Hitler (63 page)

 

He boasted that an “exact calculation of all human weaknesses” underlay his ideas and demagogic maxims, and this assured them a virtually “mathematical” certainty of success. In the course of his second airplane campaign he discovered the emotional effect the illuminated plane had in the night sky as it circled above tens of thousands of people staring in fascination. He thereupon used this trick again and again. Any invocation of the martyrs of the movement was also, he found, highly effective, though not as much as it might be. After the first defeat in the presidential election he criticized the party press for “dullness, monotony, lack of independence, lukewarm absence of passion.” Above all, he wanted to know what the press had done with the deaths of so many SA men. Mismanagement of this matter drove him into a fury. As one person present at the meeting recalled his words, he declared that the party comrades had “been buried with pipes and drums and the party sheet had written a pompous and self-pitying sermon about it. Why hadn't the newspapers displayed the corpses in their own windows, so the people could see the dead men with shattered skulls, their shirts bloody and ripped by knives? Why had these newspapers not preached funeral sermons calling on the people to riot, to rise up against the murderers and their manipulators, instead of bleating out ridiculous political half-truths? The sailors of the battleship
Potemkin
made a revolution out of rotten food, but we could not make a national struggle of liberation out of the deaths of our comrades.”
³⁴

But his thoughts returned again and again to the subject of the mass meetings which “burned into the small, wretched individual the proud conviction that, paltry worm that he was, he was nevertheless a part of a great dragon, beneath whose burning breath the hated bourgeois world would some day go up in fire and flame.”
³⁵
The procedure of these meetings followed an unchanging tactical and liturgical order, which he was forever improving, to dramatize his own appearance. While the flags, the marches, and the shouts of expectation sent the audience into a state of restlessness and receptivity, he himself sat nervously, drinking mineral water almost continually, in a hotel room or a party business office. Every few minutes he would check on the mood in the hall. Quite often he issued final instructions or suggested some message to be relayed to the audience. Only when the excitement of the masses threatened to sag would he set out for the meeting.

He had learned that long processions increased the suspense and therefore made a principle of entering the meeting halls only from the rear. He had chosen the “Badenweiler March” for his own entrance music, reserved for him alone. The distant sound of it would hush the murmuring and send the people springing from their seats with raised arms, shouting wildly—overwhelmed in the double sense of being manipulated and ecstatic: now HE was here. Many films of the period have preserved his appearance as he strode down the path of light made by the spotlights between lines of shouting, sobbing people—a
“via triumphalis
... of living human bodies,” as Goebbels extravagantly wrote. Often women pressed to the front, while he himself remained unapproachable, tight-lipped, in no way lending himself to their hungers. He ruled out introductory speeches or greetings that could only distract the audience from his person. For a few moments he would linger before the platform, mechanically shaking hands, mute, absent-minded, eyes flickering restively, but ready like a medium to be imbued and carried aloft by the strength that was already there, latent, in the shouting of the masses.

The first words were dropped mutedly, gropingly, into the breathless silence; they were often preceded by a pause that seemed to become utterly unbearable, while the speaker collected himself. The beginning was monotonous, trivial, usually lingering on the legend of his rise: “When in 1918 as a nameless soldier at the front I...” This formal beginning prolonged the suspense once more, into the very speech itself. But it also allowed him to sense the mood and to adjust to it. A catcall might abruptly inspire him to take a fighting tone until the first eagerly awaited applause surged up. For that was what gave him contact, what intoxicated him, and “after about fifteen minutes,” a contemporary observer commented, “there takes place what can only be described in the primitive old figure of speech: The spirit enters into him.” With wild, explosive movements, driving his metallicly transformed voice mercilessly to its highest pitch, he would hurl out the words. Quite often, in the furor of his conjuring, he would cover his grimacing face with his clenched fists and close his eyes, surrendering to the spasms of his transposed sexuality.

Although his speeches were carefully prepared and strictly followed the notes he always had in front of him, they nevertheless all sprang from his close communication and immediate exchange with the masses. It seemed to one of his temporary followers that he actually inhaled the feelings of his audience. This remarkable sensitivity of his, which endowed him with an unmistakably feminine aura, made possible those orgiastic unions with his public; it “knew him” in the Biblical sense of the word. To be sure, he was a shrewd psychologist and a superb stage manager. Yet he could not have bewitched the masses if he had not shared their secret emotions and incorporated all their psychoses into his own psyche. When he spoke, the masses met, hailed, and idolized themselves. An exchange of pathologies took place, the union of individual and collective crises in heady festivals of released repression.

It has often been asserted that Hitler told every meeting only what it wanted to hear, that he merely brought its true intentions to the fore and flaunted them for all to see. That, too, is true. Nevertheless, he was not an opportunistic flatterer of the crowd; rather, he was the spokesman for the massed feelings of being victimized, of fear, of hatred. He at once integrated those feelings and transformed them into political dynamics. The American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker noted after a mass meeting in Munich:

 

In the Circus Krone, Hitler spoke. He was an evangelist speaking to a camp meeting, the Billy Sunday of German politics. His converts moved with him, laughed with him, felt with him. They booed with him the French. They hissed with him the Republic.... The 8,000 were an instrument on which Hitler played a symphony of national passion.
³⁶

 

At such moments Hitler made “the collective neurosis the echo of his own obsession.” He had to have applause to bring out his full oratorical powers. Even a reluctant mood in the hall irritated him, and the SA—which he had had surrounding him at all public appearances right from the beginning—served not so much to keep order as to silence all opposition, all feelings of resistance, and to whip up enthusiasm by sheer menace. There were a number of occasions when Hitler, faced with an unfriendly audience, would abruptly lose the thread, break off his speech, and turning on his heel sulkily leave the room.

His whole being needed the mass acclaim. For this sort of cheering had once aroused him; now it maintained his states of tension and propelled him onward. He himself said that in the midst of the tumult he became “another person.” The historian Karl Alexander von Müller had long ago observed that Hitler communicated to his listeners an excitement that in turn provided fresh impetus to his voice. Certainly Hitler was a superior tactician, a capable organizer, a canny psychologist, and, despite all his deficiencies, one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period. But his invincible genius came to him only in the course of mass meetings, when he exalted platitudes into the resounding words of a prophet and seemed truly to transform himself into the leader; for in his everyday state he seemed only to be posing as
der Führer
with considerable effort. His basic condition was lethargy punctuated by “Austrian” spells of weariness. Left to himself, he seemed ready to fall back on dull movies, endless performances of the
Meistersinger,
the Carlton Tearoom's luscious chocolate confections called
Mohrenköpfe,
or going on and on about architecture. He needed hubbub around him to be fired for action. He drew his dynamism from the crowd. Its worship also gave him the stamina to carry out those terribly strenuous campaigns and flights over Germany; it was the drug his strained, driven existence constantly needed. When in October, 1931, he met Brüning for his first private talk with the Chancellor, he launched into a one-hour speech, in the course of which he worked himself up to a frenzy—lashed on by the singing of his SA unit, which he had ordered to march up and down past the windows. Obviously he had done this partly to intimidate Brüning, partly to recharge himself.
³⁷

It was this deep pathological link with the masses that made Hitler more than an effective demagogue and gave him his undeniable advantage over Goebbels, whose speeches were more pointed and clever. Hitler lifted the crowds out of their apathy and despair to, as he himself called it, “forward-driving hysteria.” Goebbels called these demonstrations “the divine services of our political work,” and a Hamburg schoolmistress wrote in April, 1932, after an election meeting attended by 120,000 persons, that she had witnessed scenes of “moving faith” which showed Hitler “as the helper, rescuer, redeemer from overwhelming need.” Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher's sister, drew similar conclusions after Hitler paid a visit to her in Weimar. He “struck her as a religious rather than political leader.”
³⁸

In this phase of his career Hitler operated more on the metaphysical than on the ideological plane. His success with the masses was above all a phenomenon of the psychology of religion. He spoke less to people's political convictions than to their spiritual state. Of course Hitler could link up with an extensive system of traditional thought and conduct: with the German bent for authoritarianism and unrealistic intellectual constructs; with profound needs to follow a leader, and with a peculiar disorientation in politics. But, beyond this, agreement for the most part ended. His anti-Jewish slogans derived their force not so much from any especially violent German anti-Semitism as from the old demagogic trick of presenting people with a visible enemy. Nor was it the unique bellicose character of the Germans that Hitler mobilized; rather, he appealed to their long-ignored feelings of self-respect and national pride. The masses were not seduced by his images of land in the Ukraine; rather, they followed Hitler for the sake of their lost dignity, because they wanted once more to be participants in history. While
Mein Kampf
was issued in numerous editions, it was read by hardly anyone; this testifies to the general lack of interest all along in Hitler's specific programs.

Hence, the rise of the National Socialist Party and its coming to power was not—as has often been argued in hindsight—a great conspiracy of the Germans against the world aimed at carrying out imperialistic and anti-Semitic ends. Hitler's speeches during the years he was attracting mass audiences in the greatest numbers contain very little in the way of specific statements of intentions, and even scant his ideological obsessions, anti-Semitism and
Lebensraum.
Their salient characteristic, in fact, is their vague, general subject matter and the frequent resort to philosophical metaphors acceptable to all. As for spelling out aims, they are a far cry from the candor of
Mein Kampf.
A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, in the midst of one of the crises he had unleashed, Hitler himself admitted that for years he had put on a show of harmlessness. Circumstances, he declared, had forced him to masquerade as peaceable.

With the bravura of a great orator, however, he was freeing himself more and more from specific content and concrete ideas. His continuous triumphs were proof that Nazism was a charismatic rather than an ideological movement, not looking to a progam but looking up to a leader. His personality gave outline and consistency to the loose jumble of ideas in the foreground. What people followed was merely the tone, a hypnotic voice; and although Hitler could draw upon unfulfilled nostalgias and dreams of hegemony, most of those who wildly cheered him were longing to forget, beneath his speaker's platform, their exhaustion and their panic. They were certainly not thinking of Minsk or Kiev, or of Auschwitz, either. They wanted, above all, things to change. Their political faith scarcely went beyond blind negation of the
status quo.

Hitler recognized what could be done with these negativistic complexes more keenly than did any of his rivals on the Left or the Right. His agitational technique really consisted in defamation and vision, in indicting the present and promising a potent future. All he did was ring the changes on his praise of a strong state, his glorification of the nation, his call for racial and national rebirth and for a free hand on the domestic and the foreign fronts. He appealed to the German longing for unity, decried the nation's “self-laceration,” called class struggle the “religion of the inferior,” hailed the movement as the “bridge building of the nation,” and conjured up the fear that the Germans might once more become the world's “cultural manure.”

But his major theme, which he found as harrowing as did the masses, was the “ruin of the Reich.” He cited the vast numbers who were reduced to wretchedness, the danger of Marxism, the “unnatural incest of party government,” the “tragedy of the small savers,” hunger, unemployment, suicides. His descriptions were deliberately generalized, first, because that assured him the maximum following, and secondly because he had recognized that within parties the precise statements of policy led to dissension and the impetus of a movement increased with the vagueness of its goals. Whoever succeeded in combining the most thorough negation of the present with the most indefinite promises for the future would capture the masses and ultimately win power. Thus, in one of his typical dualities of image and counterimage, of damnation and utopia, he demanded: “Is it by any chance German when our people is torn apart into thirty parties, when not one can get along with the others? But I tell all these sorry politicians: ‘Germany will become one single party, the party of a heroic great nation!' ”