Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  With his prioritizing of word over image in his early years, as well as his Bilderverbot (ban of images), Hitler built upon a Protestant tradition going back to the Reformation and the destruction of much of the interior of formerly Catholic churches. The cult of genius, too, was at its heart a Protestant phenomenon. But Hitler’s speeches were not the equivalent of sincere sermons in Protestant churches stripped of almost all ornaments. Rather, they were oral spectacles in which the venues where the speeches were given, the posters put up all over the city to advertise the events, and the entire atmosphere in which they took place were just as important as Hitler’s voice itself. In other words, despite his Bilderverbot, Hitler quickly mastered the use of visual imagery to support and enhance his oral performance.

  For instance, Hitler would rarely speak outdoors, as he realized that it was much easier for him to fill indoor spaces with his voice. Indoors, he could control how the sound traveled, and could control everything else, too, creating harmony out of his voice, space, and the visual, all aimed at producing a stunning shared experience.19

  He also carefully choreographed the way his talks were advertised all over Munich. The big red posters that the party put up on the special advertising columns popular in German cities at the time immediately caught people’s eye. Hitler would later state that he had opted for red because “it is the most stirring [color] and the one most likely to outrage and provoke our opponents, and so make us noticeable and memorable to them one way or another.”20

  Hitler’s oral spectacles were different from the usual Munich political event. As a result, people started to flock to his speeches, among them many of the growing number of the disaffected and disillusioned. These were people who had been sitting politically on the fence, undecided as to whether to join a political protest movement and about which movement to join. The challenge for any political group was to attract the attention of potential supporters in a confusing, fast-moving, and fragmented political marketplace. And it was Hitler’s speeches, and the way he staged them, that managed to accomplish precisely that. Needless to say, not everyone among the disenchanted who attended Hitler’s speeches became a convert to the NSDAP’s cause. Yet an increasing number came off their fences and joined the ranks of party supporters. Hitler’s speeches in 1920 were what gave the party momentum and transformed it into a significant social protest movement.

  With his voice, Hitler could attract and keep the attention of large crowds. By 1920, he had honed the use of his voice; gone were the days of the slightly awkward but well-liked loner of the years of the First World War. In private, Hitler tended to speak softly—yet on a stage, his voice transformed into something else. Konrad Heiden, who, despite being an ardent opponent of his attended his speeches in the early 1920s, experienced Hitler’s voice as “something unexpected. Between those modest, narrow shoulders, the man had lungs. His voice was the very epitome of power, firmness, command, and will. Even when calm, it was a guttural thunder; when agitated, it howled like a siren betokening inexorable danger. It was the first roar of inanimate nature, yet accompanied by flexible human overtones of friendliness, rage, or scorn.” As Ilse Pröhl, Rudolf’s Heß’s future wife, recalled of the first Hitler speech she attended in 1920, “There were only about 40 or 60 people there. But you had the impression he spoke to the whole of Germany.”21

  Elsewhere in Germany it would perhaps have been more difficult for Hitler to attract the same kind of attention that he received in southern Bavaria. As an early Hitler biographer, Ernst Deuerlein—a Franconian by birth who spent many years of his adult life in Munich—put it, “a nimble tongue” was a quality greatly admired in southern Bavaria. “The ability to ‘tell a man how it is’ enjoys a particular appreciation in the Bavarian heartland. The more spirited a speaker, the more respected he will be among his contemporaries,” Deuerlein wrote. “The people have a strong baroque streak, an appreciation of robust fun and rustic comedy. The fact that here was a simple soldier who knew to talk about things that ordinarily would be dealt with by the authorities—that was a sensation.”22

  Hitler’s performance skills were very important for the NSDAP because such events in postwar Munich doubled as venues to express political convictions and to find entertainment for a generation with no access to the conveniences of electronic media. People attended political events in the beer halls of Munich to escape the boredom of sitting at home and staring out the window. Hitler’s talent as a speaker and a performer bore the promise that the NSDAP would be the beneficiary of any future consolidation among Munich’s radical right, in a situation where it was difficult to tell the minor political differences of the city’s various right-wing splinter groups apart. Indeed, to that end, Hitler put most of his energy into giving as many speeches as possible in 1920.

  That year, Hitler was the main speaker at twenty-one DAP/NSDAP events in Munich, many of which would take place not just in the Hofbräuhaus, but also in the beer halls of some of the city’s other breweries—including the Bürgerbräu, the Münchner Kindlkeller, the Wagnerbräu, and the Hackerbräu—and attracting audiences varying in size between 800 and 3,500. The most popular event of the year was on a topic at the heart of Hitler’s politicization and radicalization. It was a protest held in the Münchner Kindlkeller against the peace conditions of the Versailles Treaty, in particular, the loss of the West German region of Eupen-Malmedy to Belgium and the threat of losing Upper Silesia in the east. The event attracted between 3,000 and 3,500 people. Hitler also contributed to at least seven discussions that followed the speeches at meetings of other political groups in Munich. Furthermore, he gave sixteen speeches outside Munich.23

  The attendance figures for Hitler’s speeches provide only a limited sense of his degree of popularity, as the events also drew political opponents in large numbers who would try to disrupt him. It is thus impossible to quantify the support Hitler received in 1920. However, the very fact that he attracted large numbers of both supporters and foes is a perfect measure of his ever-rising notoriety. This played into Hitler’s hands, as it channeled toward the NSDAP public attention that otherwise might have flowed to other political groups with comparable political ideas.

  His speaking engagements were extremely taxing. He talked at the events, which started at 7:30 or 8:00 p.m., for two to three hours, sometimes longer, without any microphone or loudspeakers in venues with often poor acoustics. Initially, Hitler did not even speak from notes; it was only in 1921/1922 that he started to bring structured notes along to his speaking events. After one to two hours of speaking, he often started to feel physically weak. Giving speeches so frequently took a toll on his body. Food was still relatively scarce in Munich—as a result, Hitler, as well as most people in Munich, often operated on a half-full stomach. To get through his marathon events and for an energy boost before starting to speak, he often mixed a raw egg with sugar in a cylinder-shaped metal container and downed the mixture right before his speech.

  One of the reasons Hitler gave such long speeches was a pragmatic one: He wanted to make sure that the party events at which he spoke would be performative rather than discursive in character. He desired to speak at people, not with them. The tradition at the time was that speaker events would feature a speech followed by lengthy discussions. Hitler thought that discussions would not bring any good and that they might spiral out of control and bring scandal. Therefore, he made sure by speaking as long as possible that there would be little time left for discussion between the end of his speeches and closing time at 11:00 p.m.

  After the end of his speeches, Hitler would still be on a high for a while and would mingle with his closest associates to calm down. After hours of speaking, he would be starving. If the meeting ended before 11:00 p.m., the inner circle of party members would walk to the Sterneckerbräu to take some dinner there. Otherwise, they would all go to the home of a party member and stay there late into the night, which would be easier for Hitler than his associates to accomplish, as unlike hi
m they had normal day jobs and could not, as he did, stay in bed late. When together with only the party members he was close to, he relaxed. As one of them recalled, “Hitler liked to be amused, to laugh, and showed his utter contentment by slapping his knees.” Likewise, Ilse Pröhl, Rudolf Heß’s future wife, recalled, “If you were sitting with Hitler, we laughed together, we made jokes together. We were very much together, he liked to laugh.”

  During the party events and his late-night dinners, Hitler’s eating and drinking habits matched those of the people around him. While he never smoked, he then, unlike later, still ate meat and drank alcohol. His favorite dish was Tiroler Gröstl, a fry-up of potatoes, beef, and eggs, which he would consume with dark beer, which he always preferred over light or wheat beer. Over the course of an evening, during the speaking event and afterward, Hitler would drink between two and three pints of beer. Yet he would consume it over several hours, and the beer he drank was weak due to the continued food shortage in Munich.24 Even then, Hitler’s drug was not alcohol—it was the act of speaking. As a US intelligence report based on interviews with people who had known Hitler closely concluded in 1942, “He is probably only happy and restful when he has talked himself to the point of swooning from exhaustion.”25

  By the second half of 1920, speaking and politicking had become everything for Hitler. It was now more than a job for him. It was a calling. It had become the fuel of his life. As he had proved unable to maintain human relationships among equals over extended periods of time, or to fill his days with working in a normal profession—in short, as he had been incapable of living the kind of life enjoyed by almost everyone else—he had literally nothing else to give structure and meaning to his life. As Konrad Heiden put it, “Others had friends, a wife, a profession; he had only the masses to talk to.”26

  Therefore, Hitler’s progressive radicalization was not driven purely by clever political tactics. In other words, it was not driven just by an attempt to be distinctive in the busy arena of right-wing politics in Munich. It also had a personal element to it. Just as a drug addict will do anything to get hold of the substance that is the source of the high, arguably Hitler had become addicted to the responses he received during his speeches, which reinforced his desire for more. Because he received the greatest responses from the most outrageous and extreme ideas he expressed, he would repeat, stress, and further develop those ideas in subsequent speeches.

  The dialectic interplay between Hitler and his audience was not lost on his associates. As Hermann Esser recalled, “Hitler appealed to the masses unconsciously at first, and then consciously. But in reality, it was the masses that shaped Hitler.” According to Esser, “[Hitler] had a feeling for [trends]; he would sense them wherever he went, and it was, in consequence, the mass that shaped him; there was an interplay here [between Hitler and his listeners].”27

  True to the conventions of what makes a genius—the belief in an individual who has original insights into the nature of the world and who lays out the architecture for a better world—Hitler, said Esser, did not provide a running commentary about day-to-day political developments in his speeches. Instead, what he said took the form of proclamations about the nature of things.28

  The common pattern of his speeches was to approach problems historically. For him, questions of national security, of making sense of Germany’s current predicament, and of finding answers could only be understood and answered historically. For Hitler, history was the defining factor in national self-understanding and in the understanding of rivals and allies, as well as a never-ceasing source of illuminating analogies. It was both the memory of states as well as an object to study to understand the rules of statecraft and international affairs. It was a means to discern the laws of human development. He always did, and always would, think historically. Both as a speaker and as a politician, and subsequently as a dictator, Hitler was first and foremost a history man.29

  Hitler’s theory of how history informs politics and statecraft followed from his approach to genius. The goal of turning to history is not to copy and replicate the past, but to act as a source of inspiration to create something new. In other words, Hitler saw the utility of history in understanding the present and in defining future challenges. When in the future, he hung paintings of Frederick the Great and put up busts of Bismarck in his party headquarters or in the Reich Chancellery, he did not do so to indicate that he wanted to be Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but that he felt inspired by them. The same was true of his approach to Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the republican Commonwealth in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. While not publicly acknowledging Cromwell’s influence on him, in private he stated that he felt inspired by the Englishman, admiring him as a self-appointed dictator, the creator of the Royal Navy, and an opponent of parliamentarianism, universal franchise, communism, and Roman Catholicism.30

  Hitler’s speeches of 1920 followed a common pattern that was defined by his approach to history: He would present Germany’s glorious past before painting a picture of its miserable present. He would then give the reasons, as he saw them, for how the former had become the latter, proceed to define remedies to battle that degeneration, and then end by promising hope for the future.31

  Thus, Hitler did not define himself just by what he was against, nor were his goals limited to seeking revenge. Nor was he a nihilist.32 Significantly, his speeches were full of bacteriological metaphors, rather than—as was so popular elsewhere on the German political right—references to how a victorious Germany had been stabbed in the back, similar to the way that the dragon-slaying hero Siegfried of the medieval epic “The Song of the Nibelungs” had been treacherously killed by his nemesis Hagen von Tronje.33 While it is possible to take revenge against a stab in the back, it is impossible to do so against bacteria. Fighting the bacteria that led to the degeneration of a body, or metaphorically of a state and society, does not require revenge. Rather, Hitler presented the notion that by destroying the bacteria that had led to its misery, Germany would recover and subsequently be made resistant to new infections and be able to live a good and self-determined life. Hitler thus preached destruction as a means to an end, always defining ultimate goals in positive terms. It was this promise of the “sun of liberty” that would make Hitler attractive to a generation of idealistic young Germans who came of age between the 1920s and the 1940s.34

  Fighting the destructive forces of the present and building a better and hopeful future were but two sides of the same coin, not just for Hitler but also for many of his fellow National Socialists. Gottfried Feder, for instance, not only railed against what he saw as the destructive forces of Judaism and of finance, but also offered the vision of a “new town” as the prototype for a German way of living that would become the nucleus for a new Germany. His goal was to establish new towns all over the country of approximately 20,000 inhabitants each, which in turn would be made up of cells of approximately 3,500 inhabitants. Feder argued that towns like these would avoid the downsides of big-city life, such as child poverty, high numbers of traffic accidents, and the spread of disease and destitution.35

  The recurrent theme of Hitler’s speeches of 1920 was that Germany would be able to live under the “sun of liberty” again only if national solidarity and a belief in one’s own abilities were boosted. Further, that golden future could be achieved only if Bavarian separatism was combated, a classless workers’ state established, the peace conditions of the Versailles Treaty undone, and high finance and “interest slavery” destroyed. Hitler would return time and time again to the same theme: the necessity of drawing lessons for Germany from the power of Britain and America. Hitler’s hatred toward the Anglo-American world had been part and parcel of his politicization and radicalization in post-treaty Munich. This was a sentiment that played well to his audiences, as it was widely shared among other far-right groups in Munich. For instance, a speaker for the German Völkisch Protection and Defiance Federation had raged at an event held
on January 7, 1920—an event that also had featured Hitler as a guest speaker—about “the great Jewish banks and billionaires, like Morgan (America) and Rothschild (England), who formed a secret society.” The speaker had claimed that “Morgan’s last will shows clearly his belief that Germany must be destroyed in order for America to remain competitive.”36

  As a result of Hitler’s rising popularity and notoriety, the NSDAP started to attract attention beyond Munich, a situation that he tried to exploit. In 1920, he spoke a total of eleven times at places outside the city boundaries but still within Munich’s orbit, in an attempt to boost the party’s profile in the region and to facilitate the establishment of party chapters beyond Bavaria’s capital. In doing so, Hitler essentially became a traveling salesman for the party.37

  The first NSDAP chapter outside Munich was established in nearby Rosenheim. On April 18, 1920, Theodor Lauböck, a senior local official of the national railway company, the Reichsbahn, set up a local chapter of the NSDAP that initially included fourteen members. As had been the case with the original DAP chapter in Munich, railway men dominated the party in Rosenheim. Hitler and Lauböck instantly got on well with each other. Hitler now often made his way to Rosenheim to visit Lauböck, his wife, Dora, and their sons, or the Lauböcks would come to Munich and meet up with Hitler in one of the beer halls of the city. When traveling, Hitler would send them postcards.38

  The only time that Hitler spoke far afield in the first half of 1920 was as a guest speaker at a meeting of the German Völkisch Protection and Defiance Federation in Stuttgart on May 7. Yet in the second half of 1920, he began regularly to address audiences outside southern Bavaria. For instance, he crossed Germany’s southern border for the Austrian national election campaign. During that trip, which lasted from September 29 to October 9, Hitler gave a total of four speeches on the campaign trail. In an electoral sense, the trip to the country of his birth was a complete failure: only 24,015 people in the whole of Austria voted for the National Socialists. During the trip and during subsequent visits to Austria in the following years, Hitler grew close to the Austrian National Socialist leader Walter Riehl. Although Riehl subsequently claimed to have played the role of John the Baptist to the messiah Hitler,39 it is difficult to see how he would have exerted any major influence on Hitler during the latter’s short and sparse trips to Austria.