Divine Fury (49 page)

That this belief approximated a kind of religious faith was a point that many, then as now, have appreciated. The Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, just days after Hitler came to power, “The moment the
Volksgeist
is considered to be a divine metaphysical entity, the Führer who embodies the
Geist
assumes a religious function. . . . He is the messiah, and with his appearance the ultimate hope of every individual begins to come true.” Bonhoeffer would later earn fame as a Christian martyr. He was an apt and early critic of the Nazi regime, and he correctly identified how it distorted and made use of Christian symbolism to suit its ends. Hitler the “king” became a perverted incarnation of the
corpus mysticum
, gathering and redeeming the people in his person for resurrection and rebirth. And yet there was another, and in the end more important, precedent for his redemptive faith: the religion of genius, which prepared the German people for Hitler’s coming and endowed him with the certainty of redemptive power. As Goebbels put it, “genius is drawn from grace.” Such grace could set one free, liberating the chosen from the moral restraints and norms that bound mere mortals. That, too, was a central tenet of the faith as it had evolved since the eighteenth century, and in Germany, in particular, the notion that creativity was by its very nature amoral—even immoral—could draw on
strong roots. As Nietzsche insisted over and over again, true creativity and morality were incompatible: “good” people, he claimed, were “incapable of creating.” And although there is no strong evidence that Hitler ever studied Nietzsche’s writings with particular care, this general sentiment was widely received. Hitler echoed it in
Mein Kampf
: “Geniuses of an extraordinary kind do not admit consideration of normal humanity.” Or, as Goebbels observed in his novel
Michael
, written in the early 1920s but first published in 1929, “the people are for the statesman what stone is for the sculptor.” He added, shortly thereafter, that “Genies verbrauchen Menschen. Das ist nun einmal so” (Geniuses use up people, that is just the way it is). The creation of genius was beyond good and evil. It would involve, of necessity, domination, subjugation, sacrifice, and force.
⁴⁸

It was in part for that very reason that the legal scholar Hermann Heller observed, in an essay on the subject that he first published in 1931, that “the political genius religion must necessarily be a religion of violence.” Heller was, as it happens, an Austrian of Jewish descent, like Edgar Zilsel, and an equally inveterate opponent of fascism. Neither man would survive the war: Heller died in exile in Spain in 1933 after the Nazis came to power, and Zilsel took his own life in Oakland, California, in 1944 after much of his family was murdered in the Shoah. But they were equally astute in their lifetimes in seeing where the religion of genius could lead. As Heller affirmed, using Fascist Italy as a precedent, the political genius religion could only be constructed in one direction, from the top down. The “genius” was a strong man, independent of all social rules, who would impose his will on the people using any means he could. That was just the way it was.
⁴⁹

There were others who, in contemplating the dogma of the religion of genius, accurately predicted its fate. One of the most insightful was Thomas Mann. In his novel
Lotte in Weimar
(1940), and then in the remarkable essay “Bruder Hitler” (Brother Hitler), published in English translation in
Esquire
magazine in March 1939, Mann took up the subject that he would later explore at length in his great novel
Doctor Faustus
(1947): the corrupting power of genius. The essay makes difficult reading still. Hitler was a “brother,” Mann confessed, an “unpleasant and mortifying brother,” a “catastrophe,” but a brother nonetheless, a fellow “artist phenomenon,” a dark and evil twin. It was an iteration of an insight that Mann developed at greater length in
Lotte in Weimar
, his rumination on the moral impact of the genius of Goethe: that good and evil in the theology of art were but common expressions of the divine. “If God is All, then he is also the Devil,” Mann wrote. In the gaze of
art, the two were conflated, producing that “horrifying approach to the godlike-diabolic which we call genius.” Mann discerned that same gaze in Hitler and the flock that sustained him. “Our notion of genius has always been shrouded in a superstitious haze,” he confessed. But now it was time to see clearly, “for today it is our fate to encounter genius in this one particular phase,” genius as madness tempered by calculation and driven by sadism and revenge. It was a penetrating analysis, yet written in exile and too late to do much good. As Zilsel had complained as early as 1918, there were far too few in the German-speaking world who saw the religion of genius as a cause for concern.
⁵⁰

That fact—that faith—and the blindness it entailed helps to explain what are otherwise striking contradictions: that a man whose entire political regime represented “an organized contempt for the mind” could be taken as a great thinker; that an individual whose artistic tastes were conventional, even kitsch to the extreme, could understand himself, and be understood, as a heroic creator; that a person of seething and unfathomable hatred could be received as a savior and redeemer; that the face of genius could be imagined ranting and demented, twisted up in ire. But then, the religion of genius never claimed to be a purely rational faith, a religion of reason. Through enthusiasm, ecstasy, and transport before the sublime, it honored a higher power. The very irrationalism of Hitler’s vision constituted, in this light, a further confirmation of his genius. His fury was furor, the possession of a daemonic man. Could there be great genius without some touch of madness?
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And so Adolf Hitler was admitted to the brotherhood of genius, and throughout the Nazi regime every effort was made to picture him in that place. Propaganda posters, photographs, and popular tracts depicted him in the company of geniuses of the past, while an entire genre of “genius films” sought to Nazify the dead in order to draw continuities with Hitler’s present. Schiller, Mozart, Michelangelo, and Frederick the Great, among others, were subjected to cinematic makeovers; Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will
presented Hitler as a genius for all eternity, descending to earth like an avenging angel on a Wagner score to merge with the genius of the people. The German genius, too—the genius of the
Volk
—was continually represented to itself in books, pageantry, mass rallies, and art. And all the while, Hitler imagined himself in the company of his true brethren. He strategized alongside Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Frederick the Great, using his genius to impose on the more considered judgments of his generals. He designed sets for the productions of Wagner operas. He founded cities like Alexander had in ancient times. And he kept alive a vision of the great work that
would guarantee his immortality. As he told a group of his confidants in 1942, politics was only a “means to an end.” When the war was over and his duties fulfilled, he confessed, “then I would like to devote five or ten years to clarifying my thought and setting it down on paper. Wars pass by. The only things that exist are the works of human genius. This is the explanation of my love of art.” Hitler singled out “music and architecture” in the same conversation as the disciplines in which “we find the recorded path of history’s ascent.” Of Wagner, he noted, “When I hear [him], it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.” And he hinted, vaguely, at the physics and metaphysics of architecture, commenting on the elusive dimensions of space and the “infinity of the cosmos,” which was “infinitely great” and “infinitely small,” but that should “always be expressed in an accessible fashion.”
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Such fantasies were sustained until the very end. In his final days in the underground bunker in Berlin, Hitler busied himself with the vast architectural model that he and the architect Hermann Giesler had designed for his native city of Linz. It was there that he had first seen Wagner’s
Rienzi
as a young man, and he had with him until he died the signed manuscript of the original score, a gift for his fiftieth birthday. Like Hitler’s genius, it went missing in the flames and has never been seen again.

B
EHOLD THE MAN
. He is “shy, almost saintly,” with wild hair, wide eyes, and a whimsical air, if perfectly respectable in coat and tie. And yet behind him looms a terrible symbol of his force: a mushroom cloud emblazoned with the equation the whole world now recognizes, E = mc
²
, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. The war is over, ended by a man who discovered the hidden laws of the universe and then used them to unleash an apocalyptic power. Einstein is Prometheus, a new titan, who has stolen atomic fire from the gods and bestowed it upon mortals, but now must watch as those same mortals make use of it as they will. The balance of the universe has been irrevocably altered. As the cover of
Time
magazine declared in 1946, Albert Einstein was a “cosmoclast,” literally, “a destroyer of order.”
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In truth, he had long upset the heavens. Einstein’s
annus mirabilis
had arrived more than four decades earlier, in 1905, when, as an obscure twenty-six-year-old patent clerk working in the cobbled Swiss capital of Bern, he had produced four papers on four separate subjects, any one of which would have represented a significant lifetime’s achievement. Here was pioneering work further explaining the existence and behavior of atoms. Here was the theory of special relativity, which posited the
constancy of the speed of light and the dilation of time. Here was work on the photoelectric effect, analyzing light as both particle and wave, for which he would be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1921. And here, finally, was the paper detailing the equivalence of energy and matter, which contained the basis (though not the derivation itself) of the famous equation. This astounding body of work quickly earned Einstein the recognition of colleagues and a string of professorships, culminating in a prestigious appointment at the University of Berlin in 1914. Yet it was only with the elaboration of the theory of general relativity in 1916, and its apparent empirical confirmation three years later by a team of British astronomers working in northern Brazil, that Einstein was transformed into a living genius on a truly international scale. “Lights All Askew in the Heavens: Einstein’s Theory Triumphs,” a headline in the
New York Times
proclaimed. As J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron and the president of the British Royal Society, observed in a special meeting convened to report the findings to the world, Einstein’s work was epoch-making, on a par with that of Newton, Copernicus, and Galileo, “one of the greatest achievements of human thought.”
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It does nothing to detract from that genuine achievement to observe that the cult of genius that followed in its wake was largely constructed. The world, wearied by World War I and eager for some display of human transcendence, transformed Einstein overnight into an international celebrity, rendering his name what it remains today, a synonym for genius. Einstein had altered the image of the heavens, and like Newton before him, he was hailed in spiritual terms. In England, he was the “greatest Jew since Jesus.” In Palestine, a “Jewish saint.” And in Austria, as an eyewitness reported, audiences greeted him “in a curious state of excitement”: “It no longer matters what one understands,” said the observer, “but only that one is in the immediate neighborhood of a place where miracles happen.” Einstein’s fame recalled perfectly the response to Einstein’s favorite composer, Mozart. Both were wonders, who made a wonder of the world.
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Einstein was alternately pleased and perturbed by such reverence, complaining that the burden of fame interrupted his work, while at the same time basking in the limelight. Yet he had no illusion that the cult of his genius was based on any real comprehension of his work, “about which,” he pointed out laconically, “[the public] cannot understand a word. I am sure that it is the mystery of non-understanding that appeals to them.” It was a perceptive remark. Traveling in the United States, where he met often with such credulous incredulity, he noted that “the cult of individual personalities is always, in my view,
unjustified. . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and of character to them. This has been my fate.” But he added that this “extraordinary state of affairs” offered one consoling thought: “It is a welcome symptom in an age, which is commonly denounced as materialist, that it makes heroes of men whose ambitions lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere.”
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With his references to the appeal of the “mystery of non-understanding” and the “superhuman” powers accorded to extraordinary individuals like himself, Einstein hinted at the way in which his own personality was being recruited for service in the religion of genius. Published just the year before Einstein was canonized in 1919, Edgar Zilsel’s
Die Geniereligion
makes no mention of the physicist in the context of the religion of genius; nor, indeed (with the partial exceptions of Tycho Brahe, Descartes, and Leibniz), does it refer to any modern scientist or mathematician at all. There is no reference to Galileo, Newton, or Darwin; no discussion of Euler, Riemann, or Gauss. The omissions likely reflect Zilsel’s own prejudices as a teacher and historian of science. He was loath to equate religion with men whom he regarded as disinterested seekers of truth. But the oversight points to more than just Zilsel’s predilections. For despite a repeated insistence since the eighteenth century that genius was a protean power—whose empire, in the Scottish writer William Duff’s words, was “unbounded”—many followed Kant in seeing science and genius as realms apart.