Such were the men close to Hitler. His movement cut across all social classes and so all types were drawn to him – the intellectual, the street fighter, the fanatic, the idealist, the hooligan, the condottiere, the principled and the unprincipled, laborers and noblemen. There were gentle souls and the ruthless, rascals and men of good will; writers, painters, day laborers, storekeepers, dentists, students, soldiers, and priests. His appeal was broad and he was broad-minded enough to accept a drug addict like Eckart or a homosexual like Captain Röhm.
Hitler never underrated a follower, Toland writes, no matter how humble, no matter how wretched he or she might be, he opened up the new party offices to down-at-heel and unemployed followers and party members who needed refuge from the cold. At the same time he looked upward, seeking out wealthy industrialists sympathetic to his cause to drum up financial support, and through Hanfstaengl he was introduced into upper-class society. Hanfstaengl introduced Hitler to William Bayard Hale, a classmate of President Wilson at Princeton and chief correspondent in Europe for the Hearst newspapers, to the artist Wilhelm Funk, whose salons were frequented by Prince Henckel-Donnersmarck and a variety of wealthy, nationalistically inclined business figures, Hanfstaengl reports, never concealing his own attraction to nobility and fame; he takes Hitler with him to visit Fritz-August von Kaulbach’s family, patrons of the arts, Hanfstaengl hoping they would connect in that common interest and that Hitler would be influenced by their refinement; he takes him with him to visit the Bruckmann family, who run a large publishing house in Munich and published Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the well-known anti-Semite. Elsa Bruckmann, formerly Princess Cantacuzène, would take Hitler under her wing as a protégé, but when later she extends her patronage to Rosenberg, Hanfstaengl makes a point of no longer attending her salon, finding it unworthy that a woman from “a family which had entertained Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Spengler” should be taken in by such a charlatan.
There is something naïve and wide-eyed about Hitler in these contexts, he writes, particularly after a dinner given by the Bechstein family, the famous piano makers, where Hitler in his usual ill-fitting blue suit feels embarrassed in such splendidly elegant company. Frau Bechstein convinces him to acquire a dinner jacket and a pair of patent leather shoes, which he does, though apart from the shoes, which for a period barely leave his feet, he hardly ever wears the outfit, an appalled Hanfstaengl warning him that no leader of a workers’ movement should be seen going around in the garb of the upper classes.
Both Frau Bechstein and Frau Bruckmann show maternal concern for Hitler, and Hanfstaengl mentions other such women in Hitler’s life, much the same age as his mother would have been, to whom he is obviously drawn, presumably because they are maternal and caring and because sexually they represent no threat to him. He knows no other women, is uninvolved in any relationship, and, Hanfstaengl writes, has no sex life. He is taken with beautiful women, and develops an infatuation for some, Hanfstaengl’s wife among them, but always platonically and without commitment.
One thing that became borne in on me very early was the absence of a vital factor in Hitler’s existence. He had no normal sex life. I have said that he developed an infatuation for my wife, which expressed itself in flowers and hand-kissings and an adoring look in his eyes. She was probably the first good-looking woman of good family he had ever met, but somehow one never felt with him that the attraction was physical. It was part of his extraordinary gift for self-dramatization, part of hidden complexes and a constitutional insufficiency which may have been congenital and may have resulted from a syphilitic infection during his youth in Vienna.
At this early period the details were unknown to me and one could only sense that something was wrong. Here was this man with a volcanic store of nervous energy, with no apparent outlet except his almost medium-like perfomances on a speaker’s platform. Most of his women friends and acquaintances were the mother-type, Frau Bruckmann and Frau Bechstein. There was another woman in her sixties I met, named Carola Hoffmann, who was a retired schoolteacher and had a little house in the Munich suburb of Solln, which he and his cronies used to use as a sort of sub-headquarters, where the good lady mothered Hitler and fed him with cakes.
His rage, not without lust, when he took Kubizek into the red-light district in Vienna, seemingly as terrifying as it was enticing; his total rejection of brothel visits and French women in the trenches, his sustained, remote infatuation with Stefanie in Linz, whom he never found the courage to approach, his tirades against the declining sexual morals of the day, his abstention from masturbation, his horror of germs and infection, his physical and moral meticulousness, not to say prudery. On the bottom shelf of the bookcase in his apartment he kept a small collection of semipornographic books, Hanfstaengl writes, and this is the essence, woman as pure, woman as image, an object he can admire and dream about as long as he can do so from a distance, but which poses an immediate and alarming threat as soon as it comes close to breaking into his world in the form of some physical reality. His fear of intimacy is immense, and with it his fear of sex; it is the bodily, physical nature of it he cannot stand, and the nearness of another. Woman as it, alluring and delightful in dreams, but never as you, in his intimate sphere. The few women he became involved with had in common that they were all much younger than him, barely of age. One such was Maria Reiter, whom he met along with her sister in 1926, just after the publication of Mein Kampf, she was very young and they met in a park where they were all walking their dogs. They chatted for an hour, Hitler invited them to attend one of his speeches, a closed event, glancing often at Maria as he spoke, accompanying her home afterwards, placing his hands on her shoulders, about to draw her toward him when suddenly in a fit of rage he felt compelled to thrash his misbehaving dog with the whip he was in the habit of carrying at the time. According to Liljegren they saw each other again on a number of occasions; Hitler asked her to call him Wolf, and he called her Mizzi. They visited her mother’s grave, they went on picnics and for drives in the countryside. Hitler was thirty-seven, she was sixteen. Later she related that he had kissed her once. When her birthday came he gave her a yellow armband and the two volumes of Mein Kampf bound in red leather, with the inscription “Read these books and you will understand me.” Her father, who was a social democrat, did not approve of his daughter being involved with the leader of the Nazis. In a letter to her, Hitler wrote:
Even if fathers sometimes don’t understand their children any longer because they have got older not only in years but in feelings, they mean only well for them. As happy as your love makes me, I ask you most ardently to listen to your father.
Less than a year later Hitler had started to lose interest in her, and when she discovered he had stayed the night in his Munich apartment without getting in touch she tried to hang herself with a clothesline, only to be saved by her brother-in-law, Liljegren writes. The relationship was by all accounts never consummated, nor was another discreet love affair a few years later with his niece Geli, who his sister Angela had been pregnant with at the time of his mother’s funeral.
Geli was nineteen years old when she moved to Munich to study; at first she became involved with Hitler’s driver, Emil Maurice, the couple going so far as to become engaged, which made Hitler furious. In a letter to Maurice, however, Geli writes that “we shall be able to meet and even be alone together, Uncle A has promised. He’s a dear, as you know.” Nevertheless, Maurice, who had been with Hitler as a minder and all-around gofer since 1921, was given the boot. Later, he would state that “Hitler loved her, but it was a strange kind of love to which he would never admit.” Hitler himself would say, “There is nothing finer than to educate a young thing as one wants: a girl of eighteen or twenty is as malleable as wax.” When Hitler moved into a larger apartment in 1929, Geli moved in with him. He hid her away, gave her what she wanted, unless it was freedom – if she was going out she would be escorted, and she enjoyed no social contact with anyone her own age, only Hitle
r’s party comrades. After two years of living like this she committed suicide, Hitler was on his way to Bayreuth when she shot herself in her room with his pistol. The bullet went through her heart. Questioned by police, Hitler said the two had argued before he left, she wanted to go to Vienna and take up singing lessons, Hitler refused, but she had been calm and wished him a pleasant trip when he left. Hitler’s housekeeper Anni Winter, however, claimed Geli had found a letter in Hitler’s jacket pocket when they had been cleaning his room earlier in the day. The letter was from another young and innocent-looking girl he had started courting. She was eighteen years old, her name was Eva Braun, and she too would end up committing suicide.
* * *
When Hanfstaengl first met Hitler he was involved with no one; whether this means he was physically impotent, as Hanfstaengl suggests, is impossible to say, but there are many indications that he lacked interest in or was perhaps even afraid of sex. Hanfstaengl’s wife called him sexless or asexual, which tells us something about the way he came across, his attentions were pantomimic and unphysical, a representation of courtship, a representation of desire, not desire itself, which was kept wholly under wraps, suppressed. There was something effeminate about Hitler too, as can be seen in the film reels of his speeches, his gesticulations are often delicate and womanly, the way he sweeps his hair to the side, his body thin and unmanly, his voice often ascending into the higher registers. At the same time he found his place in a supremely male environment and would adorn himself with masculine accessories, whip, pistol, Alsatian dog, military boots, uniforms, and this is hardly strange, since a masculine environment such as the army shuns intimacy, in favor of remoteness, is centered around action and the handling of situations, without hugging, touching, confiding, as such perfect for Hitler in that he thereby discovered he could be with others without being touched by them, physically or emotionally. His great sensitivity, to which he opened himself only in his boundless and unflagging fascination with Wagner, belonged also to his feminine side, as did his whole passion for art; much can be said of his painting watercolors during lulls at the front, but it was not the usual pastime of the hardened soldier in the trenches.
Hanfstaengl’s wife puts her finger on what both of them find odd about Hitler, stating succinctly, “Putzi, I tell you he is a neuter.” Hanfstaengl ruminates on the theme, noting how many homosexual men there are in Hitler’s inner circle – three or four, of whom Röhm, who displayed “a normal” interest in women during the war, were not discovered to be homosexual until the late 1920s – and writing:
But even if he [Röhm] was not yet an active pervert there were plenty of others around who were. Heines and one or two other patriotic organization leaders became notorious for their tastes in this direction. And when I thought of my earliest contact with a Nazi recruiting agent, it occurred to me that there were far too many men of this type around Hitler.
Part of the curious half-light of his sexual makeup which was only slowly beginning to preoccupy me was that, to say the least, he had no apparent aversion to homosexuals.
The utterance is interesting on several counts, not least in revealing Hanfstaengl’s own problems in respect to homosexuality, which was indeed prohibited by law when he wrote his book in the 1950s, but “active pervert” and “a lunatic fringe of sexual perverts,” as he goes on, are wordings full of disgust and, by contrast, reveal Hitler’s own lack of problems with the issue. What Hanfstaengl is reacting against is the very fact of Hitler failing to react as strongly as he. On the contrary, Hitler wants men without family in his ranks, considering them more likely to put their hearts into the struggle. Does this mean Hitler is a homosexual, or does it mean he is sexually indifferent? Hanfstaengl is right in his musings insofar as Hitler’s apparent lack of aversion is striking, since normally he is so extremely petty bourgeois in his opinions, reacting hatefully against any deviation from the norm, opposing anything that goes beyond, apart, that is, from this supposedly abhorrent deviation, taken to be the very antithesis of the masculine ideal Hitler so flaunted. Presumably his stance on the matter was determined by the fact that it did not encroach on him personally in any way – his fear and loathing of other forms of transgressive behavior, particularly promiscuity, touched more obviously on his own emotional life, as witnessed by his linking together of the Jewish and the sexual in Mein Kampf, where he writes:
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.
While it is Hanfstaengl who removes himself from homosexuality and Hitler who accepts homosexuals in his ranks, this is reversed in the case of the Jewish issue, Hanfstaengl holding that anti-Semitism is untenably prejudiced and despicable, with Hitler the fanatical Jew-hater, though the congruence is far from unambiguous, Hanfstaengl’s contempt for the most hard-core anti-Semites in the party stemming in part from their own unpleasantly “half-Jewish” appearance.
* * *
Hitler is an embodiment of conflict as he passes through the Munich streets in 1922 in his dark overcoat and hat, always with his Walther pistol in his pocket and his whip in hand, flanked by his Alsatian dog Prinz and his bodyguard Ulrich Graf, boiling with his hatred for the Jews, his fear of women, and his yearning for simplicity. In the latter he was not alone, it was in the air, as if the times had suddenly been overwhelmed by complexity and confusion and were reeling under the impact.
The crumbling of norms against which he reacts so strongly in his speeches and in Mein Kampf is of course not only going on out there, in the culture, but also inside him. There is an abyss between his inner emotional life and his outer behavior, and the rational explanations he gives as to his opinions and actions are clearly squeezed by other, baseless, yet by no means unfelt motives.
* * *
The great theme of the Weimar Republic, alienation, was illuminated and described from all angles, from the right and from the left, and the notion of life as a struggle was by no means confined to Hitler. Walther Rathenau, the Jewish Social Democrat minister of the Weimar government assassinated by right-wing extremists in 1922, wrote in 1912 of humanity that it
builds houses, palaces, and towns; it builds factories and storehouses. It builds highways, bridges, railways, tramlines, ships, and canals: water, gas and electricity works, telegraph lines, high voltage power lines, and cables; machines and furnaces …
What then is the purpose of these unheard-of constructions. In large part, they directly serve production. In part, they serve transport and trade, and thus indirectly production. In part, they serve administration, domicile and health care, and thus predominantly production. In part, they serve science, art, technology, education, recreation, and thus indirectly … once again production.
Labor is no longer an activity of life, no longer an accommodation of the body and the soul to the forces of nature, but a thoroughly alien activity for the purpose of life, an accommodation of the body and the soul to the mechanism …
Labor is no longer solely a struggle with nature, it is a struggle with people. The struggle, however, is a struggle of private politics; the most risky business, practiced and nurtured less than two hundred years ago by a handful of statesmen, the art of divining others’ interests and using them for one’s own ends, to have an overview of global situations, to interpret the will of the times, to negotiate, to make alliances, to isolate and to strike: this art is today not only indispensable for the man of finance alone, but, in an appropriate measure, is indispensable to every shopkeeper. The mechanized profession educates one to become a politician.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 84