“You talk as if I was born yesterday,” Bach had replied.
Lunz had drunk a lot that evening and couldn’t hold back. “I work at a factory,” he said. “Up above the machine tools are huge banners with slogans: ‘Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles.’42 Sometimes I think about this. Why am I nothing? Am I not Volk? And you too? Are you not Volk? Our era loves grand statements—people are hypnotized by their apparent profundity. What nonsense they are. Das Volk! It’s a word the authorities love. They make out that das Volk is extraordinarily wise. But only the Chancellor understands what das Volk truly wants—that it wants deprivation, the Gestapo and a war of aggression.” And then, with a little wink, he went on, “Another year or two, you know, and you and I will crack too. We too will make our peace with National Socialism, and we’ll wish we’d seen the light a bit sooner. It’s the law of natural selection—the species and genera that survive are those that know how to adapt. After all, evolution is simply a process of continual adaptation. And if man stands at the top of the ladder, if he is the king of nature, it’s simply because the human beast is more adaptable than any other brute beast. He who fails to adapt perishes. He falls from the ladder of development that leads to divinity. But you and I may be too late—I may find myself in prison, and you may be killed by the Russians.”
Bach could remember this conversation clearly. It had made him uneasy. He had thought and felt the same as Lunz and had not contradicted him. “We are the last of the Mohicans,” he had replied. Yet he had said this with a frown. Once again he had felt irritated. Mixed up with Lunz’s thoughts was a troubling, humiliating sense of impotence. Lunz’s thoughts belonged to a world of shabby old-fashioned clothes, of frightened whispers, of old people’s eyes glancing anxiously at windows and doors. And they went hand in hand with the most primitive envy. The envy he had sensed in Maria, and, still more, in her mother’s carping and grumbling—an envy of those who live their lives centre stage, of those who can exhibit their paintings, who go hunting with Göring, who receive invitations to Goebbels’s villa, who fly to congresses in Rome and Madrid and are lauded in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter.43 Were Colonel Forster to be promoted to some important post, his family’s spirit of revolt might evaporate only too quickly.
Bach had left Berlin deeply dispirited. He had so longed for his weeks of leave—for peace and quiet, for time to talk with his friends, to sit and read in the evenings, to speak freely to his mother about his innermost thoughts and feelings. He had wanted to tell her about the unimaginable cruelty of war, about how it felt to live every hour in total subordination to the coarse, brutal will of a stranger. This, he had wanted to say, was a greater torment than the fear of death.
Instead, he hadn’t known what to do with himself when he got home. He had felt depressed and unsettled. He had felt irritated when he talked to people and he had been unable to read more than a few pages at a time. Like the concert hall, the books all smelled of mothballs.
As he left Berlin on his way east, he felt a sense of relief, even though he had no desire to go to the front and didn’t in the least wish to see either his soldiers or his fellow officers.
He had returned to his motor infantry regiment on 26 June, two days before the start of the summer offensive. Now, on the quiet bank of the Don, he felt as if that had been only a few days ago. Since the offensive began, he had lost all sense of days, weeks and months. Time had become a hot, dense, motley lump, a confusion of hoarse screams, dust, howling shells, smoke and fire, marches by day and by night, warm vodka and cold tinned food, fractured thoughts, the cries of geese, the clink of glasses, the rattle of sub-machine guns, glimpses of white kerchiefs, the whistle of Messerschmitts, anguish, the smell of petrol, drunken swagger and drunken laughter, the fear of death, and the screeching horns of trucks and armoured personnel carriers.
There was the war, a huge smoking steppe sun—and a few distinct pictures: a bent apple tree laden with apples, a dark sky pierced by bright southern stars, the glimmer of streams, the moon shining over blue steppe grass.
This morning Bach had come back to himself. He was looking forward to these three or four days of rest before the final breakthrough that would take them to the banks of the Volga. Calm, sleepy, still able to enjoy the cool touch of the water, he looked at the bright green reeds and his slim, tanned hands and thought about his weeks in Berlin. He needed to link these two opposite worlds—worlds separated by an abyss yet existing side by side in the cramped space of a man’s heart.
He rose to his full height and stamped his foot against the ground. He felt as if he were kicking the sky. Behind him lay thousands of kilometres of a strange land. For years he had thought himself robbed, spiritually beggared, one of the last Mohicans of German freedom of thought. But why had he set such store by his former way of being? Had he really ever been so spiritually rich? Now, as the smoke and dust of the last few weeks yielded to this clear awareness of an alien sky and a vast, equally alien but now-conquered land underfoot, he felt in every cell of his body the sombre power of the cause in which he was implicated. He could feel, it seemed, with his skin, with his whole body the furthest reaches of this alien land he had crossed. Perhaps he was stronger now than in the days when he glanced anxiously at the door as he whispered his secret thoughts. Had he truly understood what the great minds of the past would have made of the present day? Were those great minds now aligned with this resounding, triumphant force or were they on the side of those whispering old men and women who smelled of mothballs? And was it even possible that there was a smell of mothballs about the whole nineteenth century, the century whose faithful son he had considered himself to be? Perhaps those who had known the charm and poetry of the eighteenth century had looked on his beloved nineteenth century as cynical and atrocious?
Bach looked round; he could hear approaching footsteps. The duty telephonist hurried up to him and said, “Lieutenant, the battalion commander’s on the phone. He wants to speak to you.”
The telephonist glanced at the river and let out a barely audible whistle. So much for his chance of a swim in the river—he had already understood from his friend, the battalion telephonist, that their halt was now over. They were to prepare to move on.
30
PEOPLE have tried many times to find in Hitler’s psychological make-up an explanation for the part he played in history. We now know a great deal about Hitler. Nevertheless, neither vengeful rage, nor a love of cakes with whipped cream, nor a sinister ability to play on the basest instincts of the crowd, nor a love of dogs, nor a combination of paranoia and furious energy, nor an inclination towards mysticism, nor intelligence combined with a memory of great power, nor a fickle capriciousness in his choice of favourites, nor cruel treachery and the exalted sentimentality that accompanied it, nor any number of other traits—some ordinary, some exceedingly repulsive—can ever be enough to explain what he achieved.
Hitler came to power because, after the First World War, as the country inclined towards fascism, Germany needed such a man.
After being defeated in 1918, Germany was looking for Hitler, and she found him.
Nevertheless, a knowledge of Hitler’s character will help us to understand the process by which he became the head of the Nazi state.
In his life, in his character and in everything Hitler did, there was one important constant: failure. Astonishingly, it was his repeated failures that constituted the foundation for his success. A mediocre student, who twice failed the entrance exams for the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts; a failure in his relationships with women; a failed politician, who began his political career as an intelligence agent for the German army, informing on the activities of the party he later went on to lead.
Deep in his heart he always felt the uncertainty of a young man who did badly at school and who, in a world of free competition, was denied entry into even the most modest provincial artistic circles.
Failure propels people along many different paths. It drives
some to a state of sullen resignation and others to religious mysticism. Some fall into despair; others turn embittered and envious; others become hypocrites, adopting a false air of humility; still others become suspicious and timid. Some start manically concocting the most hare-brained plans. Some find security in sterile contempt, some in wild ambition; others turn to robbery and crime.
Both before and after he came to power Hitler was essentially the same person—a petty bourgeois, a philistine and a failure; the immense power he wielded allowed him to display on a pan-European stage all the propensities of an embittered, mistrustful, vindictive and treacherous psyche. The peculiarities of his character brought about the death of millions.
Hitler’s coming to power did not in any way lessen his sense of inferiority, which was too deeply rooted. His apparent arrogance was no more than a mask.
Hitler embodied and gave expression to the peculiarities of a German state broken by the First World War.
For five or six decades the German state had known little but failure. Its striving towards world mastery had led nowhere. German imperialism had failed to win markets by peaceful means.
In 1914, attempting to win markets by other means, Germany began a war—but this too proved a failure. The German strategy of swift strikes and pincer movements proved misguided, and the German army was defeated.
Meanwhile, Adolf Schicklgruber,44 still unnoticed by anyone, was setting out on his own path of failure, parallel to Germany’s. Hatred of freedom, hatred of social and racial equality, were becoming ever more important to him.
His appeal to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and master race coincided with Germany’s turn, after its repeated experience of failure, to the idea of some wild and criminal super-supremacy. The ideas adopted by Hitler, as he trod his little path, were exactly what the defeated country needed. We can now see more clearly than ever that the superman is born of the despair of the weak, not from the triumph of the strong. The ideas of individual liberty, internationalism, the social equality of all workers—these are the ideas of people confident in the power of their own minds and the creative force of their own labour. The only form of violence countenanced by these ideas is the violence inflicted by Prometheus on his chains.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that equality benefits only the weak, that progress in the world of nature is achieved solely through the destructive force of natural selection, and that the only possible basis for human progress is racial selection, the dictatorship of race. He confused the concepts of violence and strength. He saw the vicious despair of impotence as a strength and failed to recognize the strength of free human labour. He saw the man sowing a vast wheat field as inferior to the thug who smashes him over the back of the head with a crowbar.
This is the philosophy of a loser who has fallen into despair, who is unable to achieve anything through labour but who is endowed with a strong mind, ferocious energy and a burning ambition.
This philosophy of inner impotence, to which so many reactionary German minds succumbed, was in accord with the philosophy of industrial and national impotence that had seized hold of the country as a whole. This philosophy proved equally attractive to individual dregs and failures, unable to achieve anything through their own labour, and to a state that had begun a war with the aim of world domination and ended it with the Treaty of Versailles.
So, from the failures of Schicklgruber was born the success of Hitler; so Hitler’s inner impotence led directly to his years of brief, terrible, senseless power over the nations of Europe. His understanding of post-war Germany was unsophisticated yet penetrating, and in his quest for power he was able to draw on a reckless energy and a wild demagogic fury. He managed to bring together the personal amorality of post-war Germany’s many losers—shopkeepers, officers, waiters, even some despairing industrial workers—with the state amorality of a defeated imperialist power, ready to follow a path of unabashed criminality. More consistently than any ruler in history, he appealed to the basest of human instincts, to which he himself was in thrall; he was born of these instincts and, day after day, he helped bring them to birth in others. But he also knew the power of virtue and morality—and he saw it all the more clearly for being a stranger to it. He knew how to appeal to mothers and fathers, to the feelings of farmers and workers. He suppressed the resistance of the revolutionary forces of the German working class and he made short shrift of the democratic intelligentsia. He silenced all dissent, transforming Germany into an intellectual desert.
He deceived many who might have stood against him; they mistook his lies for truth, and his hysteria for sincerity. They saw his religion of hatred as a love of Germany, his powerful animal logic as a token of genius, and his criminal dictatorship as a promise of freedom.
Even after assuming unlimited power, Hitler sensed that he still remained weaker than those whom he hated. He knew that, however many people he had managed to deceive, the constructive, creative forces of German labour and the German people did not stand behind him. He saw that neither hunger, nor slavery, nor the camps, nor any other abuse of power could grant him a sense of superiority over those he had defeated through violence. Then, in the grip of the most powerful hatred on earth—the hatred a conqueror bears towards the indestructible strength of those he has conquered—he began murdering millions of people.
His powerlessness manifested itself in many ways. He lied to the German people, saying that his aim was to combat the unjust provisions of the Treaty of Versailles while in reality he was preparing an unjust war. He deceived 2 million unemployed, giving them work building roads of military importance while persuading them that this heralded the beginning of an era of peaceful prosperity. Post-war Germany had been like the deranged mechanism of a large clock, with hundreds of cogwheels and levers spinning, whirring and clicking at random and to no purpose. Hitler’s role was to be the malign cog that united all the disparate parts of this mechanism: the despair of the hungry, the viciousness of the rabble, a thirst for military revenge, a bleeding, inflamed sense of German nationhood and the general fury at the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles.
To begin with, Hitler was no more than a splinter of wood, floating with the current, then snatched up, as if by a wave, by the post-war dream of military revenge. Then, in 1923 he struck lucky; Emil Kirdorf, the devilish old coal-king of the Ruhr, became his financial backer.45 This was at a time when Hitler and his entire National Socialist Party could fit inside a Munich beer hall or the cells of a Munich prison.
Tragically, many people believed that by working for Hitler, they were working for Germany. Through violence, treachery and deceit, he was able to exploit German science, German technology and the enthusiasm of German youth. He enabled the whole vast national mechanism to function once more—by declaring that German capitalists without markets and German workers without work were, in reality, a super-race, destined for power and glory. He was able to give complete expression to the paradigm of a fascist state.
And so it came about that Hitler’s failures were the precondition of his success. As head of the fascist state, he was swept onto the world stage. At first, he was the instrument of individuals, then of unimportant and isolated groups, and then of industrial barons and the German General Staff. Finally, he became the instrument of the principal reactionary forces of world politics.
But in the summer days of 1942 he thought of himself, with a secret, slightly furtive joy, as the embodiment of free, all-powerful will. At times he imagined himself as immortal. There was nothing he could not do. He dismissed the idea of any kind of reciprocity between himself and the world. He was blind to the huge forces that determine the course of events. He did not see that by the time of his greatest success and seemingly most absolute freedom of action, when his will alone appeared to determine whether his battering ram would fall on the West or the East—he did not see that, by this time, he had become a slave. In August 1942, it seemed that his will was being realized, that he was indeed
inflicting on Soviet Russia the deadly blow he had spoken about to Mussolini at their 29 April meeting in Salzburg. He did not understand—nor did he ever understand—that his will was no longer free; it was his absolute lack of free will that had led him to embark on a campaign where every additional kilometre of conquered territory brought the fascist empire closer to its end.
Physicists usually feel free to ignore the infinitesimally small value that expresses the earth’s gravitational attraction to a stone. They do not deny the theoretical reality of this attraction, but it is only the stone’s gravitational attraction to the earth that they need take into practical account. Hitler, at the height of his success, wanted to do the opposite; he wanted to ignore the gravitational attraction of a stone, or a grain of sand, to the earth. A mere grain of sand himself, he wanted to restructure the world according to the laws of his own will and intuition.
The only means at his disposal was violence. Violence towards states and nations; violence in the education of children; violence towards thought and labour, with regard to art, science and every emotion. Violence—the violence of one man over another, of one nation over another, of one race over another—was declared a deity.
In this deification of violence Hitler was looking for supreme power; instead, he toppled Germany into an abyss of impotence.
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