Hitler (19 page)

Finally, the anticivilizational mood of the period struck up an alliance with anti-Semitism. “German anti-Semitism is reactionary,” wrote Hermann Bahr, the Austrian journalist, in 1894, after intensive study of the question. “It is a revolt of the petty bourgeois against industrial development.”
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In fact, the equating of Judaism and modernity, like the thesis, that Jews had a special talent for the capitalistic free-enterprise economy, was not unfounded. And modernity and capitalistic competition were the very things on which anxiety about the future centered. Werner Sombart, the noted economist, actually spoke of “a Jewish mission to promote the transition to capitalism... and to clear away the still preserved remnants of pre-capitalistic organization.”
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Against the background of this economic development, the old hatred of Jews, which had had a religious basis, evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century into an anti-Semitism built on biological and social prejudices. In Germany the philosopher Eugen Diihring and the failed journalist Wilhelm Marr popularized these attitudes. (The latter wrote a pamphlet significantly titled, “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, Regarded from a Non-denominational Point of View.
Vae Victis!”
) Anti-Semitism in Germany seemed hardly more intense than in France, let alone in Russia and Austro-Hungary. The anti-Semitic publications of the period repeatedly complained that their ideas, despite their wide dissemination, were not being taken seriously enough. But while irrational nostalgias were skulking about “like masterless dogs,” anti-Semitism served as the vehicle for widespread discontent, precisely because of the half-truths contained in it. With the numerous current theories of a conspiracy of dark powers, or a malignant world-wide disease, the figure of the “Wandering Jew” had a curious credibility. In fact, it was still another embodiment of generalized anxiety. And, on another plane, there were the music dramas of Richard Wagner, which restated the problems of the age in mythic terms. The misgivings about the future, the awareness of the dawning age of gold, racial fears, antimaterialistic impulses, horror of an era of plebeian freedom and leveling, and premonitions of impending doom—all this expressed in highly sensuous art spoke to the cultivated middle classes struggling in the toils of their malaise.

The war unleashed and radicalized these manifold hostilities of the bourgeois age toward itself. Life seemed bogged down in the banalities of civilization. Now once again great exaltations were possible; the war sanctified violence and wrought glories of destruction. As Ernst Jünger wrote, its flame throwers accomplished a “great cleansing by Nothingness.” War was the perfect negation to the liberal and humanitarian ideal of civilization. The tremendous impact of the war experience, felt throughout Europe and recorded by an extensive European literature, came from this liberating sense of renewal by destruction. Those who considered themselves children of the war had learned the worth of swift, solitary decisions, absolute obedience, and the power of large numbers united by a single idea. The compromising temper of parliamentary systems, their feeble capacity for decision making and frequent self-imposed paralysis invalidated them to a generation that had come away from the war with the myth of a perfect military machine operating at peak performance.

This complex of attitudes helps explain the stubborn resistance of the Germans to their newly established democratic republic and the roles which had been assigned it within the Versailles peace-keeping system. Still haunted by their anticivilizational philosophies, they could not see the republic and the Versailles Treaty as mere aspects of an altered political situation. To them all this was a fall from grace, an act of metaphysical treason and profound unfaithfulness to true selfhood. Only treachery could have delivered Germany, romantic, pensive, unpolitical Germany, into servitude to that idea of Western civilization which threatened her very essence. Significantly, the
Völkische Beobachter
called the Treaty of Versailles a “syphilitic peace,” which, like the disease “born of brief, forbidden lust, beginning with a small hard sore, gradually attacks all the limbs and joints, even all the flesh, down to the heart and brain of the sinner.”
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The passionate opposition to “the system” sprang directly from the refusal to participate in the hated “imperium of civilization” with its blabber about human rights, its progressivistic demagoguery, its craze for enlightenment, its superficiality, its corruption, and its vulgar worship of prosperity. The stern German ideals of loyalty, divine rights, love of country, were, as one of the many pamphlets of the time put it, “extinguished mercilessly in the storms of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period.” In their place had come “democracy, the nudist movement, arrant naturalism, and companionate marriage.”

Throughout the years of the republic the intellectual Right, which continued to hold to the anticivilizational views of the Wilhelmine era, showed a notable tendency toward alliance with the Soviet Union. Or rather, with Russia, regarded as maternal soil, heartland, the “fourth dimension,” the object of indefinite expectations. While Oswald Spengler was calling for struggle against “the England within us,” Ernst Niekisch, another defendant of the nation's psychological identity, was writing: “To turn our eyes toward the East is already a sign of Germany's awakening.... The movement toward the West was in itself Germany's descent; veering to the East will once again be an ascent to German greatness.”

To “shallow liberalism” Niekisch opposed “the Prusso-Slavic principle”; as against Geneva, headquarters of the League of Nations, he proposed “the Potsdam-Moscow axis.” To the conservative, nationalistic camp, fear that Germanism would be overwhelmed by the materialistic, demythologized threat to world domination. One might speak of this group as national-conservative Bolshevists.

This first phase of the postwar era was characterized both by fear of revolution and anticivilizational resentments; these together, curiously intertwined and reciprocally stimulating each other, produced a syndrome of extraordinary force. Into the brew went the hate and defense complexes of a society shaken to its foundations. German society had lost its imperial glory, its civil order, its national confidence, its prosperity, and its familiar authorities. The whole system had been turned topsy-turvy, and now many Germans blindly and bitterly wanted back what they thought had been unjustly taken from them. These general feelings of unhappiness were intensified and further radicalized by a variety of unsatisfied group interests. The class of white-color workers, continuing to grow apace, proved especially susceptible to the grand gesture of total criticism. For the industrial revolution had just begun to affect office workers and was reducing the former “non-commissioned officers of capitalism” to the status of last victims of “modern slavery.” It was all the worse for them because unlike the proletarians they had never developed a class pride of their own or imagined that the breakdown of the existing order was going to lead to their own apotheosis. Small businessmen were equally susceptible because of their fear of being crushed by corporations, department stores, and rationalized competition. Another unhappy group consisted of farmers who, slow to change and lacking capital, were fettered to backward modes of production. Another group were the academics and formerly solid bourgeois who felt themselves caught in the tremendous suction of proletarianization. Without outside support you found yourself “at once despised, declassed; to be unemployed is the same as being a communist,” one victim stated in a questionnaire of the period. No statistics, no figures on rates of inflation, bankruptcies, and suicides can describe the feelings of those threatened by unemployment or poverty, or can express the anxieties of those others who still possessed some property and feared the consequences of so much accumulated discontent. Public institutions in their persistent weakness offered no bulwark against the seething collective emotions. It was all the worse because the widespread anxiety no longer, as in the time of Lagarde and Langbehn, was limited to cries of woe and impotent prophecies. The war had given arms to the fearful.

The vigilante groups and the free corps that were being organized in great numbers, partly on private initiative, partly with covert government support, chiefly to meet the threat of Communist revolution, formed centers of bewildered but determined resistance to the
status quo.
The members of these paramilitary groups were vaguely looking around for someone to lead them into a new system. At first there was another reservoir of militant energies alongside the paramilitary groups: the mass of homecoming soldiers. Many of these stayed in the barracks dragging out a pointless military life, baffled and unable to say good-bye to the warrior dreams of their recent youth. In the front-line trenches they had glimpsed the outlines of a new meaning to life; in the sluggishly resuming normality of the postwar period they tried in vain to find that meaning again. They had not fought and suffered for years for the sake of this weakend regime with its borrowed ideals which, as they saw it, could be pushed around by the most contemptible of their former enemies. And they also feared, after the exalting sense of life the war had given them, the ignobility of the commonplace bourgeois world.

It remained for Hitler to bring together these feelings and to appoint himself their spearhead. Indeed, Hitler regarded as a phenomenon seems like the synthetic product of all the anxiety, pessimism, nostalgia, and defensiveness we have discussed. For him, too, the war had been education and liberation. If there is a “Fascistic” type, it was embodied in him. More than any of his followers he expressed the underlying psychological, social, and ideological motives of the movement. He was never just its leader; he was also its exponent.

His early years had contributed their share to that experience of overwhelming anxiety which dominated his intellectual and emotional constitution. That lurking anxiety can be seen at the root of almost all his statements and reactions. It had everyday as well as cosmic dimensions. Many who knew him in his youth have described his pallid, “timorous” nature, which provided the fertile soil for his lush fantasies. His “constant fear” of contact with strangers was another aspect of that anxiety, as was his extreme distrust and his compulsion to wash frequently, which became more and more pronounced in later life. The same complex is apparent in his oft-expressed fear of venereal disease and his fear of contagion in general. He knew that “microbes are rushing at me.”
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He was ridden by the Austrian Pan-German's fear of being overwhelmed by alien races, by fear of the “locust-like immigration of Russian and Polish Jews,” by fear of “the niggerizing of the Germans,” by fear of the Germans' “expulsion from Germany,” and finally by fear that the Germans would be “exterminated.” He had the
Völkische Beobachter
print an alleged French soldier's song whose refrain was: “Germans, we will possess your daughters!” Among his phobias were American technology, the birth rate of the Slavs, big cities, “industrialization as unrestricted as it is harmful,” the “economization of the nation,” corporations, the “morass of metropolitan amusement culture,” and modern art, which sought “to kill the soul of the people” by painting meadows blue and skies green. Wherever he looked he discovered the “signs of decay of a slowly ebbing world.” Not an element of pessimistic anticivilizational criticism was missing from his imagination.
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What linked Hitler with the leading Fascists of other countries was the resolve to halt this process of degeneration. What set him apart from them, however, was the manic single-mindedness with which he traced all the anxieties he had ever felt back to a single source. For at the heart of the towering structure of anxiety, black and hairy, stood the figure of the Jew: evil-smelling, smacking his lips, lusting after blonde girls, eternal contaminator of the blood, but “racially harder” than the Aryan, as Hitler uneasily declared as late as the summer of 1942.
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A prey to his psychosis, he saw Germany as the object of a world-wide conspiracy, pressed on all sides by Bolshevists, Freemasons, capitalists, Jesuits, all hand in glove with each other and directed in their nefarious projects by the “bloodthirsty and avaricious Jewish tyrant.”
The
Jew had 75 per cent of world capital at his disposal. He dominated the stock exchanges and the Marxist parties, the Gold and, Red Internationals. He was the “advocate of birth control and the idea of emigration.” He undermined governments, bastardized races, glorified fratricide, fomented civil war, justified baseness, and poisoned nobility: “the wirepuller of the destinies of mankind.”
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The whole world was in danger, Hitler cried imploringly; it had fallen “into the embrace of this octopus.” He groped for images in which to make his horror tangible, saw “creeping venom,” “belly-worms,” and “adders devouring the nation's body.” In formulating his anxiety he might equally hit on the maddest and most ludicrous phrases as on impressive or at least memorable ones. Thus he invented the “Jewification of our spiritual life,” “the mammonization of our mating instinct,” and “the resulting syphilization of our people.” He could prophesy: “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”
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The appearance of Hitler signaled a union of those forces that in crisis conditions had great political potential. The Fascistic movements all centered on the charismatic appeal of a unique leader. The leader was to be the resolute voice of order controlling chaos. He would have looked further and thought deeper, would know the despairs but also the means of salvation. This looming giant had already been given established form in a prophetic literature that went back to German folklore. Like the mythology of many other nations unfortunate in their history, that of the Germans has its sleeping leaders dreaming away the centuries in the bowels of a mountain, but destined some day to return to rally their people and punish the guilty world. Into the twenties pessimistic literature repeatedly called up these longings, which were most effectively expressed in the famous lines of Stefan George: