11
Myth and Might
For most English-speaking readers today, and especially for those who fought in it, the Second World War was probably as close as one can imagine to a just war. It had a clearly discernible and defined justification and sanction. Moral issues were starkly delineated. There was no question of who was right, who wrong. Distance in time has, of course, rendered certain Allied actions and policies—the bombing of Dresden, for example—difficult, if not impossible, to condone; but except for the occasional warped would-be historian, no one has attempted to excuse or ‘rehabilitate’ Nazi Germany.
If the Second World War was indeed a just conflict, it was so because it constituted a moral contest, a crusade against madness and recognisable ‘evil’. General Eisenhower could title his account Crusade in Europe without seeming guilty of pretentiousness, portentousness or rhetorical hyperbole. To the extent that Nazi Germany could be seen as embodying and incarnating the potential madness and ‘evil’ of all mankind, that madness and ‘evil’ became endowed with form; and once something is endowed with form, it can be opposed. One knows what one is fighting against, and this clarifies and crystallises what one is fighting for. If one knows what one is fighting for, the fight is meaningful and justifiable.
By incarnating madness and ‘evil’ within itself, the Nazi régime, paradoxically, ‘redeemed’ the rest of the Western world into sanity and virtue. This, with typical Olympian irony, Thomas Mann demonstrates in Doctor Faustus; and other writers, from George Steiner in England to Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes in Latin America, have since picked up the theme. It took Nazi Germany to teach us the meaning of atrocity and outrage. It took Auschwitz and Treblinka to remind us of what we as human beings are capable of perpetrating, despite our veneer of civilisation, and to make us wish to disown such propensities. Nazi Germany rendered us, albeit only temporarily perhaps, a degree or two more moral, more decent—a degree or two more sensitive to such things as, for example, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in what used to be Yugoslavia. To that extent, and however uncomfortably the recognition may sit with us, we are in Nazi Germany’s debt.
If the Second World War made sense and rested on some moral basis, the First World War did not. On the contrary, the First World War was the most terrifyingly insane conflict in the whole of modern European history, not excepting the Thirty Years War of 1618-48. It was insane in its causes (or lack thereof), its motivation (or lack thereof), and the policies (or lack thereof) that precipitated it. It was pre-eminently insane in its conduct. On the opening day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, more than a hundred thousand British and French soldiers, forming three lines fifteen miles long, clambered out of their trenches. Each bearing sixty pounds of equipment on his back, they then proceeded not to charge, not to duck or dodge, but to march, as if on parade, into the face of machine guns firing more than a hundred rounds per minute. By the end of the first day—the single most costly day in the history of the British Army—57,470 had fallen. By the end of the battle, the toll on all sides amounted to a million and a half. The territory gained at this price came to an average, along the front, of five miles—five miles of mud, of shell craters, rubble and devastated fields.
This was insanity, and the insanity was repeated at Verdun, at Ypres and Passchendaele, at Gallipoli, on the Russian and Italian fronts. Never had mankind engaged in such wholesale and mindless slaughter to so little purpose, with so little to show for it. And while this orgy of carnage enacted itself, arms merchants and munitions manufacturers in Britain, France and Germany were negotiating business deals and trade agreements with each other, keeping the blood flowing because it was profitable to do so.
There have been numerous evocations of the First World War’s madness. Some of the best, and most penetrating, can be found in Hermann Broch’s novel The Sleepwalkers, first published in 1931.
The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality . . . it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality . . . An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire ... Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.1
The madness of the First World War achieved the scale it did because it consisted, as Broch says, of ‘a blurring of all forms’. In effect, and in contrast to that of the Second World War, the madness had no form. In the Second World War, Nazi Germany incarnated and gave form to human madness. In the conflict of 1914-18, the madness was rampant, diffuse, omnipresent, devoid of shape or contour—like the clouds of poison gas drifting insidiously over the trenches. The madness was everywhere, suffusing everyone and everything, extending from hapless soldiers in their dug-outs to army commanders in their chateaux, corporate executives in their boardrooms and heads of state in their offices. No one side, in the First World War, could exercise a monopoly on guilt. Despite all the propaganda, there were no clearly defined villains or culprits. Everyone was to blame—and, therefore, no one was entirely to blame. The conflict has generally, and not inaccurately, been seen as the culmination of a subterranean dynamic inherent in Western civilisation—the consummation, so to speak, of a longstanding, long-evolving collective European death wish. It was all the more traumatic by virtue of what had immediately preceded it.
On the eve of the war, during the first decade of the twentieth century, Western society appeared to have reached a zenith in its development. Never before had a culture achieved such a degree of opulence, luxury, refinement, cosmopolitanism and sophistication.
Never had optimism been greater or more unqualified. ‘Civilisation’ had conferred seemingly inestimable benefits on Western Europe and was now, under the aegis of imperialism, bringing those benefits to more ‘benighted’ sectors of the globe. Medicine was making such strides as to foster belief in the eventual eradication of all disease. Science was opening dramatic and exciting new vistas on past, present and future. Psychology was promising to eliminate all disorders, maladjustments and ‘abnormalities’ of the mind. Technology was advancing at a pace that would transform the entire world of human activity. Travel had attained the level of comfort and extravagance embodied by the ‘Orient Express’ and the great ocean liners, and the conquest of the air was imminent. ‘Kultur’ had imparted taste, sensitivity and discrimination to social life. Education was becoming ever more widespread. Across the entire Occident, a complacent sense of order and stability prevailed. In every sphere of human endeavour, it appeared that things could only become better. A fervent, unquestioning belief in ‘Progress’ and its bounty constituted, in effect, the dominant religion of the age.
In fact, however, the most apposite symbol of the age was the Titanic. The faith reposed in ‘Progress’ culminated only in the horror of ‘the war to end all wars’. The conflict of 1914-18 was not only the most appalling bloodbath in Western history. It was also the single most profound and traumatic betrayal of faith, of hope, of optimism, of aspirations and expectations. Everything that had previously seemed to promise so much proved treacherous, not serving to improve man’s lot, but to augment his capacity for destructiveness. Civilisation, despite its refinements, had led to the primitive barbarity of the trenches and to abattoirs like the Somme, where men died as if on an assembly line, regardless of class, calling, aptitude or educational background. Science and technology had led not to an improvement of the human condition, but to Zeppelins, to explosives raining from the sky, to combat aircraft, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient engines for killing—as well as to the ultimate nightmare of poison gas, a weapon so terrifying even Hitler was to shrink from employing it. Religion, which plumed
itself on bringing enlightenment to the ‘heathen’, proved unable to curb the bloodlust of its own devotees. As Heine had prophesied, cathedrals such as Amiens were indeed pulverised by Thor’s hammer, disguised as Krupp howitzer shells.
Since the Thirty Years War, certain ‘rules of warfare’ had been observed. Among other things, civilian populations were supposed to be exempt from the depredations of conflict. Now, in flagrant repudiation of everything ‘civilisation’ was alleged to stand for, the world’s great cities and their populations comprised a new front line. The bombs dropped on London by Zeppelins did scant damage and caused few casualties, but the mere fact that an urban centre could become a target for aerial bombardment introduced a dimension unknown in war since the seventeenth century—and established a new precedent which Hitler would ruthlessly exploit.
In the cataclysm of the First World War, virtually an entire generation of young men fell. The casualties inevitably included many of the best and brightest, the most original and imaginative, the most highly educated, the most qualified for future leadership. Altogether, more than 65 million men had been engaged in combat. More than half were killed, wounded or ‘missing’. The British Empire lost 2 million, Austria-Hungary 5 million, France 6 million, Germany 8 million, Russia as many as 2 million. When the war was over, there were 2 million demobilised, maimed and often unemployable veterans wandering in the streets of Britain and her dominions; 3.6 million in Austria; more than 4 million in France, and another 4 million in Germany’s fledgling Weimar Republic.
Those who survived became known, not inaccurately, as the ‘lost generation’, chronicled by such writers as Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. For this generation, the betrayals of the First World War had left nothing in which to believe any longer, no authority worthy of honour. The result was not just disillusion. It was what Broch depicted in The Sleepwalkers as an utter and total ‘disintegration of values’. The optimism and confidence, the certainty and complacency of 1914 had given way to a vista of emptiness, apathy and relativism. Robert Musil, Broch’s compatriot and contemporary, succinctly characterised the prevailing mood as ‘a relativity of perspective verging on epistemological panic’.
In Germany, the ‘disintegration of values’ was particularly pervasive and debilitating. However appalling their losses, the Allies could at least muster rhetoric to congratulate themselves on what purported to be victory and claim substantial war reparations. Russia had lost her reigning dynasty and imperial status; but she had at least the illusion—like a rainbow arching beyond the horrors of revolution and civil war—of a new and bright future in which to believe. Austria, too, had lost her reigning dynasty, but a sizeable portion of her former population—in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia—could find hope in independence and freshly formed democratic republics, however artificially contrived.
Germany had no such solace. Europe’s most recently created imperial power—so recently created she had not yet had time to take her status for granted, had still been glorying in that status—was now bereft of her ruling dynasty and imperial splendour. The Weimar Republic, whose very name was intended to embody Goethe’s old ideal of a nation dedicated to culture and the spirit, offered little palliative, little to replace what had been lost. For one thing, the new republic was not accepted by Germans because it was less an organic development than an artificial construct: a dictated and imposed national identity, based on foreigners’ conceptions of what Germany was supposed to be. It reflected other people’s ideal of Germany, in an environment that militated against idealism of any kind. And the Weimar Republic could not cope with the apathy, the numbness, the privation, the starvation, the ruined infrastructure, the dingy greyness that prevailed. For Germany, there appeared to be no future, illusory or otherwise, and the present entailed extreme hardship, which was only intensified by soaring inflation and economic depression of such proportions as virtually to wipe out the middle class, the traditional bulwark against extremism. To exacerbate the situation further, there were crippling war reparations to pay.
There were other humiliations as well, less tangible perhaps, but none the less devastating to the country’s morale. As both soldiers and civilians recognised, Germany’s military machine had acquitted itself impressively enough—as well as those of its adversaries, if not, indeed, better. That had not, however, prevented defeat; and defeat, seemingly inexplicable, had to be ascribed to someone or something, thus fostering a quest for a scapegoat.
Equally baffling was the fact that Germany, in the eyes of the world, was held solely responsible for the cataclysm—as if Germany alone had instigated it, as if Austria and Russia, Britain and France, had been altogether innocent. Certainly Germany had been guilty of a serious transgression in violating Belgian neutrality, and her ruling dynasty made mistakes. But the ruling dynasty had paid for their mistakes with their throne, and the country as a whole had paid for the ‘rape of Belgium’ with casualties exceeding those of the Western Allies. So far as the causes of the war were concerned, Germans felt themselves no more culpable than the conflict’s other belligerants. The débâcle had begun, after all, with a dispute between Austria and Russia. Russia had declared war on Germany, not Germany on Russia. Given these circumstances, it seemed monstrously unfair that Germany alone should have to bear the weight of the world’s opprobrium.
These factors converged to engender a national crisis. Contrary to the assertions of many historians, this crisis was not simply economic, social or political, nor even a combination of these. It was, in fact, Germany’s old, long-standing and deep-rooted collective identity crisis—the crisis of collective self-definition, collective self-assessment and self-esteem, collective orientation, direction and purpose. But now, with the collapse of the institutions that had previously masked or sublimated it, that crisis no longer smouldered in the background, beneath the surface or behind transient façades. It dominated the foreground of German consciousness.
In the wake of the First World War Germany required not just a social, political or economic palliative, still less an idealised and somewhat saccharine conception of Weimar imposed by foreigners. The country needed an entirely new raison d’être, an entirely new sense of purpose, direction and self-definition. Such needs can seldom, if ever, be fulfilled by political, social or economic programmes. Such needs cannot even be satisfactorily fulfilled by ideologies. But such needs have traditionally been fulfilled by religions. This, ultimately, was what National Socialism offered.
Great is the anguish of the man who becomes aware of his isolation and seeks to escape from his own memory ... And in his fear of the voice of judgement that threatens to issue from the darkness, there awakens within him a doubly strong yearning for a Leader to take him tenderly and lightly by the hand, to set things in order and show him the way . . .2
Thus Broch wrote prophetically in 1929. And thus, in a drama only too familiar today, does the lonely self-alienated youth—in the throes of an identity crisis, fearing responsibility, seeking meaning, purpose and direction for his existence—find illusory solace and a supposed sense of ‘belonging’ in one or another sect or cult, presided over by a self-appointed guru or messiah figure. Thus does one fall prey to the likes of Charles Manson in California, Jim Jones in Guiana, David Koresh in Waco and, on a much more cataclysmic scale, Adolf Hitler.
Under Mussolini, Fascism in Italy never amounted to more than a political ideology. It made no attempt whatever to activate, channel and exploit the religious impulse, but contrived instead a ‘live-and-let-live’ accommodation with the Catholic Church, according Rome certain prerogatives and then proceeding to implement its own purely secular programmes. To that extent, Italian Fascism may have had a qualified, abstract intellectual appeal for more simplistic minds, but it made no corresponding emotional appeal. It offered only a superficial vainglorious nationalism, a crude jingoistic imperialism and a pompous façade of grandeur and splendour. There was little in all this to elicit a visceral response f
rom hearts or souls. Hearts and souls were left to the custody of the Church. As a result, Italian Fascism, compared to other mass movements of the period between the wars, was puerile, often laughable. While not underestimating its more sinister aspects, Thomas Mann could depict it farcically in ‘Mario and the Magician’.
In Spain, Franco’s kind of Fascism was more sophisticated. It took pains not just to reach an accommodation with organised religion, but to align itself explicitly with organised religion. Franco’s movement was therefore more than a mere ideology. It yoked itself to the religious impulses and yearnings of the Spanish people, or at least many of them, and could thereby arrogate a kind of divine sanction or mandate. Spanish Falangists did not tacitly assume that God was on their side. Through such organisations as Opus Dei and El Cristo Rey, they dragooned Him into being so, attaching Him inseparably to Franco’s cause. Franco could thus present himself as a latter-day crusader, engaged in an enterprise ordained and endorsed by heaven. By tapping the reservoir of religious energy, Franco could appeal to hearts and souls in a way that Mussolini could not. This imparted to his movement an impetus and a vicious fanaticism that Mussolini’s never displayed.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 25