None of these nine ordinary Germans (and even the tenth, Herr Hildebrandt, is not completely firm on the point) thought then or thinks now that the rights of man, in his own case, were violated or even more than mildly inhibited for reasons of what they then accepted (and still accept) as the national emergency proclaimed four weeks after Hitler took office as Chancellor. Only two of the ten—Hildebrandt, of course, and Simon, the bill-collector—saw the system as in any way repressive. Herr Simon thinks that it was because of what he calls his “democratic” tendency to argue that he rose only to the lowest rank in the Party, cell leader, in spite of his having been one of the oldest members of the Party in Germany. But he was never alienated from his Party faith or its leadership by what he still regards as the local perversions of its principles by “the little Hitlers.”
“The little Hitlers” recurred constantly in my conversations with my friends. It did not derogate Hitler—quite the opposite. “The little Hitlers” were the local or provincial officials, fellows you knew or had heard other fellows talk about familiarly. You knew (or had reason to believe) that they were no bigger or better than you were; you detested their imitation of the Führer, above all, of his certainty and the absoluteness that springs from certainty. But, because of the old military principle of command which obtained throughout the Party, you could do nothing about it but dream at night that Schmidt, the little Hitler, had fallen on his face in public and you were chosen by acclaim to replace him.
None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategical mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers—a backhanded tribute to the Leader’s virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil, fully familiar to those who have heard partisans of F. D. R. or Ike explain how things went wrong.
Having fixed our faith in a father-figure—or in a father, or in a mother or a wife—we must keep it fixed until inexcusable fault (and what fault of a father, a mother, a wife, is inexcusable?) crushes it at once and completely. This figure represents our own best selves; it is what we ourselves want to be and, through identification, are. To abandon it for anything less than crushing evidence of inexcusable fault is self-incrimination, and of one’s best, unrealized self. Thus Hitler was betrayed by his subordinates, and the little Nazis with him. They may hate Bormann and Goebbels—Bormann because he rose to power at the end, and they are ashamed of the end; Goebbels because he was a runt with a “Jewish mind,” that is, a facile and cunning mind unlike theirs. They may hate Himmler, the Bluthund, above all, because he killed in cold blood, and they wouldn’t do that. But they may not hate Hitler or themselves.
“You see,” said Tailor Schwenke, the littlest of my ten little men, “there was always a secret war against Hitler in the regime. They fought him with unfair means. Himmler I detested. Goebbels, too. If Hitler had been told the truth, things would have been different.” For “Hitler” read “I.”
“The killing of the Jews?” said the “democratic” bill-collector, der alte Kämpfer, Simon. “Yes, that was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did. If I had been a Jew, I would have myself. Still, it was wrong, but some say it happened and some say it didn’t. You can show me pictures of skulls or shoes, but that doesn’t prove it. But I’ll tell you this—it was Himmler. Hitler had nothing to do with it.”
“Do you think he knew about it?”
“I don’t know. We’ll never know now.”
Hitler died to save my friend’s best self.
Apart from the partially and secretly anti-Nazi teacher, only the bank clerk, Kessler, the natively eloquent little man who became an official Party speaker in the county, seems to have had any shadow of doubt about Hitler’s personal or public goodness—and even he may be projecting his own experience: “Hitler was a spellbinder, a natural orator. I think he was carried away from truth, even from truth, by his passion. Even so, he always believed what he said.” “The schemers, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, Bormann—they built him up into a man of destiny,” said Salesman Damm, the Party office manager in Kronenberg. “They did it so skilfully that he finally believed it himself. From then on, he lived in a world of delusion. And this happened, mind you, to a man who was good and great.” It could happen to me, Heinrich Damm, too.
These believers (for believers they certainly were) do not seem to have been worshipers any more than we believers in F. D. R. or Ike are—if anything, less so. Hitler was a man, one like ourselves, a little man, who, by doing what he did, was a testament to the democracy “you Americans” talk about, the ability of us little men to become great and to rule the whole world. A little man, like ourselves. Such a man is the modern pattern of the demagogical tyrant, “the people’s friend” of Plato’s mob democracy. These Hitlers, Stalins, Mussolinis are commoner upstarts, the half-literate Hitler the commonest of the lot.
Kings and kaisers rule by God’s grace, Hitlers by their own. God’s grace puts a father over his children, to rule them in their interest. He is visibly and incontrovertibly endowed with wisdom appropriate to his function, and his walking stick (or his napkin ring or his rocking chair), like the Kaiser’s crown, sets him wholly apart from his children. But these Hitlers wear trench coats. Are they in fact father-figures? Or are Leader and Father two separable subconscious entities?
The newest wrinkle in psychoanalytic lingo is “charismatic leader.” It seems to mean (if “charismatic” is derived from the Greek charisma) the one to whom it is given to take care of his people. Both the Kaiser and Hitler “took care of” the German people, but the Kaiser was endowed by God. He did not have to kiss babies; he did not have to do anything. The most perfect of fathers, he lived far away, in Potsdam; you might see him once or twice in your life, in a great parade, or never at all. Unlike your own biological father, he never punished you for little things or unjustly. Unlike your biological father, he let you be “bad,” in your personal life, beat your wife or get drunk or do shoddy work, without ever whipping you or withdrawing his love.
Seven of my friends (the seven oldest of them) had been brought up in a stable society, with their perfect father in Potsdam and their imperfect father at home. One of the seven, Herr Kessler, the bank clerk, had been orphaned early and was brought up by his mother. At least four of the other six feared or hated their fathers (or both), and of Hildebrandt alone am I able to say with some certainty that he neither feared nor hated his.
The old tailor, Schwenke, still hates his father, who is still alive, at ninety-three, in a near-by village; Schwenke has not seen him in years. He hated him always in his heart—“he drank too much,” “he was cruel to my blessed mother”—and finally he hated him openly, running away from home to the army after his father ordered him to remain in the service of a master-tailor who mistreated him. Heinrich Damm, the country boy, feared his father, who, besides being an ambitious and avaricious farmer, was the village innkeeper and, after a backbreaking day in the fields, could handle any half-dozen sots who tried to keep him from closing the inn at midnight. Damm remembers that his father compelled his pregnant mother to pile rocks until she dropped; when she died, a few years later, his father said, “I guess I worked her too hard.” But the son feared his father too much (and still does) to hate him.
By contrast, the five of my friends who now have children in or approaching their teens all marvel at the sassiness, the independence, of their own children. And “marvel” better describes their attitude than “disapprove” or “resent.” The younger Schwenke said, “My father”—the old tailor—“would have killed me if I’d talked to him the way my boy talks to me,” and he shakes his head. “It’s all different now,” said Cabinetmaker Klingelhöfer. “When I was a boy, I spoke when I was spoken to; otherwise, never. Now my children disagree with me about everything, and I can’t do a thing. My wife is the boss,” and he laughs. The clue to the change (and a radical change it seems to be) may be the emancipation of the German woman and, in particular, of the wife, which Nazism tried to overcome. The German child, today as yesterday, seems to be left almost entirely to the mother; even among my non-Nazi friends, the relationship between father and child was generally much more remote than ours. But, whereas the mother once executed the father’s will upon the child, she now seems to execute her own.
My friends’ youngsters are, to be sure, being brought up in a disintegrated society, in which not only the Kaiser but also the biological father have been dislodged. My friends have lost their jobs or their homes or their status or their security, and their children know it. And the Kaiser is only a character in history, gone without any supposition that he will ever return.
The true father-figure is a true figure, the representation of an ideal essence. Whether Wilhelm II was, as a ruler or a man, good or bad was irrelevant to his status. The failings of one’s biological father could not but affect one’s attitude, but the failings of the true father-figure were, like the Emperor’s new clothes in the fairy tale, beyond the very presumption of his subjects to observe. There were, in Germany, daring intellectuals who attacked the Kaiser’s policies before the first World War, but my friends were not daring intellectuals.
One does not presume to judge the true father-figure. One would not—but cannot help himself—judge his biological father. But one judges a man like himself by his own criteria of success and failure. Hitler was, until 1943 or 1944, a success. He displayed all the way to Stalingrad a genius which only a dozen men in the whole world’s history have had, a genius for continuous success in public affairs against the odds which only public affairs present. None of my friends hesitates—every soldier is a military expert, and every German is a soldier—to say that he was wrong to invade Poland (or to invade when he did or how he did) or, perhaps, to attack Russia, which he had so brilliantly immobilized, or to ally himself with Italy or to take on the world so soon. But these wrongs were strategic mistakes. I might—my friends are talking—have made them myself. Napoleon made them.
My friends do not mourn Hitler any more than we mourn those of our own national leaders whose genius culminates in ruin; such geniuses must build their own sarcophagi with the cynical assistance of the political party hacks who find themselves with bare bones on their hands in the next campaign. My Nazi friends do not deify Hitler or (if the distinction may be made) glorify him. They never questioned his absolute right or absolute power to absolute rule. But they do not think of him—and seem never to have done so—as Führer, the Leader, and not just because the Occupation’s re-educators suppressed the use of the very word. They think of him as Hitler, and, whatever they dream of reviving, they do not dream of reviving Hitlerism.
Romantic they are, but this romantic they are not. They do not repress his name; they mention it when there is occasion to mention it. But there is little occasion to do so. Old soldiers in Germany have something else to do these days besides spit on the stove and tell stories; the stove is cold. Nothing surprised my friends so much as to hear that Americans still speculate about Hitler’s survival, in the flesh in Argentina or Spain or in personal spirit in Germany. He lived, succeeded, failed, died, and is dead.
Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my friends’ view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual’s assessment of his strategy. After that—you have only to look at Germany, “at us, Herr Professor,” to see that he was bad for Germany. Hitler belongs to the ages; what he left behind him belongs to my friends, who are scrabbling in the ruins. The distant future may revive him, but I think not; the distant future is not likely to leave Germany as it was or is.