Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (26 page)

The reality was rather different. Hitler was totally irreligious and had no interest in honour or ethics. He believed in biological determinism, just as Lenin believed in historical determinism. He thought race, not class, was the true revolutionary principle of the twentieth century, just as nationalism had been in the nineteenth. He had a similar background to Lenin. His father, too, was a minor bureaucrat, an Austrian customs official on the Bavarian border. Hitler, like Lenin, was the product of an age increasingly obsessed by politics. He never seriously attempted to make his living by any other means and he was only really at home, like Lenin, in a world where the pursuit of power by conspiracy, agitation and force was the chief object and satisfaction of existence. But in that barren and cheerless world he, like Lenin, was a master. He had the same intellectual egoism, lack of self-doubt, ruthlessness in personal relations, preference for force as opposed to discussion and, most important, the ability to combine absolute fidelity to a long-term aim with skilful opportunism. The two men even shared a certain puritanism: Hitler, like Lenin (and unlike Mussolini), had little personal vanity and was not corrupted by the more meretricious aspects of power.

But in one essential respect they were quite different. Whereas Lenin was the religious type of revolutionary, Hitler was a romantic. Indeed he was an artist. Liberal intellectuals were horrified, in 1939, when Thomas Mann, in a brilliant essay called
Brother Hitler
, compared him to the archetypal romantic artist (as described in, say, Henri Murger’s
Vie de Bohème)
and asked: ‘Must we not, even against our will, recognize in this phenomenon an aspect of the artist’s character?’
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Yet the comparison is valid and illuminating. It explains a good deal about Hitlerism which otherwise would remain obscure. Hitler practised painting with little skill and no success. His talent did not lie there. But his reactions were usually those of an artist both in recoil and response. Taken to his father’s place of work, he found himself filled with ‘repugnance and hatred’; it was ‘a government cage’ where ‘old men sat crouched on top of one another, like monkeys’.
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He grasped that he had a public mission when he first heard a performance of Wagner’s earliest success,
Rienzi
, about a commoner who becomes people’s tribune in fourteenth-century
Rome but is destroyed by jealous nobles in a burning capitol: it began at that hour’, he said later.
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He seems to have conceived the ‘final solution’ for the Jews in the fantastic setting of the Gothic castle at Werfenstein in Austria where an unfrocked monk, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, was working out a systematic programme of race-breeding and extermination ‘for the extirpation of the animal-man and the propagation of the higher new-man’, and waged the race-struggle ‘to the hilt of the castration knife’. It is significant that Lanz claimed Lenin as well as Hitler among his disciples, seeing an analogy between the extermination of classes ‘thrown into the dust-bin of history’ and races eliminated by breeding programmes, two forms of social Darwinism.
⁶⁴
Hitler, too, was very interested in class differences, very shrewd in exploiting them to his advantage. But class did not stand near the centre of his political dream because it was not a visual concept. Race was.

Hitler appears always to have approached politics in terms of visual images. Like Lenin and still more like Stalin, he was an outstanding practitioner of the century’s most radical vice: social engineering – the notion that human beings can be shovelled around like concrete. But in Hitler’s case there was always an artistic dimension to these Satanic schemes. Planning a world empire radiating from Berlin, it was the colossal state structures of the capital which sprang first to mind and were then modelled down to the smallest detail.
⁶⁵
When, during the war, Hitler gave directives for the political, demographic and economic transformation of tens of millions of square miles of Europe, right up to the Urals, he spoke in elaborate terms of the Babylonian gardens which were to adorn the cities of the master-race.
⁶⁶
It was highly characteristic of him that he put an architect in charge of war production. Indeed he should have been an architect himself. When he spoke of his desire for the world to be ‘changed thoroughly and in all its parts’, he was thinking visually and in concrete terms, by extension from his lifelong wish to rebuild his ‘home’ town of Linz. All he actually contrived to put up was a new bridge there: but almost to the last day in the bunker he studied plans for the city’s transformation. He periodically envisaged retirement, ‘after the war’, when, his prime mission accomplished, he would replan towns and supervise public building schemes.

Hitler’s artistic approach was absolutely central to his success. Lenin’s religious-type fanaticism would never have worked in Germany. The Germans were the best-educated nation in the world. To conquer their minds was very difficult. Their hearts, their sensibilities, were easier targets. Hitler’s strength was that he shared with so many other Germans the devotion to national images new and old: misty forests breeding blond titans; smiling peasant villages under
the shadow of ancestral castles; garden cities emerging from ghettolike slums; riding Valkyries, burning Valhallas, new births and dawns in which shining, millennian structures would rise from the ashes of the past and stand for centuries. Hitler had in common with average German taste precisely those revered images which nearly a century of nationalist propaganda had implanted.

It is probably true to say that Hitler’s cultural assets were the source of his appeal. Popular detestation of Weimar culture was an enormous source of political energy, which he tapped with relish. Lenin’s notion of giving up music to concentrate on politics would have been incomprehensible to him. In Germany, music was politics; and especially music-drama. Hitler exemplifies the truth that architectural and theatrical skills are closely related. His romantic-artistic instincts led him to rediscover a truth almost as old as the
polis
itself, which certainly goes back to the Pharaohs: that the presentation of the charismatic leader, whether Renaissance monarch or modern democratic politician, is at least as important as the content. One of the reasons Hitler admired Wagner was that he learnt so much from him, especially from
Parsifal
, which became the model for his political spectaculars. The lesson he derived from the Western Front was that wars could be won or lost by propaganda: a thought which inspired his famous sixth chapter of
Mein Kampf.
The object of all propaganda, he wrote, was ‘an encroachment upon man’s freedom of will’.
⁶⁷
This could be achieved by the ‘mysterious magic’ of Bayreuth, the ‘artificial twilight of Catholic Gothic churches’, and both these effects he used; but he also plundered the tricks of Reinhardt and other despised Weimar producers and the cinema of Fritz Lang. The scenes of his oratory were designed and set with enviable professional skill; the attention to detail was fanatical. Hitler was the first to appreciate the power of amplification and the devilry of the searchlight: he seems to have invented
son et lumière
and used it with devastating effect at his mass night-meetings. He imported political costumery and insignia from Mussolini’s Italy but improved upon them, so that Hitlerian uniforms remain the standard of excellence in totalitarian sumptuary. Both Stalinism and Maoism imitated Hitler’s staging, exceeding it in scale but not in style.

As the star of these music-dramas Hitler rehearsed himself with equal professionalism. The myth of the ‘mad orator’ was unfounded. Hitler was always in total control of himself. He found the notion useful in dealing with foreigners, however, since people like Neville Chamberlain were hugely relieved when they actually met Hitler and found him capable of talking in a sane and reasonable manner. But all his ‘mad’ effects were carefully planned. He said in August 1920 that his object was to use ‘calm understanding’ to ‘whip up and incite
… the instinctive’.
⁶⁸
He always studied the acoustics in the halls where he spoke. He committed his speeches to an excellent memory (though he had very full notes too). He practised in front of a mirror and got the party photographer to take him in action so he could study the shots. The mind reels at what he might have done with television and it is odd he did not push its development: Berlin-Witzleben put on a
TV
show as early as 8 March 1929. Hitler used oratorical gestures, then rare in Germany, which he copied from Ferdl Weiss, a Munich comedian who specialized in beer-hall audiences. He timed himself to arrive late, but not too late. In the early days he dealt brilliantly with hecklers and used a lot of mordant humour.
⁶⁹
Later he aimed at the inspired prophet image, and severely reduced the specific political content in his speeches. Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth, whom he visited in Weimar, said he struck her more as a spiritual than a political leader.
⁷⁰
But his style was not that of a theologian so much as a revivalist: the American journalist H.R.Knickerbocker compared him to ‘Billy Sunday’.
⁷¹
One observer wrote at the time: ‘Hitler never really makes a political speech, only philosophical ones.’
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In fact he did not so much outline a programme and make promises as demand a commitment. He saw politics as the mobilizing of wills. The listener surrendered his will to his leader, who restored it to him reinforced. As he put it: ‘The will, the longing and also the power of thousands are accumulated in every individual. The man who enters such a meeting doubting and wavering leaves it inwardly reinforced: he has become a link in the community.’

We touch here upon an important point. Hitler, like Lenin, had nothing but contempt for parliamentary democracy or any other aspect of liberalism. But whereas Lenin insisted that an élite or even a single individual represented the will of the proletariat by virtue of their/his
gnosis
, Hitler was not averse to the democratic voice expressing itself in a less metaphysical form. In a sense he believed in participatory democracy and even practised it for a time. Indeed Hitler had no alternative but to pursue power, to some extent, by democratic means. In a rare moment of frankness, Lenin once said that only a country like Russia could have been captured so easily as he took it. Germany was a different proposition. It could not be raped. It had to be seduced.

It took Hitler some time to discover this fact. His political education is worth studying in a little detail. In pre-1914 Vienna he acquired his socialism and his anti-Semitism. The socialism he got from the famous Christian-Social mayor, Karl Lueger, who imitated and improved on Bismarck’s social policy to create a miniature welfare state: in fifteen years he gave Vienna a superb transport,
educational and social security system, green belts and a million new jobs. Here the whole of Hitler’s domestic policy up to 1939 was adumbrated: to use the huge, paternalistic state to persuade the masses to forgo liberty in exchange for security. Lueger was also an anti-Semite, but it was another Viennese politico, the Pan-Germanist Georg von Schöaerer, who taught Hitler to place the ‘solution’ to ‘the Jewish problem’ in the very centre of politics: Schönerer demanded anti-Jewish laws and his followers wore on their watch-chains the insignia of a hanged Jew.

The third element, which turned Hitler into the archetypal Easterner, was added during the war. Ludendorff believed strongly in the political education of the troops. He indoctrinated them with the idea of a vast eastward expansion, which the Brest-Litovsk Treaty showed was possible. Hitler became an enthusiastic exponent of this vision, expanded it and adapted it to include in its realization the ‘final solution’ for the ‘Jewish problem’. It remained the biggest single element in his entire programme of action, the axis of attack around which all else revolved. Ludendorff’s scheme for a politicized army was one of the many ideas which Lenin enthusiastically adopted, appointing political commissars down to battalion level. In turn, the German army readopted it after the Red risings of early 1919 had been put down. The Political Department of the Munich district command made Hitler one of their first ‘political instruction officers’ after the Munich Soviet had been smashed. Ernst Roehm was one of his colleagues. These two men took full advantage of the genuine anti-Red fears in Munich to turn it into the capital of German extremism.

In September 1919 Hitler took over a small proletarian group called the German Workers’ Party. By April 1920, when he left the army to begin a full-time political career, he had transformed it into the nucleus of a mass party, given it a foreign policy (abrogation of Versailles, a Greater Germany, Eastern expansion, Jews to be excluded from citizenship) and reorganized its economic aims into a radical twenty-five-point programme: confiscation of war-profits, abolition of unearned incomes, state to take over trusts and share profits of industry, land for national needs to be expropriated without compensation. He also added the words ‘National Socialist’ to its title. Though Hitler sometimes used the words nationalism and socialism as though they were interchargeable, the radical and socialist element in his programme always remained strong. He was never in any sense a bourgeois or conservative politician or an exponent or defender of capitalism. Nor was the Nazi Party predominantly lower middle-class. Modern historians have hotly debated the extent of its working-class appeal.
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The truth seems to be that the active Nazis were drawn from the discontented of all classes except the peasants and farmers. Out of a
total of 4,800 members in 1923, 34.5 per cent were working class, 31 per cent lower middle-class, 6.2 minor officials, 11.1 clerks, 13.6 small businessmen and shopkeepers.
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