PROLOGUE

Hitler and Historical Greatness

 

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments. They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them. But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength. He who overcomes himself is divine. Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.¹

Leopold von Ranke

 

History records no phenomenon like him. Ought we to call him “great”? No one evoked so much rejoicing, hysteria, and expectation of salvation as he; no one so much hate. No one else produced, in a solitary course lasting only a few years, such incredible accelerations in the pace of history. No one else so changed the state of the world and left behind such a wake of ruins as he did. It took a coalition of almost all the world powers to wipe him from the face of the earth in a war lasting nearly six years, to kill him—to quote an army officer of the German resistance—“like a mad dog.”

Hitler’s peculiar greatness is essentially linked to the quality of excess. It was a tremendous eruption of energy that shattered all existing standards. Granted, gigantic scale is not necessarily equivalent to historic greatness; there is power in triviality also. But he was not only gigantic and not only trivial. The eruption he unleashed was stamped throughout almost every one of its stages, down to the weeks of final collapse, by his guiding will. In many speeches, he recalled, with a distinctly rapturous note, the period of his beginnings, when he had “nothing at all to back (him), nothing, no name, no fortune, no press, nothing at all, nothing whatsoever,” and how, entirely by his own efforts, he had risen from “poor devil” to rule over Germany and soon over part of the world as well. “That has been almost miraculous!”² In fact, to a virtually unprecedented degree, he created everything out of himself and was himself everything at once: his own teacher, organizer of a party and author of its ideology, tactician and demagogic savior, leader, statesman, and for a decade the “axis” of the world. He refuted the dictum that all revolutions devour their children; for he was, as has been said, “the Rousseau, the Mirabeau, the Robespierre and the Napoleon of his revolution; he was its Marx, its Lenin, its Trotsky and its Stalin. By character and nature he may have been far inferior to most of these, but he nevertheless managed to achieve what all of them could not: he dominated his revolution in every phase, even in the moment of defeat. That argues a considerable understanding of the forces he evoked.”³

He also had an amazing instinct for what forces could be mobilized at all and did not allow prevailing trends to deceive him. The period of his entry into politics was wholly dominated by the liberal bourgeois system. But he grasped the latent oppositions to it and by bold and wayward combinations seized upon these factors and incorporated them into his program. His conduct seemed foolish to political minds, and for years the arrogant Zeitgeist did not take him seriously. The mockery he earned was justified by his appearance, his rhetorical flights, and the theatrical atmosphere he deliberately created. Yet in a manner difficult to describe he always stood above his banal and dull-witted aspects. One particular source of his strength lay in his ability to build castles in the air with an intrepid and acute rationality.

In 1925, Hitler had been sitting in a furnished room in Munich, a failed Bavarian local politician, drawing his sketches of imaginary arches of triumph and domed halls. In spite of the collapse of all his hopes after the attempted putsch of November, 1923, he did not take back a single one of his words, did not mute his battle cry, and refused to modify any of his plans for domination of the world. In those days, he later remarked, everyone had branded him a visionary. “They always said I was crazy.” But only a few years later everything he had wanted was reality, or at any rate a realizable project, and those institutions that had recently seemed to be permanent and unchallenged were on their way out: democracy and political-party government, unions, international workers’ solidarity, the European system of alliances, and the League of Nations. “Who was right?” Hitler triumphantly demanded. “The visionary or the others?—I was right.”⁴

In this ability to uncover the deeper spirit and tendencies of the age, and to represent those tendencies, there certainly is an element of historic greatness. “It appears to be the destiny of greatness,” Jacob Burckhardt wrote in his famous essay on historical greatness, in Reflections on History, “that it executes a will going beyond individual desires.” Burckhardt speaks of “the mysterious coincidence between the egoism of the individual and the communal will.” In general terms and at times in specific details, Hitler’s career seems like a classic illustration of this tenet. The following chapters contain a wealth of evidence of that. The same is true for the other elements that in Burckhardt’s view constitute historical greatness. Irreplaceability is one; “he leads a people from one stage of cultivation to another.” He “stands not only for the program and the fury of a party, but for a more general aim.” He manifests the ability “to jump boldly across the abyss”; he has the capacity of simplification, the gift of distinguishing between real and illusory powers, and finally the exceptional will power that creates an atmosphere of fascination. “Contest at close quarters becomes utterly impossible. Anyone desiring to oppose him must live outside of the reach of the man, with his enemies, and can meet him only on the battlefield.”⁵

And yet we hesitate to call Hitler “great.” Perhaps what gives us pause is not so much the criminal features in this man’s psychopathic face. For world history is not played out in the area that is “the true site of morality,” and Burckhardt has also spoken of the “strange exemption from the ordinary moral code” which we tend to grant in our minds to great individuals.⁶ We may surely ask whether the absolute crime of mass extermination planned and committed by Hitler is not of an utterly different nature, overstepping the bounds of the moral context recognized by both Hegel and Burckhardt. Our doubts of Hitler’s historic greatness also spring from another factor. The phenomenon of the great man is primarily aesthetic, very rarely moral in nature; and even if we were prepared to make allowances in the latter realm, in the former we could not. An ancient tenet of aesthetics holds that one who for all his remarkable traits is a repulsive human being, is unfit to be a hero. It may be—and evidence will be offered—that this description fits Hitler very well. His many opaque, instinctual traits, his intolerance and vindictiveness, his lack of generosity, his banal and naked materialism—power was the only motive he would recognize, and he repeatedly forced his table companions to join him in his scorn of anything else as “bosh”—and in general his unmistakably vulgar characteristics give his image a cast of repugnant ordinariness that simply will not square with the traditional concept of greatness. “Impressiveness in this world,” wrote Bismarck in a letter, “is always akin to the fallen angel who is beautiful but without peace, great in his plans and efforts, but without success, proud and sad.” If this is true greatness, Hitler’s distance from it is immeasurable.

 

It may be that the concept of greatness has become problematical. In one of the pessimistically toned political essays Thomas Mann wrote in exile, he used the terms “greatness” and “genius” in regard to a then triumphant Hitler, but he spoke of “botched greatness” and of a debased stage of genius.⁷ In such contradictions a concept takes leave of itself. Perhaps this idea of greatness also springs from the historical consciousness of a past era, which placed almost all its weight on the actors and ideas of the historical process and almost none on the extensive network of forces.

Today this tendency is reversed, and we ascribe little importance to personality compared with the interests, relationships, and material conflicts within the society. This approach has also been applied to Hitler. Thus he has been portrayed as the “hireling” or “sword arm” of capitalism, who organized the class struggle from above and in 1933 subjugated the masses, who had been pressing for political and social self-determination. Later, by unleashing the war, he carried out the expansionist aims of his employers. In this story, which has been presented in a great many variants, Hitler appears as totally interchangeable, “the most vulgar of tin soldiers,” as one of the leftist analysts of Fascism wrote as early as 1929. For the proponents of this theory he was, at any rate, merely one factor among others, not a determining cause.

Fundamentally, the argument is directed at the very possibility of arriving at historical knowledge by way of a biographical study. No single person, it runs, can ever make manifest the historical process in all its complexities and contradictions, upon all its many, forever shifting areas of tension. Strictly speaking, the argument continues, the biographical approach merely continues the old tradition of court and adulatory writing, and after 1945 went right along employing basically the same methodology, with merely a change of sign: Hitler remained the all-moving, irresistible force and “merely changed his quality; the savior became the diabolic seducer.”⁸ Ultimately, the argument continues, every biographical account willy-nilly serves the needs for justification felt by the millions of onetime followers who can easily see themselves as the victims of so much “greatness” or who at any rate can place all responsibility for what happened upon the pathological whims of a diabolic and imperious leader. In short, biography amounts to a surreptitious maneuver in the course of a broad campaign of exculpation.

This argument is strengthened by the fact that the personality of Hitler scarcely arouses our interest. Over the years it remains oddly pallid and expressionless, acquiring tension and fascination only in contact with the age. In Hitler there is a great deal of what Walter Benjamin called “social character.” That is, he incorporated all the anxieties, protests, and hopes of the age in his own self to a remarkable degree. But in him all emotions were enormously exaggerated, distorted, and infiltrated with weird features, though never unrelated or incongruent to the historical background. Consequently, Hitler’s life would hardly deserve the telling if it were not that extrapersonal tendencies or conditions came to light in it; his biography is essentially part of the biography of the age. And because his life was inextricably linked to his time, it is worth the telling.

Necessarily, then, the background comes more prominently into the fore than is customary in biographies. Hitler must be shown against a dense pattern of objective factors that conditioned, promoted, impelled, and sometimes braked him. The romantic German notion of politics and the peculiarly morose grayness of the Weimar Republic belong equally in this background. So also do the declassing of the nation by the Treaty of Versailles and the secondary social declassing of large sections of the population by the inflation and the world-wide Depression; the weakness of the democratic tradition in Germany; fears of the miscalculations of conservatives who had lost their grip; finally, the widespread fears aroused by the transition from a familiar system to one new and still uncertain. All this was overlaid by the craving to find simple formulas to account for the opaque, intricately involved causes of moroseness, and to flee from all the vexations the age provided into the shelter of an imperious authority.

Hitler as the point of convergence for so many nostalgias, anxieties, and resentments became a historical figure. It is no longer possible to conceive the second quarter of the twentieth century without him. In him an individual once again demonstrated the stupendous power of a solitary person over the historical process. Our account will show to what virulence and potency the many intersecting moods of an age can be brought when demagogic genius, an extraordinary gift for political tactics, and the capacity for that “mysterious coincidence” Burckhardt spoke of, meet in a single person. “History tends at times to become suddenly concentrated in one man, who is then obeyed by the world.”⁹ It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Hitler’s rise was made possible only by the unique conjunction of individual with general prerequisites, by the barely decipherable correspondence that the man entered into with the age and the age with the man.

This close connection tends to refute that school of thought which attributes superhuman abilities to Hitler. His career depended not so much on his demonic traits as on his typical, “normal” characteristics. The course of his life reveals the weaknesses and ideological bias of all the theories that represent Hitler as a fundamental antithesis to the age and its people. He was not so much the great contradiction of the age as its mirror image. We will constantly be encountering traces of that correlation.

The signal importance of objective preconditions (which this book attempts to deal with in a series of special “interpolations”) also raises the question of how Hitler particularly affected the course of events. There is no doubt that a movement gathering together all the racist-nationalistic tendencies would have formed during the twenties without the intervention of Hitler’s influence and following. But it would very likely have been only one more political grouping within the context of the system. What Hitler conferred upon it was that unique mixture of fantastic vision and consistency which, as we shall see, to a large extent expressed his nature. The radicalism of Gregor Strasser or Goebbels never amounted to more than an infraction of the existing rules of the political game, which underlined the validity of those rules by the very act of challenging them. Hitler’s radicalism, on the other hand, annulled all existing assumptions and introduced a novel element into the game. To be sure, the numerous emergencies of the period would have led to crises, but without Hitler they would never have come to those intensifications and explosions that we shall witness. From the first party battle in the summer of 1921 to the last few days of April, 1945, when he expelled Göring and Himmler, Hitler held a wholly unchallenged position; he would not even allow any principle, any doctrine, to hold sway, but only his own dictates. He made history with a highhandedness that even in his own days seemed anachronistic. It is unimaginable that history will ever again be made in quite the same fashion—a succession of private inspirations, filled with surprising coups and veerings, breathtaking perfidies, ideological self-betrayals, but with a tenaciously pursued vision in the background. Something of his singular character, of the subjective element he imposed upon the course of history, emerges in the phrase “Hitler Fascism” favored by Marxist theoreticians in the thirties. In this sense National Socialism has quite rightly been defined as Hitlerism.

But the question remains whether Hitler was not the last politician who could so largely ignore the weight of conditions and interests; whether the coercion of objective factors has not grown visibly stronger, and whether with this the historical possibility of a great doer has not grown ever smaller. For, unquestionably, historical rank is dependent upon the freedom that the person who acts maintains in the face of circumstances. In a secret speech delivered in the early summer of 1939, Hitler declared: “There must be no acceptance of the principle of evading the solution to problems by adjustment to circumstances. Rather, the task is to adjust circumstances to requirements.”¹⁰ Following this motto, he, the “visionary,” practiced an imitatio of the great man; the attempt was boldly carried to the utmost extreme, and ultimately failed. It would appear that such attempts ended with him—just as so much else ended with him.

 

If men do not make history in the way that traditional hero-worshiping literature assumed, or do so to a far smaller extent, Hitler certainly made much more history than many others. But at the same time history made him, to an altogether extraordinary degree. Nothing entered into this “unperson,” as he is defined in one of the following chapters, that was not already present; but whatever did enter acquired a tremendous dynamic. Hitler’s biography is the story of an incessant, intensive process of interchange.

We are still asking, however, whether historical greatness can be associated with a hollow individuality. It is challenging to imagine what Hitler’s fate would have been had history not produced the circumstances that first awakened him and made him the mouthpiece of millions of defense complexes. It is easy to picture his ignored existence on the fringes of society, to see him embittered and misanthropic, longing for a great destiny and unable to forgive life for having refused him the heroic role he craved. “For the oppressive thing was. . . the complete lack of attention we found in those days from which I suffered most,” Hitler wrote concerning the period of his entry into politics.¹¹ The collapse of order, the age’s anxieties and climate of change, played into his hands by giving him the chance to emerge from the shadow of anonymity. Great men, in Burckhardt’s judgment, are needed specifically in times of terror.¹²

The phenomenon of Hitler demonstrates, to an extent surpassing all previous experience, that historical greatness can be linked with paltriness on the part of the individual concerned. For considerable periods his personality seemed disintegrated, as if it had evaporated into unreality; and it was this seemingly fictitious character of the man that misled so many conservative politicians and Marxist historians—in curious agreement—to regard Hitler as the instrument for the ends of others. Far from possessing any greatness and any political, let alone historical, stature, he seemed to embody the very type of the “agent,” one who acts for others. But both the conservatives and the Marxists were deceiving themselves. It was actually an ingredient in Hitler’s recipe for tactical success that he made political capital out of this mistake, in which class resentment against the petty bourgeois was then, and still is, expressed. His biography includes, among other things, the story of a gradual disillusionment. In his day he excited a good deal of ironic contempt, and that attitude persists, though kept in check by the memory of the toll of lives he took. But it was, and still is, a misreading of his character.

The course of this life, and the pattern of events themselves, will throw light upon the whole matter. Yet here we may well ask ourselves a few pertinent questions. If Hitler had succumbed to an assassination or an accident at the end of 1938, few would hesitate to call him one of the greatest of German statesmen, the consummator of Germany’s history. The aggressive speeches and Mein Kampf, the anti-Semitism and the design for world dominion, would presumably have fallen into oblivion, dismissed as the man’s youthful fantasies, and only occasionally would critics remind an irritated nation of them. Six and one-half years separated Hitler from such renown. Granted, only premature death could have given him that, for by nature he was headed toward destruction and did not make an exception of himself. Can we call him great?