Divine Fury (48 page)

That Hitler was able to assume his role convincingly owed as much to the reception of his audience as it did to his skills on the stage. The religion of genius was a precondition of Hitler’s acceptance, the legitimating ground of the Führer cult. But he was undeniably a master at playing to the crowd, and his understanding of genius made full allotment for the people’s participation. True, Hitler was perfectly clear that the motor of human history was the outstanding individual: “Progress and the culture of mankind,” he observed in
Mein Kampf
, “are not products of the majority, but they rest exclusively on the genius and the energy of the personality.” And yet he emphasized again and again that the relationship was symbiotic. Immediately following his account of the awakening of the individual genius by the “hammer-stroke of Fate,” and his assertion that true genius is “always inborn” and never learned, Hitler hastened to add that what was true “for the individual” was also true for the “race.” “Creatively gifted” peoples were so from their inception, and his Aryan followers, Hitler insisted, were uniquely gifted. The Aryan was the “prototype” of mankind, the “founder of higher humanity as a whole,” and the true mover of history. “What we see before us of human culture today,” Hitler wrote, “the results of art, science, and technical achievements, is almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” The Aryans were a race of “culture founders,” “the ‘Prometheus of mankind,’ from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth.”
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In emphasizing the uniquely creative capacity of the “Aryans,” a term that in his vocabulary was all but synonymous with the “Germans,” Hitler was repeating a widely held claim of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century race theorists. The claim was by no means exclusive to Germany. The French historian and cultural critic Hippolyte Taine, for example, made much of the distinction between “Germanic” peoples—who he said were visionary, intuitive, artistic, and creative—and “Latin” peoples, who in his considered judgment (he himself was a Latin!) tended to be logical and methodical, yet imitative and sterile. Oppositions of the sort were central to a wide variety of influential European commentators on race, from Arthur de Gobineau, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, and Ernest Renan to Charles Maurras and Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon, in addition to making cranial studies of genius, was interested in how the genius of the race expressed itself in the mass gatherings of crowds. Hitler may well have been familiar with his work, and that
of several of the others, besides. But his primary source for his discussion of German creative capacity was Chamberlain, whom he invoked directly, and who dwelled on the theme in
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
at length. Chamberlain, in this respect, was undoubtedly Hitler’s “spiritual sword,” and in so arming him Chamberlain dispatched another powerful weapon that could be used to effect the union between the genius of the individual and the genius of the race: anti-Semitism. The Jews, both Hitler and Chamberlain agreed, were the anti-creative people par excellence. “The Jew possesses no culture-creating energy whatsoever,” Hitler maintained. He was an “outward imitator” rather than an “ingenious creator,” and for that reason there had never been, and could never be, a true “Jewish art.” Forever aping and mimicking the cultures in which they lived as foreign bodies, the Jews had no culture of their own.
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This perverse opposition between the inherently creative German
Volk
and a Jewish
Gegen Volk
that was devoid of all creative capacity played on a central distinction that had characterized the discussion of original genius since the eighteenth century. To create was to bring into being all that was new and unprecedented; to imitate was to copy and render what others had done. Creation required genius; imitation drew on talent, at best. It was a distinction that Wagner himself had made in his anti-Semitic essay of 1850, “On Jewishness in Music,” a work that was all the more repugnant for the fact that Wagner borrowed liberally from Jewish composers in crafting his own distinctive style. Chamberlain showed his fidelity to his master by surpassing him in vehemence. To imitate was not simply to plagiarize or steal, he deemed, but to corrupt the source of creativity itself. The Jewish imitator, Chamberlain alleged, was in truth a parasite, who in sucking the blood of its host, sapped and poisoned the creative energies of the body that fed it.

Faithfully recycled by Hitler, this discourse presented the Jews as the greatest threat to the creative genius of the German people. On the one hand, Jews (and other non-Aryans) allegedly polluted German blood, weakening German genius biologically through racial intermingling, a point that Hans F. K. Günther, a leading German racial theorist and eugenicist, emphasized in one of the many works by him that Hitler owned and recommended to the Nazi faithful. “What is at stake,” Günther insisted, “is the unhindered development of the bearers of the highest culture of mankind, who, if the process of amalgamation with [the Jews] goes further, run the risk in mind and body of wandering off those paths which their own genius has marked out for them.” Hitler shared this view wholeheartedly, but he also stressed, on the other hand, that
the Jews undermined the very foundations of genius worship intellectually by casting the Germans’ healthy “admiration for their own geniuses” as a kind of “idolatrous admiration.” As soon as a people succumbed to this “Jewish arrogance and impudence,” Hitler warned, it renounced its own powerful energy, which is “based on the veneration of the genius and the elation and the devotion brought about by him.” The Jews, in other words, sowed doubts among the faithful and skepticism among the followers of the genius religion in a manner that required a diabolical skill. Hitler freely admitted as much. “Today the Jew is looked upon as ‘clever,’” he acknowledged, “and in a certain sense he has been so at all times.” The Jew’s “intellectual abilities [had been] schooled in the course of centuries.”
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Such concessions reflected the currency of an image of “smart Jews,” a stereotype of superior Jewish aptitude and ability that fed its own cult of the Jewish genius, and that competed and at times intersected with anti-Semitism. Already in
Hereditary Genius
, Galton had called attention (despite his own anti-Semitic views) to what he suspected was the peculiar eminence of the Jewish people, who were uncommonly “rich in families of high intellectual breeds.” The degeneration theorists Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso emphasized this point as well, the latter by singling out what he called the Jewish “neurotic tendency.” The “Jewish elements in the population furnish four and even six times as many lunatics as the rest of the population,” he maintained, a point that rendered Jews especially susceptible to the genius of
dégénérescence
! Critics and anti-Semites, of course, could point out that Nordau and Lombroso were Jews themselves, casting doubt on their assertions, or question the results of other Jewish researchers such as the historian and folklorist Joseph Jacobs, whose
Studies in Jewish Statistics
(1891) found that in conditions of relative freedom, the Jews produced more geniuses and men of eminence, on average, than other peoples. It was harder, however, to deny the host of apparently more objective studies carried out in the aftermath of World War I that demonstrated the superior performance of Jews on intelligence tests and IQ exams. As one of the exam’s key architects, Lewis Terman, put it, the Jews filled their quota of “gifted children” at a factor of roughly twice what would be expected on the basis of their presence in the population. At the very highest levels, too, they far surpassed the mean. Between 1905 and 1930, men of Jewish ancestry claimed 20 of the 153 Nobel Prizes awarded to individuals, an impressive 13 percent. At the very least, the image of the smart Jew had data to back it up.
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Without seeking to deny (or even to acknowledge) such assertions outright, Hitler simply worked around them, emphasizing the gulf that
separated creativity and original genius from mere intelligence and imitative cleverness. In calling attention to the Jews’ singular capacity to dissemble, deceive, and destroy, however, he granted them a certain “genius” of their own. Hitler, in fact, referred to the Jews as the “evil genius” of the German people, “whose great men are only great in the destruction of mankind and its culture.” Chamberlain developed the same point, insisting, “We cannot understand Judaism and its power . . . cannot form a just and proper estimate of the Jew among ourselves, until we have recognized his demoniacal genius.” Here were the makings of a terrible metaphysical clash. For whereas the Jew represented the evil genius of humanity, the pure-blooded Aryan constituted its good genius, an opposition that Chamberlain highlighted in a particularly striking way. “The man who belongs to a distinct, pure race, never loses the sense [of this powerful presence],” he claimed. “The guardian angel of his lineage is ever at his side, supporting him where he loses his foothold, warning him like the Socratic
Daemon
where he is in danger of going astray.” Race, then, was the genius of the people, humanity’s
daimonic
power, which in its purity “lifts a man above himself,” said Chamberlain: “It endows him with extraordinary—I might almost say supernatural—powers, so entirely does it distinguish him from the individual who springs from the chaotic jumble of peoples drawn from all parts of the world. And should this man of pure origin be perchance gifted above his fellows, then the fact of Race strengthens and elevates him on every hand, and he becomes a genius towering over the rest of mankind.” The genius of the race could only fully express itself in and through the genius of the great man, whose highest task was to revive, resuscitate, and reawaken the people’s creative spirit. The genius incarnated the highest aspirations and striving of the
Volk
.
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Here, in summary, was Hitler’s own view of his relationship to the German people. It was a view that in certain respects could call upon a venerable line of development, stretching back at least as far as the eighteenth century, and arguably well before, to the moment when Augustus Caesar first sought to conflate his own
genius
with the
genius populi Romani
, linking its fortune and fate to his star. In the eighteenth century, thinkers from Montesquieu to Herder began to theorize an explicit relationship between the genius of the people and the genius who could articulate, capture, or express the people’s spirit in a striking way. The Romantics consolidated these thoughts, seeing in outstanding individuals, such as Beethoven or Napoleon, the oracles and incarnations of peoples. Hitler was aware of most of these precedents. He, too, claimed to have a star, and in the “comet-path of genius” of Napoleon
and his German counterpart, Frederick the Great, he claimed to find explicit models to help guide its trajectory. But where Hitler broke definitively from such precedents was in racializing the relationship between the genius and the
Volk
, claiming that the connection was in the genes. That imagined connection was largely the product of the science of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and when combined with the religion of genius, it made for a sinister concoction. For if the evil genius of the Jewish people corrupted the creative genius of the Germans, must not the Jewish presence be removed? At a minimum, the Jews must be prevented from breeding with Germans and further polluting their hereditary genius and blood.
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And so a program of eugenics followed logically, if not inexorably, from Hitler’s
Geniegedanke
. It was, above all, a negative eugenics: the uncreative, unproductive elements must be prevented from poisoning the truly creative race. As Hitler put it in a 1938 speech justifying the expulsion of “degenerated elements” and “Neanderthal culture” from German soil, “whether or not we can today call geniuses of eternal standing our own is as always difficult to judge, but in the end it is of little consequence for our actions. What is of great consequence, however, is the preservation of an environment in which true genius can be nurtured.” Genius, in other words, might be fostered, but the laws of its creation were mysterious. It was arguably for this reason that Hitler never pursued the eugenics of genius with the same zeal as his early Soviet counterparts. “Only a genius can turn himself into a genius,” he would comment in 1942. Only a genius can create genius; only a genius can bring genius into being through an act of will. The genius of eternal standing was an enigma and a lonely exception. He could never be the norm, and perhaps could never be bred at all, a point on which eugenicists themselves sometimes insisted, despite Galton’s earlier robust hopes. As the Norwegian racial hygienist Jon A. Moejn argued in the pages of the international
Eugenics Review
in 1926, the answer to why the “great genius disappears in the next generation” was simple: “because every child has two parents,” one of whom invariably weakened the stock. Others pointed out that geniuses, as nature’s exceptions, displayed a tendency to sterility. But whatever the specific views of Hitler’s racial scientists, who continued to measure heads and dissect brains at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin, his own focus was on providing the conditions in which true genius could flourish. That meant, in practice, creating a racial pool of “pure” Aryan stock, from which the genius and the genius of the people could spontaneously emerge.
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That horrific goal was the stated aim of Hitler’s self-described “dictatorship of genius,” which he theorized about long before assuming power in 1933. The artist-führer, the Genius as Führer, would serve as a savior and redeemer, an embodiment of the German
Volksgeist
who would restore and recall its creative potential. As the new Nazi minister of culture in Bavaria, Hans Schemm, declared in 1933, Hitler was the “German artist,” who embodied the “totality of the artistic and political genius of the German people.” A front-page story in the leading Nazi newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
, two years later reaffirmed the point. Announcing an exhibition of Hitler’s watercolors, the article’s subtitle proclaimed “Art as the Basis of Political Creativity.” That Hitler did not become a student at the Academy of Vienna was an act of fate, the article alleged, for “he was destined for greater things than simply becoming a good painter or perhaps a great architect.” Still, art was fundamental to who he was—it touched the “very core of his being,” and there was an “indissoluble link” between the “Führer’s artistic works and his great political undertaking.” For once, the Nazi mouthpiece approximated the truth, for Hitler’s self-understanding as an artist of genius was crucial both to his project and to his reception. Politics, he stressed, was an art. And the “true artist,” Goebbels confirmed, “was a genius,” capable of molding the people to his will, giving it shape and releasing its inner creativity.
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