Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Mayr’s vision was for the NSDAP to become under his influence a kind of new Nationalsozialer Verein (National Social Association), which had existed around the turn of the century with the goal of pulling working-class people into the National Liberal camp. The association had attempted this by addressing their social discontent, which had been triggered by the rising social inequality then reigning in Germany.

  Yet soon after writing to Kapp, Mayr realized that his belief that he could run the NSDAP in the same way as he had orchestrated propaganda for the military was illusionary. Soon he began to comprehend what had been under way for a while, but which he had failed to realize or to accept: namely, that Hitler had emancipated himself from Mayr and had no interest in being his puppet anymore. According to Hermann Esser, who like Hitler had worked for Mayr and joined the Nazi Party, to his great disappointment Mayr came to realize “that Hitler was not prepared to work for him.” He had to conclude that while Hitler was trying to use him as his helper, his former protégé was unwilling to be influenced by him. Mayr learned the hard way that, contrary to his intentions, the NSDAP was a product of neither the Reichswehr nor himself. His growing appreciation that senior members of the party refused to be orchestrated by him would culminate in his decision, in March 1921, to leave the NSDAP. After that, he would never meet Hitler again.8

  Mayr’s gradual coming to terms with his inability to mold the NSDAP according to his wishes went hand in hand with a political disenchantment with the policy goals of the party. The issue was not just that the NSDAP rejected his policy goals. Rather, Mayr started to have second thoughts about his own right-wing ideas. As a result, he began moving to the political center, ultimately landing in the arms of the Social Democrats (SPD). Henceforth, he would try to undermine Hitler and the NSDAP on the pages of the pro-SPD Münchener Post, collaborating closely with Bavaria’s former SPD leader Erhard Auer and feeding him intelligence about the political right.9

  Mayr’s move to the left would make him a traitor in the eyes of many officers, who would thus start defaming him. They would derisively speak of Captain Mayr as “a small man, quite weak-looking, dark, black,” with a “a nose of a clearly dinaric shape,” in which they then would detect Jewish traits. From that moment on, they would start referring to Hitler’s former paternal mentor as “Mayr-Kohn.” By 1923, Mayr would label himself a “republican of reason”—in other words, a political convert whose head, but not all his heart, was with the republic. By the following year, he would no longer merely be a “republican of reason.” He would join the SPD as well as the Reichsbanner, the prorepublican and SPD-affiliated veterans’ association. In the Reichsbanner, he would finally find a group that was willing to be orchestrated by him. In the late 1920s, Hitler’s erstwhile mentor would write regularly for Das Reichsbanner: Zeitung des Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, the weekly organ of the organization. Mayr would become close to the national leadership of the Reichsbanner and become deputy editor in chief of the association’s journal. In all his activities, he would be a fervent opponent and critic of the NSDAP. Mayr also would be the driving force behind reconciliation efforts of Reichsbanner veterans with French veterans’ associations, as a result of which he would be made an honorary member of one of them, the Fédération nationale.10

  In 1933, out of fear of the wrath of his former propagandist who now inhabited the Reich chancellery, Mayr would flee to France, a country where he had spent two months prior to the First World War, in 1913, in preparation for an exam to qualify as a French-German interpreter. Together with his wife, Steffi, a graphic designer, he would live in a suburb of Paris, eking out a living as a German language tutor. After the fall of France in 1940, he would be arrested, interned in the south of France, then held in the basement of the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin before being transferred first to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then to Buchenwald. There, the officer who had let the genie out of the bottle back in 1919 would be forced to work in the Gustloff munitions plant in Weimar, a factory run by the SS. A British bomb would kill him during an air raid on February 9, 1945.11

  One of the reasons why Hitler did not want to be orchestrated by Mayr was a pragmatic one: He was starting to exploit the German popular longing for a new kind of leader, one who was a genius, which would allow him to stage himself more effectively and thus to broaden his appeal. However, Karl Mayr stood in the way of his attempt to surf on that wave.

  The preoccupation with genius in Western thought had started with a late-seventeenth-century argument within the French arts scene. French thinkers had disagreed with one another over whether it was possible to surpass what the ancient masters had created with the help of geniuses who would be able to invent new forms of artistic expression better suited to the present. By the eighteenth century, the longing for genius had mutated into the social world. An emerging new, enlightened middle class now believed that geniuses would be able to help them in their push for cultural hegemony, personal autonomy, and emancipation against the power of the old order. Geniuses, it was thought, had a superior capacity for originality and creativity, and thus were able to break the mold of the past. While everybody else would be tinkering around problems, geniuses would provide entirely new answers or even radically recast the questions to be asked.

  A genius, according to this thinking, is someone who does not have to be taught how to attain personal autonomy and creativity, or how to be a leader. Geniuses have innate qualities with which they are born, and which they develop and realize when growing up. The connotations of the German term Bildung is a reflection of this German belief in the innate qualities that people possess. Whereas the English term education is based on the idea of an individual’s being led out of ignorance by others, the word Bildung expresses a belief in individuals’ ability for self-formation. Geniuses are thus the perfect and pure form of individuals with the innate gift for originality and creativity. In short, geniuses have a god sitting within them. And as such, they do not have to adhere to common conventions of public discourse or even logic. Geniuses are creating something new that will be of benefit to everyone and that they do not have to justify; geniuses only have to proclaim it. There also is no need for geniuses to compromise, as compromise is believed to weaken what geniuses have created. Furthermore, there is no need for geniuses to abide by rules or even by received rules of morality, because they are creating new rules and principles of morality that redefine what is good and evil. As Nietzsche put it in his most seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “That anything at all is good and evil—that is his creation.”

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term genius was most commonly applied to artists. As originality and transgression of conventions is the very essence of genius, there had been a longing for the type of artist who is an enfant terrible, who as a result of that longing could get away with almost anything. By the early twentieth century, the enthusiastic longing for genius had become so widespread and so institutionalized in German schools that the educated middle classes celebrated Goethe and Schiller, the two towering figures of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature, poetry, and drama, as icons of genius. Meanwhile, Houston Stewart Chamberlain had celebrated Wagner as the most outstanding “genius” of the nineteenth century.12

  Chamberlain championed his father-in-law as an original artist who defined a century—in other words, as someone whose influence transcended the world of art and entered that of politics, social theory, and philosophy. It is no surprise that by the 1920s, so as to rise from their defeat, Germans’ longing for genius had been translated into a desire for a decidedly new type of politician and leader, one who was a genius and thus truly gifted, genuine, new, and original. That genius would at his heart be not a politician but an artist, who, as Chamberlain put it, would not conduct politics but Staatskunst. There is no English word that quite captures the meaning of the term. The closest English term, statecraft, denotes a skilled workmanlike activity, wherea
s Staatskunst treats the conduct of state affairs as a creative and original artistic activity. Geniuses, it was believed, had the unique ability to see and understand the architecture of the world that was hidden behind false facades, as well as the capacity to peel away false appearances from the world.

  In post–First World War Germany, the longing for leaders who were geniuses was neither limited to the extreme political right nor to the mainstream conservative, right-wing, antirepublican, “wanting our Kaiser Wilhelm back” spectrum of society. The prorepublican, progressive, optimistic middle class had that longing too, as members of that class looked for new figures emerging from below, as, following the thinking of the time, the pedigree of a person played no role in producing genius. In other words, the longing for genius was fueled by a participatory and emancipatory desire for it to come from below, building upon the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century belief in the existence of individuals with innate superior qualities that could be neither inherited nor taught. The prorepublic middle class of Germany saw in that emancipatory and participatory element of genius a facilitator of democratization that was directed against the old order.

  Thus, it was not a desire for a Wilhelm III but for an entirely new kind of leader that drove the cross-party longing for a new creative and original political leader who was a genius. Friends and foes of the old regime alike derided politicians who based themselves on the models provided by prewar leaders as “epigones,” as poor and lame copycats. Even many people on the right believed that there was no going back to the past. The past might have been glorious, but the past was the past, and the future required new answers, even if it was a future that was inspired by the past. There was, of course, no consensus as to what the future should look like. Yet there was near consensus that geniuses would help lead the way into the future.

  It was this cross-societal yearning for genius that created a window of opportunity for Hitler, as the way he managed to stage himself adhered closely to political and cultural expectations about a “genius” as a godlike savior. Thus, it was not a failure to break with the pre-1918 Wilhelmine political order that created the conditions that gave rise to Hitler; rather, it was the radical break with that order that, while not making National Socialism’s rise inevitable, created an opening ready for Hitler to exploit.13 As it was commonly believed that geniuses were created by nature, not nurture, Hitler could not be seen as having been produced by Karl Mayr, or by anyone else, for that matter. Rather, he had to present himself as someone who had been formed entirely without any outside input.

  That said, it is a safe assumption that Hitler’s paternal mentor Dietrich Eckart encouraged Hitler to see himself as a genius. Eckart’s hero Otto Weininger had created a dichotomy between genius and Jews, considering “genius” the highest expression of masculinity and a nonmaterialistic world, while seeing Jews as the purest form of femininity. For Eckart, the goal of geniuses was to purge the world of the supposedly harmful influence of Judaism.14

  It is difficult to establish the exact date when Adolf Hitler started to see himself as a genius, or to stage himself as one. To proclaim forthrightly “I am a genius” would have made him the source of ridicule. Such proclamations would also have been less effective than leaving it to his propagandists to describe him as a “genius.”

  He did broach the issue in a speech as early as April 17, 1920, when he declared, “What we need is a dictator who is also a genius, if we ever want to rise up again in the world.” Only much later would he openly indicate that he saw himself as that genius. For instance, in Mein Kampf he repeatedly referred to genius in a manner that clearly implied he was talking about himself. Furthermore, in 1943, he would remark to one of his secretaries that the reason he had decided not to have children was that life for the children of geniuses was always difficult.15

  It is plausible that when Hitler delivered his April 17 speech, he saw himself as making the case for somebody else, whoever that might be. However, it is even more plausible and probable that through the very act of calling for a genius to rescue Germany, Hitler realized that that leader and dictator could and should be himself.

  The whole point of genius is that those who possess it are not established figures but emerge seemingly from nowhere. On April 17, Hitler clearly did not make the case for a senior figure to become Germany’s savior. Furthermore, he himself possessed all the characteristics people usually associated with genius: He was a man without a pedigree and without a high degree of formal education, who was an artist at heart but had a passion for politics. He desired not to imitate and rebuild a lost and destroyed world, but to create an entirely new, invincible Germany that would withstand the shocks to its system for all time to come. Similarly, he presented himself as an independent, dynamic thinker. He preferred to talk at people, rather than with people, and to treat politics not as a deliberative activity but as a performative act—in short, to proclaim rather than to engage.

  Indeed, ever since joining the DAP/NSDAP, Hitler had done his utmost to make sure that neither his party nor he, himself, would play second fiddle to anyone. Be it in his struggle with the DAP’s erstwhile national chairman Harrer, or in his rejection of mergers with other groups throughout 1920, Hitler had made clear that he firmly believed the DAP/NSDAP should lead rather than be led. Thus, it is difficult to see how Hitler would have perceived himself as merely doing the bidding for someone else when he called for a genius to rescue Germany, as geniuses can only come from below, as he would not allow the DAP/NSDAP to be second to any other group, and as he possessed all the characteristics that people typically associated with genius at the time.

  It is hard to tell whether Hitler first called for a genius and dictator to rescue Germany and only in doing so came to the realization that he was, in fact, talking about someone like him; or whether he first realized that he fulfilled all the criteria of a genius and then used that realization as a tool to make a case for himself. Similarly, it is impossible to tell whether Hitler genuinely started to believe he was a genius (although his subsequent pattern of behavior would suggest that that was the case) or whether he started to stage himself as a genius only for tactical gain. Either way, Hitler’s early demand for a genius and dictator suggests that his stated goal of being the propagandist for a new Germany was a necessary ploy at a time when stating that he himself could be that genius would have appeared ridiculous.

  Hitler was also exploiting the idea, popularized by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, that, for Germany and other Teutonic nations to live in freedom and autonomy, the Teutonic race needed to move forward as a “pure race”—one based not essentially in biological reality, but one that still needed to be formed through an act of self-creation.16 The inherent logic of Chamberlain’s demand was that only a genius would be able to bring about the latter. Furthermore, by placing himself in a tradition of genius, Hitler—whatever his true intentions were—put himself in the legacy of how geniuses were being perceived. This may explain how people who were not themselves radical anti-Semites could still be fascinated by Hitler and support him, much in the same way they admired Chamberlain and celebrated him as a genius even while not taking too seriously some of his arguments.

  One of the reasons Chamberlain was so successful as an author was that a genius was expected to be an enfant terrible. He said a lot of outrageous things in his book that, in the eyes of many, did not detract from its supposedly original and positive core. For instance, Theodore Roosevelt, in reviewing Chamberlain’s Grundlagen, had taken strong exception to the author’s anti-Semitism and yet noted how much the world could learn from Chamberlain about the state of the world and the future of Teutonic nations.17 It was this tradition of seeing geniuses as brilliant and creative dilettantes that would govern the way many people would respond to Hitler in the years to come. People believed that geniuses, in creating something new, would occasionally get carried away, as a result of which they might say things that should not be taken seriously or literally and t
hat should not distract from the substance of their creation.

  Irrespective of exactly when Hitler started to see himself as a genius, he staged his speeches in 1920 in a way that adhered to expectations as to how a new genius leader would act, presenting himself as an artist-turned-politician rather than as career politician or a leader born into privilege.

  In this, Hitler took a cue from Wagner, his favorite artist of all time. In fact, the artistic influence Wagner had on Hitler’s presentations was far more important than the impact of his political ideas on Hitler’s thinking. For instance, Hitler’s and Wagner’s conceptions of anti-Semitism were more different than they were similar. Rather than focusing on Wagner’s anti-Semitism, Hitler was inspired by the way Wagner’s operas, which he had attended as often as he could, were staged as Gesamtkunstwerke, artistic creations that synthesize through their interaction sound, image, word, and space to create spectacles that were full of enchanting harmony. Eventually, Hitler would collaborate with architects, light artists, filmmakers, and many others to create the spectacles immortalized in the films of Leni Riefenstahl about the 1934 Nuremberg party rally and the 1936 Olympics, which contained such effects as the fusion of Hitler’s image and voice, the staging of tens of thousands of supporters in front of him, and the use of light domes. For the time being, though, Hitler staged his speeches as oral spectacles.18 This was unusual in the visual world of Catholic southern Bavaria, with its local traditions of spectacles centering on depictions of the Holy Family and of saints, as well as on the facades of baroque houses and churches. Until the summer of 1923, Hitler steadfastly refused to be photographed.