INTERPOLATION II

German Catastrophe or German Consistency?

The idea is not so impotent as to amount to no more than an idea.

G. W. F. Hegel

 

Thought precedes action like lightning thunder. Admittedly the German thunder is also German and not very nimble; it rolls up rather slowly. But it will come, and once you hear it peal, as nothing has ever pealed before in the history of the world, know this: the German thunder has reached its goal.

Heinrich Heine, 1834

 

The dramatic ceremonial with which Hitler took over the chancellorship, the accompaniment of torchlight parades and mass demonstrations, bore no relationship to the constitutional importance of the event. For, strictly speaking, January 30, 1933, brought nothing more than a change of administrations. Nevertheless, the public sensed that the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor could not be compared with the cabinet reshufflings of former years. Despite all the vaunted intentions of the German Nationalist coalition partners “to keep the frustrated Austrian painter on the leash,” the Nazis from the start made ready to seize full power and to apply it in revolutionary ways. All the efforts of Papen and his fellows to play a part in the oratory, the celebrating, or the directing of affairs only gave the impression of breathless running to keep up. Numerical superiority in the cabinet, influence with the President, or in the economy, the army, and the bureaucracy could not conceal the fact that this was their rival’s hour.

After January 30 a mass desertion to the Nazi camp began. Once again the axiom was proved that in revolutionary times principles are cheap, and perfidy, calculation, and fear reign supreme. This was true, but not the whole truth. For the massive political turncoatism bespoke not only lack of character and servility. Quite often it represented the spontaneous desire to give up old prejudices, ideologies, and social restrictions and to join with others in making a fresh start. “We were not all opportunists,” wrote the poet Gottfried Benn in retrospect, speaking as one of that vast host of people who were carried along by the force of the spreading revolutionary mood.¹ Powerful traditional parties and associations cracked under the propagandist^ onslaught; and even before they were forcibly dissolved and banned they left a leaderless following to its own devices. The past—republic, divisiveness, impotence—was over and done with. A rapidly shrinking minority did not succumb to the frenzy. But such holdouts were driven into isolation; they saw themselves excluded from those celebrations of the new sense of community, from those who could reveal in mass oaths in cathedrals of light, in addresses by the Führer, in mountaintop bonfires and choral singing by hundreds of thousands of voices. Even the first signs of the reign of terror could not mute the rejoicing. The public mind interpreted the terror as an expression of a ruthlessly operating energy for which it had looked all too long in vain.

These concomitants of enthusiasm are what have given Hitler’s seizure of power its distressing note. For they undermine all the arguments for its having been a historical accident, the product of intrigues or dark conspiracies. Any attempt to explain the events of those years has always had to face the question of how Nazism could so rapidly and effortlessly have conquered the majority, not just attained power, in an ancient and experienced civilized nation. And how could it have thrown that majority into a peculiarly hysterical state compounded of enthusiasm, credulity, and devotion? How could the political, social, and moral checks and balances, which a country belonging to the “nobility of nations”² after all possesses, have so glaringly failed? Before Hitler came to power, an observer described what he considered the inevitable course of events: “Dictatorship, abolition of the parliament, crushing of all intellectual liberties, inflation, terror, civil war; for the opposition could not simply be made to disappear. A general strike would be called. The unions would provide a core for the bitterest kind of resistance; they would be joined by the Reichsbanner and by all those concerned about the future. And if Hitler won over even the Army and met the opposition with cannon—he would find millions of resolute antagonists.”³ But there were no millions of resolute antagonists and consequently no need for a bloody coup. On the other hand, Hitler did not come like a thief in the night. With his histrionic verbosity he revealed, more perhaps than any other politician, what he had been aiming for through all the byways and tactical maneuvers: dictatorship, anti-Semitism, conquest of living space.

Understandably enough, the euphoria of those weeks gave many observers the impression that Germany had rediscovered her true self. Although the Constitution and the rules of the political game as played in the republic remained valid for the time being, they nevertheless seemed curiously obsolete, cast off like an alien shell. And for decades this image—of a nation that seemed to have found itself in exuberantly turning away from the European tradition of rationality and humane progress—determined the interpretation of events.

The first attempts at tracing the success of Nazism to a special mentality rooted in German history thus began early in the thirties. The German was pictured as perplexing, full of antitheses, making a principle of his aloofness from civilization and civil conduct. He seemed to take a truculent pride in being the representative of a culturally advanced nation that could so offensively scandalize the world. Reckless pedigrees were constructed extending through Bismarck and Frederick the Great all the way back to Luther or into the Middle Ages, sometimes even as far back as the Teutonic leader Arminius who at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest A.D. 9 defended German living space from Roman penetration. Such “ancestry” was supposed to prove a tradition of latent Hitlerism long before Hitler. This theory was best expressed in a number of books by the French specialist in Germanic studies, Edmond Vermeil. For a time, subsequently, it dominated British and American efforts at interpretation; William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has to a large degree formed the world’s picture of Germany, made use of it. Vermeil wrote:

 

At various stages of their history the Germans have believed with a desperate certainty, which sprang either from inner dissension and weakness or, on the contrary, from the notion of their insurpassable and invincible strength, that they had a divine mission to fulfill and that Germany has been chosen by Providence.⁴

 

The usurpation of the Roman Empire, the Hanseatic League, the Reformation, German mysticism, the rise of Prussia, romanticism—all these were more or less disguised manifestations of this missionary urge. And the sense of mission began to take a more overt turn with Bismarck’s blood-and-iron policies and the German Empire’s determination to achieve the status of a global power. Seen from this angle, nothing in German history was “innocent.” Even in its most idyllic moments, the specters of obedience, militarism, and expansionism were palpably present. The German yearning for the infinite could be seen as an endeavor to exert in the realm of the mind a dominion that Germany still had not the power to achieve in reality. Ultimately everything terminated in Hitler; he was by no means a “German catastrophe,” as the title of a well-known book⁵ asserted, but a product of German consistency.

Without doubt there were unmistakably German features in National Socialism; but they are of a different and more complex kind than those set forth by Vermeil or Shirer. No genealogy of evil, no single explanation, can do justice to the nature of the phenomenon. Nor should we see its seeds only in the obviously dark and ominous elements in the German past. Many naïve attitudes, or at any rate attitudes that for generations caused no trouble, and even some virtues and commendable values, made the success of Nazism possible. One of the lessons the era has to teach us is that a totalitarian power system need not be built up. upon a nation’s deviant or even criminal tendencies. A nation cannot decide, like a Richard III, to become a villain. Historical, psychological, and even social conditions comparable to those in Germany existed in many countries, and frequently only a fine line separated other nations from Fascist rule. The Germans were not the only people to arrive late at the sense of nationhood, or to be behindhand at developing democratic institutions. As for the unbridgeable gulfs between liberal and socialist forces, between the bourgeoisie and the working class, these, too, were not peculiarly German. We may also question whether revanchist yearnings, bellicose ideologies, or dreams of great power status were more pronounced in Germany than in some of her European neighbors. And even anti-Semitism, decisively though it governed Hitler’s thinking, was surely not a specifically German phenomenon. In fact, it was rather weaker among the Germans than in most other peoples. Racial emotions did not, at any rate, win the masses over to National Socialism or kindle their enthusiasm. Hitler himself was cognizant of this, as his efforts to play down his anti-Semitism during the final phase of his struggle for power plainly showed.⁶

During the same era many Fascist or Fascist-oriented movements came to power—in Italy, Turkey, Poland, Austria, and Spain, for example. What was peculiarly German about National Socialism emerges most clearly by comparison with the systems in these other countries: it was the most radical, the most absolute manifestation of Fascism.

This fundamental rigor, which came out on the intellectual as well as the administrative plane, was Hitler’s personal contribution to the nature of National Socialism. In his way of sharply opposing an idea to reality, of elevating what ought to be above what is, he was truly German. The failed local politician, subletting a room on Thierschstrasse, sketched triumphal arches and domed halls that were to assure his posthumous fame. Ignoring mockery, the Chancellor did not reckon in generations, but in millennia; he wanted to undo not merely the Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s impotence but nothing less than the consequences of the great migrations. Whereas Mussolini’s ambition aimed at restoring a lost historical grandeur, whereas Maurras called for a return to the ancien regime and the “gloire de la Deesse France,” whereas all the other Fascisms could do no better than invoke a past golden age, Hitler set himself a goal more grandiose than anything the world had ever seen: an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals and from Narvik to Suez. His pure master race seeking its rightful place would fight for and win this empire. Would other countries oppose him? He would crush them. Were peoples located contrary to his plans? He would resettle them. Did the races fail to correspond to his image? He would select, breed, eliminate until the reality fitted his conception. He was always thinking the unthinkable; in his statements an element of bitter refusal to submit to reality invariably emerged. His personality was not without manic characteristics. “I confront everything with a tremendous, ice-cold lack of bias,” he declared. He seemed authentically himself only when he spoke and acted with the utmost radicality. To that extent, National Socialism cannot be conceived apart from Hitler.

Among the things that set Nazism apart from the Fascist movements of other countries is the fact that Hitler always found obedient instruments to carry out his eccentric radicalism. No stirrings of pity mitigated the concentrated and punctilious harshness of the regime. Its barbarous features have often been ascribed to the deliberate application of cruelty by murderers and sadists, and such criminal elements continue to loom large in the popular mind. To this day types of this sort appear in literary works, whip in hand, as the personifications of Nazism. But the regime had quite another picture of itself. No question about its making use of such people, especially in the initial phase; but it quickly realized that lasting rule cannot be founded upon the unleashing of criminal instincts. The radicality that constituted the true nature of National Socialism does not really spring from the license it offered to instinctual gratification. The problem was not one of criminal impulses but of a perverted moral energy.

Those to whom Nazism chiefly appealed were people with a strong but directionless craving for morality. In the SS, National Socialism trained this type and organized it into an elite corps. The “inner values” that were perpetually being preached within this secular monastic order—the theme of many an evening meeting complete with romantic torchlight—included, according to the prescript of Heinrich Himmler, the following virtues: loyalty, honesty, obedience, hardness, decency, poverty, and bravery. But all these virtues were detached from any comprehensive frame of reference and directed entirely toward the purposes of the regime. Under the command of such imperatives a type of person was trained who demanded “cold, in fact, stony attitudes” of himself, as one of them wrote, and had “ceased to have human feelings.”⁷ Out of his harshness toward himself he derived the justification for harshness toward others. The ability to walk over dead bodies was literally demanded of him; and before that could be developed, his own self had to be deadened. It is this impassive, mechanical quality that strikes the observer as far more extreme than sheer brutality. For the killer who acts out of an overpowering social, intellectual, or human resentment exerts a claim, however small, upon our sympathy.

The moral imperative was supplemented and crowned by the idea of a special mission: the sense of taking part in an apocalyptic confrontation, of obeying a “higher law,” of being the agent of an ideal. Images and slogans alike were made to seem like metaphysical commandments, and a special consecration was conferred upon relentlessness. That is how Hitler meant it when he denounced those who cast doubt on his mission as “enemies of the people.” This fanaticism, this fixation upon his own deeper insight and his own loftier missionary aims, reflected the traditional German false relationship to politics, and beyond that the nation’s peculiarly distorted relationship to reality in general. The real world in which ideas take form and are experienced by people, in which thoughts can be translated into despairs, anxieties, hatreds, and terrors, simply did not exist. All that existed was the program, and the process of putting it across, as Hitler occasionally remarked, involved either positive or negative activity. The lack of humanitarian imagination (which comes to the fore whenever Nazi criminals are brought to trial, from the Nuremberg Trials on) was nothing but the expression of this loss of a sense of reality. That was the characteristically German element in National Socialism, and there is reason to believe that various connecting lines run far back into German history.

According to a paradoxical epigram, the most significant event in modern German history was “the revolution that did not take place.”⁸ Often this incapacity for revolution has been seen as the expression of a particularly submissive character. For a long time the type of good-natured, dreamy, unwarlike German served as a kind of laughingstock for more self-assured neighbors. But in reality the profound suspicion of revolution was only the reaction of a nation whose historical experiences were largely dominated by the sense of being menaced. Due to her central position geographically Germany early developed defensive and encirclement complexes. These seemed to be all too justified by the horrible, never to be forgotten experiences of the Thirty Years’ War, when the country was transformed into an underpopulated wasteland. The most momentous legacy of that war was the traumatic feeling of helplessness and a deep-seated dread of all chaotic conditions. This feeling was perpetuated and used to good advantage by Germany’s rulers for generations. Keeping the peace was regarded as a citizen’s foremost duty; but peace and order in turn became the citizen’s foremost demand upon his government. The role of the authorities was to keep out fear and misery; the Protestant view of governmental authority accorded well with this.

The tendency of the Enlightenment throughout Europe was to challenge existing authorities. But the spokesmen of the Enlightenment in Germany refrained from criticizing the government of princes; some even lauded it—so ingrained were the terrors of the past. The German mind accords unusual respect to the categories of order, discipline, and self-restraint. Idolization of the state as court of last resort and bulwark against evil, and even faith in a leader, have their origin in such historical experiences. Hitler was able to play on such attitudes and use them to further his plans for dominion. Thus he created the cult of obedience to the Führer or staged those militarylike demonstrations whose precise geometry offered protection against the chaos so feared by all and sundry.

The epigram about the German revolution that did not take place contains only half the truth. For the nation whose past is devoid of beheaded kings or victorious popular risings has contributed more than any other to the revolutionary mobilization of the world. It supplied the most provocative insights, the most trenchant revolutionary slogans, for the so-called Age of Revolutions. It heaved up rocky masses of ideas, out of which future ages built their houses. In intellectual radicalism Germany has had no match; and this, too, is part of a heritage that has conferred greatness and a characteristic bravura upon the better minds in Germany. But this again had little to do with the ability to assume pragmatic attitudes in which thought and life became reconciled and reason turned rational. The German mind had small concern with that; it was asocial in the literal sense of the word and thus basically oriented neither to the right nor the left but, rather, chiefly to the celebrated antithesis to life: uncompromising, always taking the “I can do no other” position, revealing a nearly apocalyptic “tendency toward the intellectual abyss.”

The process of alienation from reality was intensified by the many dis-illusionments the bourgeois mind experienced in the course of its efforts to achieve political emancipation during the nineteenth century. The traces of this process can be seen on almost every plane: in the unreal character of political thought; in the mythologizing of history by Winckelmann and Wagner; and in the German adulation of culture. The superior man was supposed to live in the phantom realm of art and the sublime. The realm of politics was situated off to one side, and finer spirits would not venture there.

The social type in whom these tendencies became concentrated has enjoyed the highest prestige to this day. We recognize him, for his professorial face conforms to those old portraits of withdrawn, thoughtful men, whose features are imprinted with high-minded austerity and adherence to principle, though there could be some strange strains within their depths. They thought in sweeping terms, toppled or erected systems; they gazed toward remote horizons. At the same time, they were surrounded by an atmosphere of intimacy and cozy domesticity and led what would seem happy private lives. Books and dreams, as Paul de Lagarde has remarked, were their element. Their imaginations made up for their distance from reality. They had a good opinion of themselves, feeling themselves ennobled by their intellectual occupation, and were on the whole content with civilization and their own contribution to it.

Contempt for reality corresponded to an increasingly overt belittling of politics. Politics was reality in the bluntest, most obtrusive sense: the “rule of the inferior,” as the title of a celebrated book of the twenties put it.⁹ Aside from a thin minority that was forever being forced into isolation, the public in Germany did not know what to make of politics. The German world was oriented toward private concepts, aims, virtues. No social goals could match the rewards of the private world: family happiness, the emotions aroused by nature, the quiet passions of the study. Joys such as these made a whole world of intelligible satisfactions, and no one was going to abandon them, exchanging the mystery of the forest for the “din of the market place” and the freedom of dreams for constitutional rights.

This feeling also was driven to an extreme. “A political person is repulsive,” Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt. One of his admirers has remarked: “If Wagner was in any way an expression of his nation, if there was anything in which he was German, humanistically German and bourgeois German in the highest and purest sense of those words, he was so in his hatred for politics.”¹⁰ The antipolitical bias tended to be dressed up as defense of morality against power, of humanity against socialistic trends, of the intellect against public life. From these pairs of opposites, constantly elaborated by new profundities and polemical ponderings, the favorite themes of bourgeois self-examination developed. The supremely brilliant expression of the general attitude, in the form of a complex confession and profession of faith, was Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (“Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”), published in 1918. It was intended as a brief on the part of culture-proud Germany against the “enlightened,” Western “terrorism of politics.”

This attitude was also evident in the way the Germans responded when war and the postwar era confronted them squarely with politics. They reacted to the “dirty” revolution with passionate disdain and made a scramble for the traditional escape route that led into aesthetic or mythological realms. In their inability to make any sense of political facts, they spawned all the conspiracy theories that thickened the air during the Weimar years: the myth of the stab in the back, for example, or the theory of the dual menace by a Red (Communist) and a golden (capitalist) International. Anti-Semitism and the widespread anxiety complexes about Freemasons and Jesuits also sprang from the same source. In short, the Germans’ abhorrence of politics drove them into an imaginary world full of the romantic concepts of treason, loneliness, and deceived greatness.

What political thought there was was also marked by nonpolitical images. Ideologies were constructed out of “the war experience” and out of such notions as “young nations,” “total mobilization” or “barbaric Caesarism.” The vast flood of nationalistic and utopian schemes and catchword philosophies of the so-called Conservative Revolution aimed at dressing up the world in the costume of irrationalism. These ideologies pitted their radical slogans against the toilsome compromises of political reality. They passed judgment on everyday life in the name of grandiose myths. It is true that they exerted little direct influence. But by presenting confusing romantic alternatives they contributed to the process of intellectually starving out the republic. This was all the easier because reality had become so hateful that “disgust with politics” could be aroused far more effectively than ever before. While the advocates of Weimar often seemed like apologists for a corrupt system, the attackers of the Right seemed imaginative, overflowing with projects, as they constructed out of mythology, sentimentality, and concentrated bitterness an anti-image to the republic. Among their most contemptuous slurs aimed at the “system” was that it had nothing to offer to the nation but “domestic bliss,” consumption, and petty bourgeois epicureanism. Adventure, tragedy, doom—such words fascinated the age. Among Germany’s intellectuals, Carl von Ossietzky found many “altruistic lovers of every catastrophe, gourmets of world-political misfortunes.” Meanwhile, a French observer at the beginning of the thirties wondered whether Germany’s “present crisis is not too passionately and violently felt.”¹¹ In fact, it was this tendency toward melodrama that gave the crisis its hopeless, desperate cast. This in turn made the craving to escape from reality a mass phenomenon and the idea of a heroic leap into the unknown the most familiar of all thoughts.

 

The phenomenon of Hitler must be seen against this ideological milieu. Sometimes he actually seems the artificial product of these attitudes and complexes: he illustrates so neatly the combination of mythological and rational thinking, the extreme radicality of the socially alienated intellectual. His speeches contain the stock in trade of antipolitical bias as he pours out his hatred for parties, for the compromises of the “system,” for the republic’s lack of “grandeur.” To him politics was a concept closely related to fate, incapable of producing anything of its own accord, needing to be liberated by the strong man, by art, or by a higher power called “Providence.” In one of the key speeches he made during the course of the seizure of power—the speech of March 21, that famous “day” of Potsdam—he dealt with the very question of the relationship between political impotence, surrogate reveries and redemption by art as follows:

The German, at odds with himself, with deep divisions in his mind, likewise in his will and therefore impotent in action, becomes powerless to direct his own life. He dreams of justice in the stars and loses his footing on earth. . . . In the end, then, only the inward road remained open for German men. As a nation of singers, poets and thinkers they dreamed of a world in which the others lived, and only when misery and wretchedness dealt them inhuman blows did there perhaps grow up out of art the longing for a new rising, for a new Reich, and therefore for new life.¹²

 

Once he had given up his dream of being an artist, he came to regard himself as the savior the nation awaited. He considered politics principally as a means to achieve greatness, allowing him to compensate for his inadequate artistic talent by entering upon another grandiloquent role. For all his bathos about art, “the humanities” left him indifferent. The documents that reveal him at his most spontaneous, his early speeches and the table talk at the Fuhrer’s headquarters, are convincing evidence of this. Probably few tributes gratified him so much as the remark of Houston Stewart Chamberlain in a letter of October, 1923, hailing him as “the opposite of a politician.” Chamberlain had added: “The ideal of politics would be to have none; but this non-politics would have to be frankly acknowledged and imposed upon the world.” In this sense Hitler actually had no politics; what he had, rather, was a large, portentous idea of destiny and the world. And with manic persistence he made it the goal of his life to attain that ideal.

Walter Benjamin called Fascism the “aestheticizing of politics.” The German conception of politics had always been infected with aesthetics, and Nazism gave a central place to this quality. One of the reasons for the Weimar Republic’s failure was that its representatives did not understand the German psychology and thought of politics solely as politics. It remained for Hitler to endow public affairs with the necessary eclat. This he did by his endless obfuscations, his theatrical scenarios, the storms of ecstasy and idolization. Those vaults created by massed searchlight beams were the fitting symbol for it all: walls of magic and light erected against the dark menace of the outside world. And if the Germans did not share Hitler’s hunger for space, his anti-Semitism, his vulgar and brutal qualities, they applauded him and followed him because he had once more restored passion to politics, and overlaid it with a note of dire significance.

In keeping with the theory of the unpolitical “aesthetic state,” Hitler regarded his artistic and political ideas as a unity and was fond of repeating that his regime had at last reconciled art and politics. He considered himself a ruler in the mold of Pericles and was wont to draw parallels; Albert Speer recalls that he regarded the Autobahnen as his Parthenon.¹³ He declared quite seriously that neither Heinrich Himmler nor Rudolf Hess could succeed him because they were “totally unartistic,” whereas Speer rose so high and was for a while actually the intended successor to the Führer chiefly because he ranked in Hitler’s mind as an “artistic person,” an “artist,” a “genius.” Characteristically, at the beginning of the war, Hitler exempted the artists from military service, but not the scientists and technicians. Even when being shown new weapons, he seldom overlooked the aesthetic form. He was capable, for example, of praising the “elegance” of the barrel on an artillery piece. There was absolutely nothing that mattered outside of art, he would say; even as a general, only an artistic person could be successful. After the victory over France he preferred to enter Paris not as a conqueror but as a sort of museum visitor. His early yearnings for retirement, which later on he expressed with increasing urgency, also sprang from this basic attitude. “I became a politician against my will,” he remarked repeatedly. “For me politics is only a means to an end. There are people who think that I would find it hard someday to be no longer active as I am now. Not at all! It will be the best day of my life when I drop out of political life and leave all the worries, the troubles and the vexation behind me. . . . Wars come and go. What remains are the values of culture alone.” Hans Frank regarded such sentiments as expressing the tendency of the age: “To be able to banish everything that is connected with governments, war, politics, etc., and to subordinate these to the high ideal of cultural activity.” In this context it is significant that the top Nazi leadership consisted of a disproportionately large number of inchoate, frustrated, or failed semiartists. Aside from Hitler, Dietrich Eckart is a case in point. Goebbels had tried his hand as a novelist. Rosenberg had started out as an architect, von Schirach and Hans Frank as poets. Funk dabbled in music. Speer, too, in his determinedly individualistic and nonpolitical stance, may be counted among them. The same is true for that type of intellectual whose aestheticizing pronunciamentos, at once vague and unqualified, accompanied and furthered the rise of National Socialism.

Hitler’s private style also exemplified the lack of grip upon reality characteristic of socially alienated intellectuals. Many of his contemporaries noted his tendency to take off, in conversation, into “higher regions,” from which he had constantly to be “pulled down to the solid ground of facts,” as one of them wrote. Significantly, Hitler gave himself to his fantasies particularly when he was at home at Obersalzberg, or in the Eagle’s Nest, which he had built on the Kehlstein above the Berghof, at an altitude of more than 6,000 feet. Here, in thinner air, against the backdrop of the mountains, he thought over his projects; here, he repeatedly said, he had come to all major decisions. But the fantasies of a vast empire extending to the Urals, the wild geopolitical schemes for partitioning the world, the visions of mass slaughter of whole peoples and races, the superman dreams and phantasmagorias of blood purity and Holy Grail, and finally the elaborate diagrams of runways, military installations, and fortified villages conceived on a continental scale—all this in substance can hardly be called “German.” What was German about it was only the intellectual consistency with which he constructed these mental systems. What was German also was the merciless rigor, the shrinking from no logical conclusion. Certainly Hitler’s harshness stemmed from a monstrous character structure, while his radicality always had something of the brutality of the gutter. But over and beyond that, this radicality may be attributed to the apolitical attitude, the hostility toward reality, which belongs to the intellectual tradition of the country.

On the other hand, what distinguished him from all his ilk was his capacity for political action. He was the exception, the intellectual with a practical understanding of power. More radical postulates than his can easily be found in the texts of his forerunners. Both Germans and other Europeans came out with even stronger anathemas against the present, showed an even stronger aestheticizing contempt for reality. The Futurist Filippo Marinetti, for example, proclaimed redemption from “infamous reality,” and in a 1920 manifesto demanded “all power to the artists.” But these and similar pronouncements were merely the bombast of intellectuals who were all too conscious of their impotence. What made Hitler the exception once again was his readiness to take his intellectual fictions literally.

It is certainly true that he did not take the Germans by surprise, as the tyrant Pisistratus did the Athenians while they were at table. Like the rest of the world, the Germans could have been warned, since Hitler always set forth his intentions. He had scarcely any intellectual reserve. But the traditional divorce of conceptual from social reality had long ago persuaded Germany that words were cheap, and none seemed less expensive than his. That is the only way to explain the great misjudgment of him, which was also a misjudgment of the times. Rudolf Breitscheid, chairman of the Social Democratic Party faction in the Reichstag, clapped his hands with pleasure when he heard the news of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. Now at last the man would ruin himself, he said. Breitscheid ultimately died in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Other parliamentarians added up the votes to prove that Hitler would never be able to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to alter the Constitution. Julius Leber, another leading Social Democrat, remarked sardonically that he was waiting like everybody else in the hope of at last “finding out the intellectual foundations of this movement.”¹⁴

No one seemed to grasp who Hitler really was. The expected sanctions from abroad were never imposed. Instead, foreign governments, with that same combination of blindness, weakness, and hopes of “taming” the wild man that afflicted Germany prepared for the agreements and pacts of the coming years. There were only a few isolated expressions of forebodings, even these mingled with an odd fascination. A German observer in Paris noted among Frenchmen “a feeling as if a volcano has opened up in their immediate vicinity, the eruption of which may devastate their fields and cities any day. Consequently they are watching its slightest stirrings with astonishment and dread. A natural phenomenon which they confront almost helplessly. Today Germany is again the great international star that appears in every newspaper, in every cinema, fascinating the masses with a mixture of fear, incomprehension, and reluctant admiration, to which a goodly dash of delighted malice has been added. Germany is the great, tragic, uncanny, dangerous adventurer.”¹⁵

Scarcely one of the ideas under whose aegis the country began this adventure belonged to it alone. But the inhuman earnestness with which it embarked on its flight from reality was authentically German. The tendencies and biases described above, reinforced by the exacerbated tension between a revolutionary idea formulated a century ago and the immobility of social conditions, gave this emergence extraordinary force, the fury of a belated reaction. The German thunder had reached its goal at last.

But the rejection of reality in the name of radically idealized concepts cannot be suppressed, linked as it is to the spontaneity of the imagination and the risk-taking of thinking. That this involves hazards in the political sphere is undeniable. In the final analysis, however, the German mind owes a good deal of its glory to this tendency, and, despite what many think, not all its issues necessarily lead to Auschwitz.