The workers, it should be noted, were never to become a major source of Nazi votes, at least not to the extent of the middle class and the peasantry. The unions were too powerful for that: they effectively controlled the job market and had a monopoly on the unemployment dole. As a result, workers had to join one of the unions and vote for its candidates at election time. The hearts of such men were not in their votes.
We may now consider the “inhuman exploiters” themselves, the hated employers or creditors of all the above groups, i.e., Germany’s big businessmen.
Most German industrialists were not pro-Nazi prior to 1933; to them almost any kind of regime, including the Republic, was acceptable. Nor were business contributions to the Nazi cause a significant factor in Hitler’s success, which is an ideological, not a financial phenomenon. (Money makes it easy to disseminate propaganda; it cannot define the ideas to be propagated or determine the country’s receptivity to them.)4 There were, however, a number of leading industrialists who did support the Nazi movement, especially near the end of the Republic.
To the wealthy magnates and in private, away from the eyes of the press and the country, the Nazis took the line that the party’s anti-business drumfire was merely rhetoric designed to wean the radical masses from communism, and that the businessmen should not take any of it seriously.
Some of the powerful magnates who contributed to the party did not believe this bit of “pragmatic truth” or Big Lie; they contributed out of fear of terrorist reprisals, or out of despair (better to take orders from the Nazis than bullets from the Communists), or they were merely playing it safe, paying off several parties at the same time. Some, however, did believe it. Hitler, they said to one another, may be unmannerly, but he will look out for our interests; he is a friend of capitalism.
The profit motive, in Germany, had never been regarded “as either desirable or honorable. The tone was set by the bureaucracy and the army; in their opinion the profit motive was something rather contemptible. The capitalist bourgeoisie regarded the way of life of the nonbusiness strata of society as an ideal to which they tried to conform.”5 Such “capitalists” had littte concept of private property or of a free market, and no desire for either. Property to them did not mean possession by right, but by government permission; capitalism to them did not mean laissez-faire, but government control of the economy, the traditional, imperial kind of control, control mediated by behind-the-scenes deals between politicians and property-holders. Accepting such premises, many businessmen were prepared to grant that a totalitarian could be a defender of capitalism. Theirs was the mentality of a mixed-economy pressure group, trained in “social service” and deaf to principles or ideology, choosing a despot who promised to be benevolent.
One British writer describes these big bankers and industrialists, who prided themselves on their “practicality” in backing Hitler, as “too innocent for politics.” William Shirer says that they were “politically childish.” In fact, their “innocence” was anti-intellectuality, and their “political childishness” was (in effect) philosophical pragmatism.6
At various times prior to 1933, the Nazis offered private deals and/or public promises to virtually every significant group in Germany, including the Junkers, the army, the war veterans, the high-school students, the university students, the artists, even the spinsters. (“In the Third Reich,” Hitler said in a Berlin speech, “every German girl will have a hus. band.”)7 And to material promises the Nazi orators added flattery, stressing each group’s incomparable achievement or tradition, praising its unique virtue, fanning the passions of class (and race) solidarity—while denouncing class warfare as pernicious Marxism. Your virtue, Hitler told his audiences from the beginning, is your devotion not to personal success or “class greed,” but to the nation. The present government, he said, is too corrupt to appreciate your sacrifices; but in the Third Reich you will be abundantly rewarded, because your welfare is essential to the public interest.
How could Hitler say it to so many rival groups and still maintain his credibility with all of them? “The slogan proclaiming the primacy of public interest,” explains one historian, was
sufficiently vague to take in all sorts of economic currents and contradictory interests.... [I]t was easy to assert that community interests required such and such a measure. Thus it was possible simultaneously to appeal to the profit interests of the business community and to the utmost radicalism of the laboring masses and the uprooted intellectuals.8
In addition, there is the fact that a campaign championing “contradictory interests” is no problem to an electorate which regards consistency as “only logic.”
In one respect, however, despite his attacks on logic, Hitler was an exponent of consistency and demanded it from his followers. If his promises were to be achieved, he told each group, Germany must repudiate the mixed, Weimar type of system, and accept the supremacy of the whole in every area of life. The “Twenty-Five Points” made it clear, in 1920, what kinds of changes this would involve.
The economic points of the document, indicated above, were regarded for the most part as highly moral by socialist. liberal circles and by many nationalist groups; each of these points has a counterpart or base in the Weimar Constitution. The Nazis, however, regarded these points as merely one ex. pression of a wider principle. Sprinkled throughout the manifesto, peacefully coexisting with its economic planks, are some additional demands.
Points 1-6, 8, 19, and 22 are concerned primarily with foreign policy (and with racism), and put forth a variety of nationalist ultimatums, including demands for abolition of the Versailles Treaty, more German land, the exclusion of Jews from citizenship, an end to non-German immigration, and the formation of a “national army” as against a “paid army.”
Four further passages deal with another area: they supplement economic statism and foreign-policy nationalism by calling for domestic thought-control. Point 20, dealing with education, demands curriculum revision. “Comprehension of the State idea (civic training),” it says, “must be the school objective, beginning with the first dawn of understanding in the pupil.” Point 23 demands the creation of a “German national press” and concludes: “It must be forbidden to publish papers which do not conduce to the national welfare. We demand legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation, and the suppression of institutions which militate against the requirements above-mentioned.” Point 24 promises liberty to all religions “so far as they are not a danger to, and do not militate against the moral feelings of, the German race.”
Point 18, the climax in this area, is a mere two sentences; they reveal what “the public good,” once it has consumed property and liberty, demands in regard to life: “We demand a ruthless struggle against those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals against the nation, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.”
A criminal, according to the Nazi philosophy, is not a man who violates individual rights; he is a man who injures “the common interest.” For the supreme crime—activities “against the nation”—they believed, such a man must receive the supreme penalty. In a broad, programmatic statement, the Nazis did not find it necessary to specify in detail which activities were to merit this penalty. The general outlines of the answer, they felt, were clear enough, implicit in the commonly accepted code: “usurers, profiteers, etc.”
Within twenty-five years, that “etc.” was to subsume millions of lives.
The moderates invoked the altruist code loudly, but applied it inconsistently and incompletely, primarily to demand an extension of economic controls. Hitler invoked the same code, but went the whole way with it. He would not hear of limiting self-sacrifice to the realm of material production, while allowing self-assertion to dominate the realm of men’s spiritual concerns. He indignantly dismissed the dichotomy between economic freedom and political freedom; he was
against both equally and for the same reason. Men, he said, must be prepared to give up everything for others: they must give up soul and body; ideas and wealth; life itself.
“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit,” Hitler told Rauschning.
The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun.... I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.9
The Social Democrats and their allies were widely accused, especially in the thirties and by the young, of using noble slogans as mere rhetoric to cover up the manipulations of “politics as usual”; the moderates were unable to convince the country that they really meant the slogans. The Nazis’ righteous consistency on the issue did convince people, though not at first. In the early twenties, the party’s uncompromising demands, moral and political, were a liability, and Hitler was not taken seriously by most Germans. The Republic, people still believed, had not yet been given a chance, and temporizing measures within the framework of the new system might be able to work.
Within a decade people were to see the results of such measures.
In Weimar Germany a political movement without the backing of an armed troop was doomed to impotence. This was evident from the beginning, when the only efficacious forces in the country were the Free Corps soldiers and the Spartacist guerrillas. The two groups were soon imitated by other factions, large and small, all claiming that the solution to Germany’s problems lay not in “talk” but in “action,” i.e., in physical force.
By the mid-twenties, all the leading political parties were equipped with their own private armies, either officially or by informal alliance. This was true not only of the Communists and the Nationalists, but also of the Social Democrats, who created a uniformed socialist army, the Reichsbanner, consisting of over three million workers.
Hitler did not intend to be left out. In 1921, he began to organize his own army, recruiting its members largely from unemployed former Free Corps fighters. The result was the brownshirted Sturm Abteilungen (the SA or Storm Troopers). In 1925, a special Nazi elite corps was added, the blackshirted Schutz Staffeln or SS.
Some of the recruits to these squads had strong ideological commitments; many did not. “We were young guys without any political ideas,” one man recalled. “[W]hy should we bother ourselves with politics? ... If Hauenstein [a Free Corps leader] was ready to give his support to this man [Hitler] that was good enough for me.”10
If a German youth firmly endorsed any kind of idea, then, given what he had been taught, the chances are that he was (or soon would be) ready to fight for Hitler. If he brushed aside ideas and lost himself in a group, he was still following the country’s dominant principles, and he was even more ready. Either way, through conscious ideology or professed anti-ideology, the result was the same.
The Nazi formations were trained to vent fury and sow terror—to break up meetings of opponents, to administer beatings, provoke street fights, stage riots, mutilate bodies, kick in skulls. These were the methods by which Hitler proposed to make his nationalism, his socialism, and his promises to every group come true.
The method was brute destruction, and from the beginning the Nazis presented it to the country as such, with little attempt at apology or cover-up. In this regard, Hitler himself was the most eloquent party symbol: wild-eyed, gesticulating, raving—contorted by a frenzy to kill and avidly explicit about it.
The Nazis held out to the electorate something besides material support. They promised the Germans the satisfaction of a special kind of lust: the lust to see their enemies, foreign and domestic, torn into bloody pieces. In the emotionalist republic, this kind of lust was a dominant emotion.
The poor hated the rich, the rich hated “the rabble,” the left hated the “bourgeoisie,” the right hated the foreigners, the traditionalists hated the new, and the young hated everything, the adults, the Allies, the West, the Jews, the cities, the “system.”
The Nazis promised every group annihilation, the annihilation of that which it hated. Just as Hitler offered Germany a synthesis of ideas, so, appealing to the nationwide, classwide spasm of seething fury, he offered the voters a synthesis of hatreds. In the end, this combination was what the voters wanted, and chose.
10
The Culture of Hatred
An historic group of intellectuals in Weimar Germany-in-eluding theorists in the humanities, scientists, novelists, social commentators, journalists, playwrights, artists—professed a deep antipathy to the nation’s entrenched dogmas, and undertook to offer their countrymen fresh ideas. On the whole, these men were independent of the political, religious, and educational establishments and beholden to no outside power. They were the “free spirits” of the German Republic.
The product of their activities was that blend of art, theory, values, and manners which observers at the time and ever since have cherished as “Weimar culture.”
“Weimar culture,” in this sense of the term, does not designate the total of the cultural activities of Weimar Germany, but those highly visible works and trends which rejected the traditional, nineteenth-century approaches, each in its own field, and self-consciously championed the new, the unorthodox, even the revolutionary. For the most part these trends antedated the Republic; despite the vigorous opposition of the imperial regime, Expressionism, for instance, the leading art movement within Weimar culture, had already reached maturity in Germany prior to World War I. After the war, with the conservative forces in disarray, the new trends flourished in every field; although bitterly controversial, they were passionately acclaimed in avant-garde circles, and they set the dominant tone of the Republic’s cultural life.
The Weimar vision of the world came to be the pacesetter for the other countries of the West. Weimar Germany, in the words of Walter Laqueur, was “the first truly modern culture.”
“Whereas in France,” writes Bernard Myers, “the struggle was far from over and in the United States merely beginning, Germany during the twenties seems to have been a paradise for contemporary painters, sculptors and graphic artists.... [P]er capita there was more acceptance of contemporary art in Germany during the pre-Hitler period than anywhere else.”
“When we think of Weimar,” writes Peter Gay, “we think of modernity in art, literature, and thought. . . .”1
This raises the question: what is “modernity in art, literature, and thought”?—a question none of these authors discusses. What is the fundamental impulse defining “Weimar culture,” the basic principle uniting the work of Kaiser, Kandinsky, and Schoenberg with that of men such as Thomas Mann, Karl Barth, Sigmund Freud, and Werner Heisenberg?
And what does this principle do to the people who have to breathe it in daily? What does it do to their souls, their lungs, their sense of hope, and their capacity for hatred?
If art is the barometer of a culture, literature, the most explicit of the arts, may be taken as the barometer of art.
The two preeminent figures of Weimar literature were Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann. Both had been famous before the Republic, and both were criticized in certain avant-garde circles as insufficiently modern. Nevertheless the two men are an eloquent indication of the spirit of the new German culture.
Of the two, Hauptmann was the more widely respected at the time. Although his work was not confined to any one artistic school or literary form, his reputation rested on his activity in the German theater of the 1890s. He was the country’s outstanding exponent of Naturalism.
Hauptmann was dedicated to portraying “realistic,” “human” characters, as dictated by his idea of reality and of human nature. Although his plays typically feature bitter social protest (from a Marxist perspective), the characters are not pres
ented as purposeful men. In this regard, The Weavers is representative. Despite their fury at injustice, the weavers are not efficacious proletarian giants. They are, stressedly, pawns determined by economic factors, made wretched by social forces beyond any single man’s power to cope with; they are worn, self-effacing “little people,” brooding, reckless, weak, given to whining complaints and berserk rages and drink and superstition. There is no outstanding figure among these sufferers, no individual to dominate the action—in fact, no developed characterizations at all. The protagonist of The Weavers is not a man but a social class, represented by hordes of interchangeable workers who function only as a mass.
As a social determinist, Hauptmann preached that the individual is a pawn of the group; in his own political behavior, he acted accordingly. He never abandoned his fundamental commitment to collectivism, and he was the perfect German weather vane in regard to the forms of implementing it. In 1914, he wrote poetry defending the war; in 1919, he celebrated the advent of the Republic; in 1933, the “idol of the Socialist masses” voted for Hitler.
In relation to the glowing view of man held by earlier writers such as Schiller (and, in France, Hugo), Hauptmann’s late-nineteenth-century Naturalism is modem: man the proudly independent being has given way to man the moaning social atom. Hauptmann, however, is not fully representative of the Weimar trend. He is almost an old-fashioned man-glorifier, when compared to the other, much more influential literary leader of the country, Thomas Mann.
Ominous Parallels Page 21