Once Hitler is encouraged to speak in public, finds the confidence and discovers that he is able to, and that people are interested in what he has to say, he is for the first time free to explore his abilities. He is now able to mine his inner being without the destructive checks and balances of the brain, existing simply in the moment, and that feeling of control, of mastery and skill, must surely have filled him to the brim. He is thirty years old and yet to experience success in anything to which he has applied himself. In fact he has failed in every endeavor, until now, stepping onto the platform and looking out at the crowd of people in the room in front of him. His sensitivity, which is so great and which compels him to sever himself from other people completely, either by withdrawing, avoiding the gaze of others, keeping to himself, or by talking incessantly to keep everyone at arm’s length, this sensitivity, so unmanageable in the face of an individual you, now comes into its own, perhaps for the first time in his life, for while he is so aware of that you as to shut it out entirely, with near-autistic compulsion, his awareness of the we is quite as intense, and to this we, which is unthreatening, he is able to open himself. He opens himself to the we, heedful of what it says, sensing every nuance of its mood and playing on its strings, for he is not himself a part of this we, but stands outside it, rousing it, stirring it into life, taking it here, taking it there, and he is able to do so because he has always stood outside it. In order to see something, one must see from outside.
Only someone who stands outside the social world knows what the social world is; to those within it, it is like water to a fish. Hitler rejects the singular you, and stands outside the we, and yet he longs for it, and it is this longing his audiences sense when he speaks, the longing for the we being the very foundation of the human, swelling in times of crisis, swelling in chaos, as it did in the Germany of the 1920s, and in Hitler it burns fiercely indeed. There is no need to listen to what he says, his audience were oblivious too, but to the way he says it, the emotions by which he is filled, this is what they react to, this is what they feel, and they drink it up like water. Oh, this longing for community, this longing to be equal, this longing to belong. The simplest is the truest, and this is the truth of Hitler, his longing to be a part of the we touches something deep within that we itself – all accounts of his speeches from this time focus on the same thing, the way his raucous beer-hall audiences, for all their shouting and scuffling, their whooping and howling, hush and fall calm, and become as one. The simplest is the truest, and hatred of the Jews represents the simplest thing of all, the we’s need of a they, the basic mimetic structure of violence, the one against the other, duplicated in ritual, us against them, the sacrifice of a they in order that the we may prevail. That need too swells in crisis, swells in chaos, one of the fundamental forms of culture, a condition to which we continue to return. For Hitler, longing for the we is also a longing for the war, and the role it played in what later occurred cannot be underestimated.
Ernst Hanfstaengl recognizes this more clearly than most, writing:
We all knew, but overlooked the deeper implications of the fact, that the first flowering of his personality had been as a soldier.
When he talked of National-Socialism what he really meant was military-Socialism, Socialism within a framework of military discipline or, in civilian terms, police-Socialism. At what point along the line his mind took the final shape it did I do not know, but the germ was always there.
When Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party it was hardly a party at all. Its first public meetings in 1919, with Drexler speaking, were attended by audiences of ten, thirty-eight, and forty-one respectively. With Hitler speaking these numbers improved dramatically. In 1920 he spoke at more than thirty public meetings, drawing audiences of between 800 and 2,500 in every instance, Kershaw reports, party membership figures increasing similarly, from 190 in January 1920 to 2,000 a year later, and 3,300 six months after that. Hitler was being noticed, at first by other party members, subsequently by Munich’s general public. Those who saw him speak at those first meetings had need of him and took care of him accordingly, which was a further boost to his confidence, extending his radius, bringing him into contact with new people in new contexts. An early member of the party, Dietrich Eckart, was especially important in this respect. Eckart was a poet, translator of Ibsen, a morphine-addicted anti-Semite who quickly took an interest in Hitler and became a mentor to him. He was twenty years Hitler’s senior, as educated as he was cultivated, though often blunt in manner. He gave Hitler his first trip in an airplane, took him to the theater, bought him a coat, taught him writing, published his first articles, introduced him to circles he had not previously had access to, and generally paved his way into Munich’s right-wing radical environment, as well as nourishing his anti-Semitic and anticommunist opinions and providing him with arguments in their support. “This man is the future of Germany,” he would say of Hitler, according to Timothy W. Ryback. “One day the whole world will be talking about him.” Eckart became a father figure to Hitler, who was flattered by his attentions and absorbed everything he taught him. Three years before Eckart was introduced to Hitler, he had found cause to proclaim:
We need someone to lead us who is used to the sound of a machine gun. Someone who can scare the shit out of people. I don’t need an officer. The common people have lost all respect for them. The best would be a worker who knows how to talk. He doesn’t need to know much. Politics is the stupidest profession on earth. Any farmer’s wife knows as much as any political leader. Give me a vain monkey who can give the Reds their due and won’t run away as soon as someone swings a chair leg at him. I would take him any day over a dozen educated professors who wet their pants and sit there trembling with their facts. He has to be a bachelor, then we’ll get the women.
Few could fit that description better then Hitler. When Hanfstaengl, born in 1887 and two years older than Hitler, met him, Hitler was thirty-four. For the first time in his life he was succeeding at something, for the first time in his life he was of worth to others and not just himself, but the portrait Hanfstaengl paints could quite as easily have been the young man Kubizek describes from his time in Linz and Vienna. After that first evening in the beer hall, Hanfstaengl attends another meeting and hears him speak a second time, and on this occasion his impression of Hitler is moderated somewhat, Hitler going further this time, with thinly veiled incitements to guerrilla warfare in the case of a French incursion on the Rhine, this sounding to Hanfstaengl like the language of a desperado. He finds Hitler’s views on foreign politics alarming, disproportionate and extravagant. Yet he remains both captivated and intrigued, asking himself what might be at the back of this curious man’s brain, and on attending a third meeting at which Hitler speaks he introduces him to his wife and to the wife of the Norwegian illustrator Olaf Gulbransson, and invites him to his home. Before long, Hanfstaengl is drawn into Hitler’s inner circles, Hanfstaengl’s wide network of contacts being of particular use to them. He pays for a new printing press for their weekly newspaper, facilitates the publishing of some articles on foreign affairs, and endeavors in his own words to influence Hitler’s views on foreign politics, which he finds too continental and narrow-minded, and overly determined by Rosenberg and his associates, whom he despises and whose anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism positively disgust him. Hitler listens attentively to what he has to say, Hanfstaengl writes, though would later become more indifferent; when it came to the United States, Hitler wanted to hear about skyscrapers and was more fascinated by details of technical progress than by political matters, though he was particularly interested in the Ku Klux Klan, which he thought to be a political movement much like his own, and in Henry Ford, not so much as an automobile manufacturer and industrial innovator but more as an anti-Semite.
In Hanfstaengl’s home Hitler made a good impression, being especially taken with his wife, sending her flowers, kissing her hand, giving her adoring looks, and he played with the couple’s son wi
th the kind of spontaneity a child likes in an adult. His ill-fitting suit, his respectful diffidence and adherence to formal manners of address were all revealing of his class background, Hanfstaengl writes; Hitler spoke the way people of lower rank spoke to people of better education, title, or academic attainment. His table manners were good, though his tastes were occasionally curious; Hanfstaengl states that he had the most incredible sweet tooth of any man he had ever met. At one meal Hanfstaengl treats him to “a bottle of Prince Metternich’s best Gewürtztraminer” and coming back into the room after being called out to the telephone catches Hitler spooning sugar into his glass.
Hanfstaengl visits Hitler in his tiny flat at Thierschstrasse 41, where he lives extremely modestly, “like a down-at-heels clerk.” His lodgings here comprised a single room with a large bed, too wide for its corner and with the head obscuring the single narrow window. The floor covering was cheap, worn linoleum, with a couple of threadbare rugs, on the wall opposite the bed was a makeshift bookshelf, the only other piece of furniture in the room apart from a chair and a table. The landlady, a Frau Reichert, was Jewish and found Hitler an ideal tenant.
He is such a nice man, but he has the most extraordinary moods. Sometimes weeks go by when he seems to be sulking and does not say a word to us. He looks through us as if we were not there. He always pays his rent punctually in advance, but he is a real Bohemian type.
In the hallway there was an upright piano, and on one occasion when Hitler was due in court as a witness he asked Hanfstaengl to play something to calm his nerves. Hanfstaengl obliged with some Bach, to which Hitler sat nodding his head with vague interest. But when Hanfstaengl moved on to the prelude of Wagner’s Meistersinger, Hitler switched on immediately:
This was it. This was Hitler’s meat. He knew the thing absolutely by heart and could whistle every note of it in a curious penetrating vibrato, but completely in tune. He started to march up and down the hall, waving his arms as if he was conducting an orchestra. He really had an excellent feel for the spirit of music, certainly as good as many a conductor. This music affected him physically, and by the time I had crashed through the finale he was in splendid spirits, all his worries gone, and raring to get to grips with the public prosecutor.
Kershaw describes the same occasion, and since this was a meeting that took place between Hanfstaengl and Hitler alone, there are no other sources than Hanfstaengl’s memoir. Kershaw’s account is as follows:
Hitler was taken by Putzi’s skills as a pianist, especially his ability to play Wagner. He would accompany Putzi by whistling the tune, marching up and down swinging his arms like the conductor of an orchestra, relaxing visibly in the process.
In the passages where Hanfstaengl is the source he is consistently referred to by the diminutive “Putzi,” and Hitler’s interest in Wagner comes across as comical and bizarre, as if only Hitler could find something so absurd to be relaxing. But Hanfstaengl does not portray Hitler as foolish, on the contrary he emphasizes his knowledge and his feel for the spirit of the music. The fact that he is able to whistle entire Wagner symphonies may indeed appear unusual, but the same was true of Wittgenstein, who could whistle Wagner to perfection and would often exploit his talent as a party trick to entertain his guests. It is hard to imagine the author of a Wittgenstein biography belittling the great philsopher’s passion for music, even if it did manifest itself peculiarly in the form of whistling, but when it comes to Hitler the way Kershaw portrays him, everything he does is either sinister or ridiculous. Another example, Hanfstaengl writing:
Hitler’s intimates were nearly all modest people. As I got to know him I started attending the Monday evening Stammtisch at the Café Neumaier, an old-fashioned coffeehouse on the corner of the Petersplatz and the Viktualien Markt. The long, irregular room, with built-in benches and paneled walls, had space for a hundred people or so. Here he was in the habit of meeting his oldest adherents, many of them middle-aged married couples, who came to have their frugal supper, part of which they brought with them. Hitler would speak en famille and try out the technique and effect of his newest ideas.
And Kershaw’s version:
Certainly by the time Putzi Hanfstaengl, the cultured part-American who became his Foreign Press Chief, came to know him, late in 1922, Hitler had a table booked every Monday evening at the old-fashioned Café Neumaier on the edge of the Viktualienmarkt … In the long room, with its rows of benches and tables, often occupied by elderly couples, Hitler’s entourage would discuss politics, or listen to his monologues on art and architecture, while eating the snacks they had brought with them, and drinking their liters of beer or cups of coffee.
Hitler’s audience, his oldest adherents, middle-aged married couples of modest background, are in Kershaw’s rendering “elderly couples” who “often occupied” the benches and tables, so not only does he alter their age, he also gives the impression they were simply customers there and Hitler knew them as no more than that. Why? Middle-aged couples of modest background gathered around Hitler in a cozy café lends an air of respectability and decency to Hitler that goes against Kershaw’s image of him. This is why Kershaw’s version also departs from “frugal supper” in favor of “snacks” and “liters of beer.” The source text has no mention of beer or snacks, this is something Kershaw has added, presumably to enhance the impression of the place as a drinking joint, though certainly beer would also have been served there, and in the context of the juxtaposition the “cups of coffee” seem equally negative.
Hanfstaengl goes on to describe Hitler’s inner circle at this time, all of whom are present at these Monday evening political and social meetings.
While Hanfstaengl perhaps might not be the most reliable source, having been close to Hitler for some ten years, for which reason he might well be considered a Nazi, with all that this entails as regards the need to explain things away, his memoir nonetheless does provide a balanced portrait of Hitler and his supporters, simply by not tending to any one side. It is this balanced nature of Hanfstaengl’s account that makes it credible, and also what makes it interesting, in the picture it paints of Hitler and in its contribution to our understanding of his appeal, which cannot have been the appeal of a criminal, a clown, or someone of shallow nature, but must surely have been of a wholly different character, for how else would he be able to lead an entire nation with him into the abyss? He was human, the people around him were human, his party comrades were human. This is not the same as to say they were good, for the bad and the brutal too are human. Christian Weber, a burly horse dealer who enjoyed knocking communists about, has another side to him too. Hanfstaengl writes that Weber is flattered to be invited into the home of a person of the upper classes. How much this says of his sense of class belonging. All he really wants is a secure job and a measure of dignity in his life. And Hanfstaengl writes that Weber, this thug, possesses “an oddly intuitive sense of the bottomless pit of Hitler’s mind” and realizes fully what Hitler is capable of – this is perceptible, at least to someone who knows, perhaps from himself, what humans are capable of and how that potential finds expression. Another who senses this is Eckart, Hitler’s mentor, who “was already beginning to regret it.” Why? And Drexler, the union man, who strongly disapproves of the violence that is becoming a growing factor in the party’s activities. Those who accompany Hitler home from these Monday-night meetings are armed, Hitler himself carries a pistol in his jacket pocket, even when speaking. These evenings are strange in the way they bring together decent folk from meager backgrounds and raging fanatics, one of whom is perhaps mixed up in the most significant political murder to have taken place in the Weimar Republic, the assassination of the foreign minister, Rathenau. Hitler is the radial point of the group. He can whistle entire symphonies while air-conducting, he lacks the courage to approach a woman of his own age, he loves cakes and anything sweet, he holds the Iron Cross First Class, for bravery in combat, he lives a shadowy Bohemian existence in a shabby apartment, never keeps an ap
pointment, is often seen in the showrooms of automobile dealers, and when in the company of others talks incessantly. He cannot tolerate anyone other than himself dominating any situation in which he is present, and in such instances will readily lie in order to regain others’ attention, he always knows better, wears carpet slippers indoors, and has a nice line in impersonations, his take on Göring’s wife and her Swedish accent being particularly funny, though he can do equally good ones of Max Amann in a rage and Quirin Diesl insulting a political opponent, his star turn however being the semiprofessorial, politically aware nationalist babbling on about Siegfried’s sword and the German eagle in insufferably pompous fashion, Hanfstaengl writes, adding that Hitler had learned off by heart the greater part of a dreadful poem written to him by an admirer, containing endless half-rhymes on Hitler, which he recited with such passion he would have his audience in tears of laughter. Moreover he registers as a “writer” when checking into hotels, he has no eye for nature, never reads novels, admires Cromwell but most of all Frederick the Great; he is attracted by death, idealizes war, writes poems about his mother, hates the Jews and all things Jewish, he is interested in eugenics and reads everything there is about the biology of race, has never read Nietzsche, though he holds his prose to be the most splendid German, has in fact read Fichte and Schopenhauer, and his favorite motif in painting is Leda and the Swan. This man it is who sits at the Café Neumaier every Monday night, surrounded by party comrades and supporters, with a pistol in his pocket and a militarized group of young men watching out for him who beat up communists and other opponents. He has written a letter in which he states that the Jews should be removed, and he has spoken out against them in all his numerous speeches. It is an opinion he shares with many, most prevalent among the lower classes, those higher up, where power normally resides, find it inappropriate and vulgar, a breach of a norm that is primarily aesthetic or founded on notions of class. Thomas Mann, who is in the same city, perhaps only a few streets away from the Café Neumaier, does not hate the Jews, such a notion would be unthinkable to him. He hailed the outbreak of the war, its blood stood for the authentic and significant, in contrast to the inauthenticity and insignificance of civilization, this too an extreme standpoint in our time, yet within the bounds of the acceptable not least because he took it all back after the war. But Hitler and Mann in the same city, at the same time. Is Hitler more evil than Mann? When neither has yet done wrong? What is evil? Anti-Semitism? What made Mann recoil from anti-Semitism while Hitler embraced it? Education? Is anti-Semitism a class issue? Or is it a question of personal decency, a qualitative difference between people who are unlike each other? Nazism plainly came from the bottom, Drexler was a blacksmith and a trade unionist, Weber was a horse dealer, most of the others were lower middle class like Hitler himself, functionaries and office workers, all in one sense or another having failed or been marginalized in some way. The exception is Eckart, but he is a deviant, not many poets were morphine addicts and Jew-haters, whereas figures such as Rosenberg and later Himmler and Goebbels are fanatics. The sympathizers, those middle-aged couples, also belonged to the working class and the lower middle class and were of slender means, those who suffered most from the crisis that had struck Germany. They took their frugal suppers with them to the restaurant from home. Such are the people closest to Hitler in 1922, before he took a step up and became a name throughout the land. But the simple fact of Truman Smith being dispatched to meet him, and Hanfstaengl joining his inner circle, indicates that the movement had started. Every premise of what would later occur is in place here. In Hitler, who has shown himself to be a brilliant orator, but who must also, on the basis of what Hanfstaengl writes, have revealed frightening sides of himself; in Drexler, who wanted decency, and in Hanfstaengl, who wanted the return of a strong and stable German Reich, and in Rosenberg, who with his Estonian background despised Russia, and whose east-European anti-Semitism, according to Sebastian Haffner, surpassed that of the west in its brutal and violent expression, and in the anonymous middle-aged couples of the lower middle class. Of this conglomeration, Toland writes:
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 83