Peter Sloterdijk cites Rathenau here in his book Critique of Cynical Reason. Rathenau’s analysis allows man two options: either to be consumed by production, thereby becoming a part of it, on a par with its machines and conveyor belts, or to stand up for himself and his own individuality, albeit using the system’s own economic and political means, which in that way are pulled down from the superordinate structure into the sphere of the individual. The connection between the local and the global established by the new world-embracing modes of production and trade is something by which we, a hundred years after Rathenau was writing, have learned to express ourselves, indeed our lives have become as such in the peculiar interplay of individuality and mass consumption in which we live. The issue of authenticity, so precarious and acute in the period from the turn of the last century until Germany’s collapse in 1945, has been solved by way of a grand flanking maneuver, a textbook display of pragmatics made possible by the two wars themselves. Each and every one of us lives as though we were our own statesman at the center of the world, where all that we believe and think is accorded the greatest weight, quite regardless of the fact that everyone else believes and thinks exactly the same thing. Culture’s unprecedented and extreme cultivation of the individual, which takes place in the most equalizing culture the world has ever known, is a response to the problems that first appeared toward the end of the nineteenth century, which at the time were likewise perceived to be new. We simply close our eyes to the possibility of there being any discrepancy between the widespread perception of the one’s unique individuality and the striking sameness of the all. In the 1920s, the sameness of the all was a dystopia. Throughout culture the threat of the mass human found expression, mask-like faces and uniforms amid huge cogs of clattering machinery in a world from which all individuality had been erased.
Rathenau:
The intellect, still shaking from the excitements of the day, insists on staying in motion, on experiencing a new contest of impressions, with the proviso that these impressions should be more burning and acidic than those that have been gone through … Entertainments of a sensational kind arise, hasty, banal, pompous, fake, and poisoned. These joys border on despair … The devouring of kilometers by the automobile is a graphic image of the deformed way of viewing nature …
But even in these insanities and over-stimulations there is something mechanical. The human, simultaneously supervisor of the machine and machine in the global mechanism, under growing tension and heating, has surrendered his or her quantum of energy to the flywheel of the world’s activity.
The war that came two years after Rathenau wrote these words meant that the idea of the unique I came under further pressure, catastrophic to the individual self, since the medium through which it then might express itself, heroism, was closed off by the mechanization of weaponry; courage, ingenuity, cunning, resourcefulness, all were futile in the face of the machine gun or in the hail of shells: death was random, its forces unmanipulable, the heroic departure of the one became a mass slaughter. The war was a war of machines, and men were but one device among others. In 1932 Jünger described a society in which everyone was a worker, all subordinate to machines, in a world without borders, without individuality, only movement and dynamics, bodies and machines; life in the total state. In a strange, paradoxical way it is toward just such a world Hitler and his party are heading as their movement gains momentum in 1921 and 1922. Strange because it is this very de-individualisation Hitler fears in Marxism and capitalism, and which he believes has led to cultural decline and chaos in society. That he finds this decline so marked means there is no longer any concord between his feelings as to the way things should be and the way they are. In the case of such concord existing, inner morals give meaning to the external world so imperceptibly that one understands them to be natural, while external actions and events likewise giving meaning to the inner being. In the case of such concord being absent, it must be established and at almost any price, its absence representing a direct threat to our identity, which is to say the relationship between the I and the we.
Hitler is clearly a damaged individual, presumably by a process that began in his childhood and which because of some innate dynamic became reinforced in his youth and early adulthood, but that part of him that is damaged, which is the ability to approach and be close to another, the ability to empathize with another, which is to say to see the other in himself, himself in the other, has placed him outside himself, alienated him from his own emotional life, which is to say that an unbridgeable divide has opened up between his emotions and his understanding of his emotions, whereby he has been deposited outside the sphere of the social.
The damage was in the times, and many of those who suffered it became artists, for in art the divide could be bridged. Hitler tried but received no acknowledgment, was not strong enough or talented enough to overcome the resistance and would have spun away into the oblivion of the great social void had it not been for the fact that he at least in part overcame himself, firstly in the war, then in politics, where he was acknowledged from the outset and helped along, and where he fulfilled a need. When the emotions are so radically disjointed, when the inner being is a chaos, one looks for order, rules, boundaries. The order, the rules, and the boundaries Hitler knew were those he had grown up with in Linz, but that was a world he had hated ever since the age of sixteen, when he began to dress like a Bohemian artist, and it was a world too that was on its way out, whose morals and rigid structures were not applicable to what he saw and experienced in Vienna and Munich, which to a far greater extent were characterized by the new age and the massive social problems that had come with it. The confusion triggered by the radical nature of the new was especially vast in Hitler’s case and could find no outlet, certainly not in the social sphere; he read and thought, striving to establish some other concordance between himself and the world he lived in, inflamed with resentment by the dereliction of morals he saw to be a fundamental expression of a societal form and an outlook on life that he despised. He forbade himself all manner of enjoyment, retreating into asceticism, descending into depression for long periods, emerging urgently again, manically active, living only in art, in his dreams, and in the ideal, until eventually finding himself in a place where he could be unburdened of all that he contained, that place being the army, the radical simplification of his life.
The organization he was a part of building up in Munich in the 1920s, with its storm troopers, uniforms and weapons, was an extension of the military, and the politics he put forward, with its starkly defined enemy and all its muscular aggression, was an extension of the war by other means. That his appeal should be so vast that he could draw many hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of people along with him seems unfathomable to us today; we read the arguments and the perils are plain to us, the idiocy, the sheer contempt for fellow human beings, yet it was not by arguments he won over the people, but by that very abyss that ran through his soul, or by what it generated within him, for what he thereby expressed, his inner chaos and his yearning for that chaos to stop, were curiously congruent with society’s inner chaos and its yearning for that chaos to stop. His chaotic soul strove toward the boundaries by which it was constrained, his hometown morality and the order provided by the military, which is to say the petty bourgeois and the Prussian or Wilhelmian, both belonging to the past, which in the hardships of the Weimar years was where the majority, Hitler among them, turned. What made Hitler so different, however, was the flame he ignited in all who listened to him speak, his enormous ability to establish community, in which the entire register of his inner being, his reservoir of pent-up emotions and suppressed desire, could find an outlet and pervade his words with such intensity and conviction that people wanted to be there, in the hatred on the one side, the hope and utopia on the other, the gleaming, almost divine future that was theirs for the taking if only they would follow him and obey his words.
Hitler was the great simplifier, a mi
rror to his own yearning, but rather than merely paying lip service to that yearning in his political convictions he exploited it cynically as a rhetorical trope, even hitting out against sophistication and complexity in his speeches. On one occasion, on his way home from the Café Neumaier with Hanfstaengl one evening in 1922, he was almost apologetic about this:
Herr Hanfstaengl, you must not feel disappointed if I limit myself in these evening talks to comparatively simple subjects. Political agitation must be primitive. That is the trouble with all the other parties. They have become too professorial, too academic. The ordinary man in the street cannot follow and, sooner or later, falls a victim to the slap-bang methods of Communist propaganda.
Hanfstaengl saw his role in respect to Hitler as saving him from Rosenberg and the fanatical anti-Semites, providing him with a wider, more international perspective than the provincialism Hitler and his party comrades otherwise stood for. He believed Hitler’s political radicalism and leanings toward brutality derived from lack of education and would be consumed once he was introduced into the higher circles of society, the barons of industry he brought him together with, whose conservatism was the same as Hanfstaengl’s own, extending no further into the utopian than the society their parents and grandparents had inhabited. Hanfstaengl believed they could make use of Hitler to reach down into the depths of the people, thereby failing to understand that he was uncorrectable, a revolutionary utopian and a fanatical racist. That this latter trait, specifically his anti-Semitism, could be moderated along the way as he gained in power and influence was a frequent notion of Hanfstaengl’s. Hitler listened to him and needed him, but did not care for the things he said. For instance, whenever he tried to impress on Hitler the importance of a future alliance between the United States and Germany or spoke insistently about other issues of foreign politics, Hitler would lead him back to Clausewitz, Moltke, and Kaiser Wilhelm. Prewar Europe was his frame of reference for foreign politics, and as such it was not a question of whether Germany with him in charge should go to war, but rather of when. This was his position as early as 1922. Everything that happened in Hitler’s life following the first war was a repeat of what had happened and existed in his life before it, only on a much grander scale and in reality, and the only true aim, to which everything had to lead, was a new war, bringing the first to its rightful conclusion. That he could achieve such a feat from the starting point he had in 1918 is hard to believe. But the very fact that all the odds were stacked so heavily against him, that he was such an underdog, was an important factor, certainly in the final years before he rose to become chancellor, it being widely held across a number of political parties that what would be most damaging to Hitler would be to hand him genuine power, because then he would be politically dead in no time, being nothing more than a charlatan, a bluffer, a simple little man of the lower middle class. Indeed, it is strange. That he, of all people, so alienated from his own emotions, sensing them only as they washed through his organism, blinding or darkening his soul and all his being, should become sovereign over those of all Germany.
* * *
Hitler would spend between four and six hours writing a speech, which he would then condense into ten foolscap pages with no more than fifteen to twenty words on each. As the meeting approached, Liljegren writes, he would pace the floor as if rehearsing in his mind the various points of his argument. At intervals he would speak on the telephone with someone inside the venue itself, asking how many people had come, what kind of mood they were in, whether opposition could be expected. He would dish out instructions as to how the audience was to be handled while waiting for him. Half an hour after the meeting had started he would call for his coat, hat, and whip, and go out to the car, preceded by his bodyguard and driver. On the speaker’s platform he would place his sheets of paper with their cues on a small table on his left, moving each to another table on his right when he had finished with it. His pistol was in his back pocket. After the speech, which normally lasted some two hours or more, the national anthem would be played. Hitler would salute right and left, leaving the venue while the music was at its height, and was generally back in the car again before the singing was over. If he was speaking outside Munich he would go directly to his hotel. There he would take a bath, change, rest on the sofa, perhaps with Hanfstaengl at the piano, his entourage in the room next door. He made no contact with anyone in his audience either before or after his speech. It was him and the all, and no one else.
Hans Frank, then a young law student, saw him speak in 1919:
The first thing you felt was that there was a man who spoke honestly about what he felt and was not trying to put something across of which he himself was not absolutely convinced. He made things understandable even to the foggiest brain … and went to the core of things.
The Münchener Post reported one of his speeches in 1920, Toland writes, and was amused by his imitations of Jews:
Adolf Hitler behaved like a comedian, and his speech was a vaudeville turn … One thing Hitler has, you must give him credit, he is the most cunning rabble-rouser in Munich practicing such mischief.
Kurt Ludecke saw him in 1922:
Presently my critical faculty was swept away. Leaning from the tribune as if he were trying to impel his inner self into the consciousness of all these thousands, he was holding the masses, and me with them, under a hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his conviction … His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther … I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to a religious conversion … I had found myself, my leader, and my cause … I had given him my soul.
What was it about Hitler’s speaking that awakened such emotion? That he came across as honest and genuine was important here, a person at long last who presented the unvarnished truth, unlike other politicians. Hardship was plain, discontent rising, verging on despair. Hitler gave direction to that discontent. The shame of Versailles, the November Criminals, the worldwide Jewish-Marxist conspiracy, these were the three points around which Hitler gathered his rage, and in this he was clearly not alone, but his special gift was to draw forth that rage and hatred in his audiences in a way that seemed utterly unmanipulative but true and obvious in the same way as that which may not be said but which nonetheless is known appears true and obvious. His charisma as a speaker lay very much in the sense he gave that here was a man who said things the way they were, and the trust he thereby gained from his audiences, who in expressing their enthusiasm for him were also expressing their enthusiasm for themselves, the unity he created this way, was an unprecedented force he discovered himself able, like a magician, to direct wherever he wanted. This was power. Not the formal kind that came with a job or position, constrained by laws and regulations, those in writing and those unspoken, but real power, revolutionary and above the notion of the law. This probably only dawned on him gradually, for as Sebastian Haffner writes, he seemed for a long time to be satisfied merely with being his party’s speaker, whose job it was to mobilize the masses, and the idea that he could become his party’s and even his country’s uncontested leader – an idea with a long German prehistory – did not become manifest until Mein Kampf, and became real only after the subsequent relaunch of the party in 1925.
But just as important as saying things the way they were was the way he did so. The language he employed was that of his audiences. Hanfstaengl writes that without stooping to slang, except for special effect, Hitler caught the vocabulary of the day as it rose from the people around him. Outlining the problems of a housewife without money to buy food for the family at the Viktualienmarkt, for instance, he would use just the words and phrases she herself would have used to describe her difficulties if she had been able to formulate them.
In this ear for voice, register, and sociolect, that which rises from the people and which differs from generation to generation, lay Hitler’s talent. In it his sensitivity came into its own, the fact tha
t he could not only listen to the voices of his day, but also convey them to his audiences in ways that were finely tuned, addressing each audience according to its own nature, depending on whether they were students or workers. He excelled too in the art of improvisation, pausing for instance if someone shouted a comment, folding his arms across his chest and delivering a bitingly satirical response that would have his audience in stitches. Always he spoke from within, in the language of the inside, rather than from above, in the manner of other politicians and speakers.
About a quarter of his audiences were women, and this too he would exploit to his advantage; often there would be opponents ready to heckle and interject, and in his search for initial support he would turn to the women, directing attention toward their everyday problems and domestic difficulties, the very proximate realities they lived and experienced, thereby, according to Hanfstaengl, eliciting his first bravos, breaking the ice between him and his audience. But all this is rhetoric, what he says and the way he addresses his audience, his ability to tune in to the will of the we and to stand as its rightful voice was certainly immense, but not immense enough to account fully for his success, neither at that particular time, having already spoken to a crowd of 6,000 in 1920 at the Circus Krone, nor later, when entire stadiums were filled to the brim with people wanting to hear him speak. More important than what he said and the way he said it must surely have been the fact that it was he and no other. In other words, his own personal presence, his appeal, what we call charisma.
* * *
Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world; beauty is the other. They are forces seldom talked about, since both issue from the individual, neither may be learned or acquired, and in a democracy, where everyone is meant to be considered equal and where all relationships are meant to be just, such properties cannot be accorded value, though all of us are aware of them and of how much they mean. Moreover we attach value in our human sphere to that which is made, produced, or formulated, not to what is merely there to begin with; in other words, what is made, produced, or formulated is important, and what is merely there to begin with is not. In a university lecture hall, male attention is centered not on the woman with the most compelling arguments, she who speaks engagingly and with insight about Adorno or de Beauvoir, but on the woman deemed to be the most beautiful, and so it is in every space in which men and women are gathered, on every street and square, in every restaurant and café, on every beach and in every apartment, in every ferry queue and train compartment; beauty eclipses everything, bedims all else, it is what we see first and what we consciously or unconsciously seek. Yet this phenomenon is shrouded in silence inasmuch as we refrain from acknowledging it as a factor in our social lives, driving it out instead by our social mechanisms of expulsion, calling it stupid, immature, or unsophisticated, perhaps even primitive, at the same time as we allow it to flourish in the commercial domain, where it quietly surrounds us whichever way we turn: beautiful people everywhere. Beautiful people on TV, beautiful people in magazines, beautiful people in films, beautiful people in the theater, in pop music, in advertising, indeed our entire public space is packed with beautiful faces and beautiful bodies yet, at the same time, we consider beauty to be superficial, unconveying of the authentic, which is the inner being. Beauty belongs to the body and the face, which are mask-like outer expressions of the I, and its immutable, inevitable nature, the fact of it being given rather than chosen, is what disqualifies it, since after Nazism we can no longer attach value to what is innately human, the Nazis’ division of the human into categories of the innate being what eventually led them into the final catastrophe. Which is to say: we attach value to it but do so in silence. This is similar to the relationship between individuality and sameness: the two things are mutually exclusive, but only if the connection between them is made – and so we refrain from making the connection. It is as if we live in two different cultures existing parallel to each other. One is the culture of commerce, in which everything is superficial, face, outer beauty, uniformity, sameness, properties we understand to be inauthentic, shadow-values existing only for the purposes of our entertainment; the other is the culture of the social, consisting of unique individuals, inner beauty, changing properties, diversity, things we understand to be authentic, values we take to be true. The untrue world is a place to which we escape in dreams, the true world is where we live. The sense of the untrue world becoming increasingly dominant in our lives, to the extent almost of becoming the world we live in, is what brings about the forceful craving for reality that has begun to emerge in the culture around us. But what is reality, if not the body? And what is the body, if not biology? Here we are within the realm of the given, to which all yearning inclined in the Weimar era, becoming apparent for the first time in the period leading up to World War I, when the pressures exerted by the inauthentic, by the many new and increasingly mechanized expressions of civilization, were displaced in favor of the authentic, which is to say the innate, which in turn is to say the body, blood, grass, death.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 85