected. His amorality was similarly artificial and forced. He liked to put on the manner of a temperamental, violent autocrat in order to conceal the petty malevolence with which he was filled. In spite of all his highhanded crimes, he was much more the type of the pallid murderer, and certainly not free from the naggings of a morality that he scorned as a “chimaera.” A glacial temperament and digestive troubles; such a constitutional type also belongs to the nineteenth century. Nervous weakness compensated for by superman poses: in this, too, Hitler revealed his link with the late-bourgeois age, with the period of Gobineau, Wagner, and Nietzsche.

  Yet even this link was not a strong and firm one but marred by brittleness and alienation. Hitler has rightly been called “detached.” Despite his many petty bourgeois inclinations, he did not really belong to that class, either; or at any rate was never rooted in it deeply enough to share its limitations. For this reason his defensiveness was so full of resentments, and for this reason he defended the world he allegedly wanted to protect until he succeeded in destroying it.

  So it was that this reactionary man, unmistakably molded by the nineteenth century, propelled both Germany and large parts of the world into the twentieth century. Hitler’s place in history is much closer to that of the great revolutionaries than to that of the conservative, preserving autocrats. Granted, he drew his crucial impulses from the desire to prevent the dawn of modern times and to return, by means of a grand, world-historical correction, to the starting point of all errors and mistaken developments. As he himself phrased it, he had come forth as a revolutionary against revolution.9 But the mobilization of forces and the sense of commitment this rescue mission of his required enormously accelerated the emancipatory process. And the excessive stress on authority, style, and order, which were associated with his conduct, actually weakened the binding force of these social cements and ushered in those democratic ideologies that he had opposed with the energy of desperation. Abhorring revolution, he became in reality the German form of revolution.

  Certainly Germany had been engaged since 1918 at the latest in an acute process of transformation. But this had been pushed forward halfheartedly and with great indecisiveness. It remained for Hitler to confer upon it the radicalness that made it properly revolutionary, thus profoundly changing a country that had become petrified in a good many authoritarian social structures. Under the demands of the totalitarian leader state, venerable institutions collapsed, people were wrenched out of their traditional slots, privileges were done away with, and all authorities that were not derived from or protected by Hitler were smashed. At the same time, Hitler succeeded in muting those anxieties and fears of uprooting that generally accompany any breach with the past. Or else he turned these emotions into socially useful energy, since he knew how to make himself credible to the masses as an all-embracing substitute authority. But above all he eliminated the one most obvious revolutionary phenomenon of which people were most afraid: the Marxist Left.

  Certainly force and violence were involved. But Hitler’s real feat consisted in pitting his own rival ideology against the mythology of world revolution and the historical destiny of the proletariat. Clara Zetkin had seen the Fascist followings composed principally of the disappointed of all groups, the “ablest, strongest, toughest and boldest elements of all classes.”10 None other than Hitler succeeded in fusing them all in a novel, vigorous mass movement. It was not destined to last. Nevertheless, for one alarming moment the slogan “Adolf Hitler Devours Karl Marx!”—with which Joseph Goebbels had taken up the struggle for “Red” Berlin—proved to be not quite so arrogant as it had seemed at first. At any rate, his utopia of class reconciliation boldly challenged the utopia of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the idea proved so effective that Hitler was able to draw into his own ranks sizable segments of the working class and incorporate them into his own motley following. To that extent he actually justified his claim to be the “smasher of Marxism.” At any rate, he was not the last desperate gasp of dying capitalism, as a good many ideologists have described him.

  As a figure in the German social revolution, consequently, Hitler represents an ambivalent phenomenon; the “duality” we have frequently noted is nowhere more evident than in this matter. For we cannot say that the revolution that was his work happened contrary to his intentions. The revolutionary idea of “renewal,” of tranformation of the state and society into a militantly coherent Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) free of internal conflicts, remained predominant. Hitler also had the desire for change and a
conception of his goal, and he was prepared to connect the two. If we compare him with the political personalities of the Weimar period, with Hugenberg, Brüning, Papen, Breitscheid, and unquestionably with the Communist leader Thälmann, as well, he indubitably emerges as the more modern. Nor can the concomitants of the National Socialist revolution, its blunt radicalness, instinctuality, and seemingly unpolitical avarice, prevent us from calling its author and director a revolutionary. For seen in close-up, almost all violent changes look like “oversentimental and bloody charlatanism.”11 Possibly, then, Hitler’s rule should not be regarded in isolation, but viewed as the terroristic or Jacobin phase of a widespread social revolution that propelled Germany into the twentieth century and that has not reached its end to this day.

  And yet certain stubborn doubts return. Was not this revolution far more chancy, far blinder and more aimless, than it looks in retrospect to the interpreting mind? Did the changes spring not from long-term considerations but from Hitler’s arbitrariness and lack of premises, his inadequate understanding of the special social, historical, and psychic nature of Germany? When he conjured up glowing pictures of the past, was this not a ploy with which he wanted to conceal the horror of the future he was hatching?

  Such doubts arise partly because Nazism tended to wear extremely “conservative” ideological costumery. The question is whether in so doing it merely resembled the Communard who poured a few drops of holy water into his petroleum. But Hitler had not the slightest intention of reviving preindustrial forms of government. All the masquerades should not obscure the perception that—contrary to his claim of restoring Germany’s past with its dignity, its pastoral charms, and its aristocratic values—he thrust the country into the present day with radical brutality. Once and for all he cut off the retreat back to the authoritarian state of the past; until Hitler came along, the Germans with their conservative temperament had managed to keep open that line of retreat through all social changes. Paradoxically, it was only after his arrival that the nineteenth century in Germany came to an end. No matter how anachronistic Hitler seemed, he was more modem, or at any rate more determined to represent modernity, than all his rivals on the domestic political scene. The whole tragedy of the conservative resistance movement was that its moral insight was so much greater than its political intelligence. Within the hearts of the conservatives, authoritarian Germany, deeply entangled in its romantic retardations, fought a hopeless struggle with the present. Hitler’s advantage over all his rivals, including the Social Democrats, rested upon his having grasped the necessity for changes more keenly and decisively than they had done. To the extent that he negated the modern world, he did so in modern terms; and he managed to confer the features of the Zeitgeist upon his emotional bias. He distinctly felt the ambivalence into which he as a revolutionary was necessarily driven. On the one hand, for example, he praised the German Social Democrats for having swept away the monarchy in 1918, but on the other hand he spoke of the “grave pangs” that every social change caused.12 In the final analysis, if we are reluctant to call him a revolutionary, it may be because the idea of revolution seems for most of us to be linked closely with the idea of progress. But Hitler’s rule has also affected terminology; and one of its significant consequences surely is that the concept of revolution was stripped of the moral connotations it had had for so many years.

  The National Socialist revolution did not merely shatter outmoded social structures. Its psychological effects went very deep, and possibly this was in fact its most significant aspect. For it totally transformed the entire relationship of Germans to politics. On many pages of this book we have mentioned the extent to which Germans were alienated from politics and oriented toward private concerns, virtues, and goals; Hitler’s success was partly due to that state of affairs. For on the whole the people, restricted to marching, raising hands, or applauding, felt that Hitler had not so much excluded them from politics as liberated them from politics. The whole catalogue of values, such as Third Reich, people’s community, leader principle, destiny, or greatness, enjoyed such widespread approval in part because it stood for a renunciation of politics, a farewell to the world of parties and parliaments, of subterfuges and compromises. Hitler’s tendency to think heroically rather than politically, tragically rather than socially, to put overwhelming mythical surrogates in place of the general welfare, was spontaneously accepted and understood by the Germans. Adorno said of Richard Wagner that he made music for the unmusical. We might add, and Hitler politics for the unpolitical.

  Hitler undercut the German alienation from politics in two ways. First, by incessant totalitarian mobilization he inevitably drew people into the public realm; and although this was done chiefly on the occasion of stupefying mass festivities whose true purpose was to consume all political interest, he could not prevent the inadvertent result: the opening of a new area of experience. That is, for the first time in its history the nation was consistently forced out of its private world. Granted, the regime permitted only ritual forms of participation in the public realm. But still, the consciousness of such participation changed people. The whole of German inner life was gradually destroyed by the undermining effects of the social revolution, the whole realm of personal gratification with its dreams, its secluded felicity, and its yearning for nonpolitical politics.

  In addition, the political and moral catastrophe that Hitler brought upon the country also served to change attitudes. Auschwitz might be said to represent the fiasco of the private German universe and its autistic narcissism. It is incontestably true that the majority of Germans knew nothing of the practices in the death camps, and at any rate knew far less about them than the world public whose attention had been called, in repeated cries of alarm from the end of 1941 on, to the mass crimes that were taking place.13 The apathy and lack of reaction to the circulating rumors derived to some extent from the feeling that the events in the camps belonged to that political sphere that had always been alien and uninteresting to them.

  This, too, helps explain why the Germans after 1945 tended to repress their recent experience. For putting Hitler behind them also meant to some extent putting a whole way of life behind them, taking leave of the private world and the cultural type they had been for so long. It remained for the younger generation to complete the break, to cut the ties to the past and achieve freedom from sentiment, prejudices, and memories. Paradoxically, in doing so, in a sense it actually completed Hitler’s revolution. This younger generation thinks politically, socially, and pragmatically to an extent hitherto uncommon in Germany. It has, aside from some marginal individuals, renounced all intellectual radicalness, all asocial passion for grand theories, and it has shed the qualities that for so long had been peculiar to German thinking: the systematic approach, profundity, and contempt for reality. It argues soberly, objectively, and, to use a famous phrase of Bertolt Brecht’s, it no longer conducts conversations about trees.14 Its mentality is highly contemporary; it has abandoned the realms of a past that never existed and an imaginary future. For the first time Germany is busy making her peace with reality. But along with this, German thought has lost something of its identity; it practices empiricism, is willing to compromise, and is concerned about the general welfare. The German sphinx, of which Carlo Sforza spoke shortly before Hitler came to power,15 has yielded up its secret. And the world can feel the better for this.

  Nevertheless, Fascist or related tendencies have survived in Germany, as they have elsewhere. What have survived above all are certain psychological hypotheses, though these may have no obvious connection with Nazism or may turn up under unusual, often leftist auspices. Similarly, certain social and economic concomitants of Nazism have survived. The ideological premises have had the shortest span of survival, for example, the nationalism of the period between the wars, the eagerness for great-power status, or the dread of Communism. A certain bias toward Fascist solutions may be seen as a reaction to the transition from stable conditions to the uncertain
future of modern societies and will continue as long as the crisis of adjustment lasts. No one yet knows the most effective way to counter this trend. For the experience of Nazism did not promote rational analysis of the causes of the crisis; rather, it prevented it for a long time. The vast shadow cast by the death camps acted as a check upon our even thinking of the way in which the Nazi phenomenon might have been related to determinative factors of the era or to the more universal needs of men, to anxieties about the future, impulses to opposition, to the emotional transfiguration of simple things, to the awakening of nostalgic atavisms, to the desire to believe “that everything could be different, with different truths and different gods of very remote times, with dragons engraved upon very ancient stones.”

  These aspects of what had happened remained repressed for many years. Moral indignation beclouded the realization that the people who formed Hitler’s following, who had perpetrated the cheering and the barbarities, had not been monsters. The world-wide unrest of the late sixties once again brought to the fore many of the elements that have repeatedly recurred in descriptions of pre-Fascist conditions: the cultural pessimism, the craving for spontaneity, intoxication, and a dramatic quality of life, the vehemence of youth and the aestheticizing of force. Of course, these are still a far cry from true pre-Fascist phenomena; all the comparisons between the recent and the earlier movements break on one reef: the question of the weak and the oppressed, for which Fascism had no answer.16 When Hitler called himself “the greatest liberator of humanity,” he significantly alluded to the “saving doctrine of the unimportance of the individual human being.”17 But it is also well to remember that the Fascist syndrome has so far rarely ever appeared in pure form embracing all its elements and is always threatening to veer over into new variants.