Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (4 page)

He continued to frequent the opera and the theatre and, despite his growing hatred for the bourgeois, he dressed as though he were one of them, affecting an air of superiority to show the working class that they were beneath him. His bearing and care with his words were all an act, a skill he would hone to considerable effect in later years, not as an actor but as a politician, although to him the difference between the two vocations was blurred. His reason for putting on such a performance at this time was his need to belong to a better class, even though he inwardly detested such people; although he would later claim that he was, in these years, a revolutionary both artistically and politically, he did not actually decry bourgeois values but rather continued to hunger after them.

Despite his young age, he remained unswayed by and even
unaware of modern trends in music, and eschewed the works of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, always preferring Wagner as well as Anton Bruckner. He considered anything modern,
including
architecture, simply unappealing; in regard to politics he had no strong opinions, especially of the revolutionary kind; thus he avoided artistic and political oppositions of the time, and
concentrated
on becoming a
Herr
. But all he became was increasingly bitter.

The common theme in Wagner’s operas was that of the outsider, and that’s exactly how Hitler came to see himself. Like Wagner, Hitler was an academic failure, an anti-Semite and a vegetarian. Hitler came to consider that he, Wagner and the white knight were all a reflection of each other. Over the years Hitler would find even more to compare himself to Wagner. The composer held a life-long grudge against Paris for his early
disappointments
and envisioned the city being destroyed by flames. For Hitler, Vienna would be his city of disappointments, and when, in 1944, he was asked to provide additional anti-aircraft units to defend Vienna against Allied bombers, he refused and said that Vienna must find out what bomb warfare was like.

Hitler took inspiration from Wagner’s immovable conviction of his vocation, and he convinced himself that he and Wagner shared the same kinds of rejections. Since Wagner had overcome then, so too would Hitler. He came to believe Wagner was a prototype of himself, and was thus Wagner’s successor. He later declared, ‘With the exception of Richard Wagner, I have no forerunner,’
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and he described Wagner as ‘the greatest prophetic figure the German people has had’ and said that he was overcome by ‘a literally
hysterical
excitement’ when he realised his own psychological kinship with the great composer.
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Beset with a growing hatred for the bourgeois world he was so desperate to be a part of but which he considered had rejected him, he sank into a world that existed only in his mind, with a Wagner score, but which he could not contain as a simple private fantasy. For him it had to become reality, and over time his life became a creation of delusions.

H
itler moved from one residence to another, and on at least one occasion when filling in a resident’s information form, he listed his occupation as ‘writer’. His inheritance dwindling, he existed largely on his orphan’s pension, which he claimed by
asserting
that he was attending the academy. He had become a miserable wretch without friends, despising the upper classes, and had grown pale with sunken cheeks. In December 1908 he moved into a men’s refuge for the homeless in Meidling, and insisted on describing himself as an ‘academician and an artist’.
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At the home he became friends with Reinhold Hanisch for a brief period of about seven months, and they went into partnership, with Hanisch selling to picture dealers and picture framers Hitler’s reproductions of postcards and lithographs of Viennese scenes which he painted in watercolours. They did quite well and split the proceeds fifty-fifty. Back in the men’s home, Hitler was the cause of trouble, sometimes engaging in heated exchanges about Jews, Slavs and the Social Democratic Party.

There were many anti-Semitic influences upon Hitler, and all Germany, due to a general anxiety among the bourgeois of Jews and a belief in the theory of the master-race that was endemic
throughout
the German empire. Hitler read a magazine,
Ostara
(named from the German goddess of spring), published by defrocked monk Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, who used the magazine to promote his anti-Semitic and
völkisch
theories. Hitler visited von Liebenfels where he lived in Werfenstein Castle in Lower Austria, over which flew the swastika and from where, with the aid of some wealthy industrialists, von Liebenfels founded the
Ordo Novi Templi
(Order of the New Templars).
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Hitler also read the many cheap anti-Semitic pamphlets published in Vienna in which a Germanic hero appeared – a white knight – a symbolic figure which rode straight out of Richard Wagner’s operas. It must have come to him like a sign. Hitler referred to Martin Luther, who wrote
On the Jews and Their Lives,
in
Mein Kampf,
as a great warrior, a true statesman and a great reformer alongside of Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner. Hitler also accepted Wagner’s view of Social Darwinism – the survival of the fittest – and it became his mantra. He even emulated Wagner’s style of grammar and syntax in his own
eventual
writings.

In Wagner’s terms, and therefore Hitler’s, it all came down to a matter of black versus white, good versus evil, purity versus
corruption
, all expressed in Germanic terms such as the mystique of blood purification – as in
Parsifal
– and conflict between Siegfried and Hagen, bloody, sexual, pagan dramas told through music and bound up in staged spectacle that became Hitler’s church and where he found the ‘granite foundations’ for his own mystical view of the world.

His fears, thoughts and inspirations were all magnified into grandiose ideas, fanned by the flames of Wagner’s blazing
compositions
, stunning visual concepts, and the smouldering embers of anti-Semitic subtext, for, as Hanisch wrote, ‘In music Richard Wagner brought him to bright flames.’
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He displayed little interest in politics, but was mesmerised by the sight of workers marching four abreast through the streets under the red Communist flag; Communism was a threat to the
upper-class
Viennese way of life which he coveted and yet despised. He stood with bated breath, watching ‘the human snake wind past’ until, two hours later, he made for home, ‘a victim of fear and depression’, and he realised that this was the intended effect of the men marching as one, creating a shape as if it were one complete animal which intimidated the outsider while encompassing the insider. He was uninterested in the political purposes being
demonstrated
, but had been hugely impressed by the theatrical effect of
the march and, upon his return home, spent many hours
pondering
ways that he might be able to control an audience.
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He pondered, dreamed and fantasised, but was otherwise generally inactive. Hanisch noted that Hitler ‘was never an ardent worker, was unable to get up in the morning, had difficulty getting started, and seemed to be suffering from a paralysis of the will.’
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He managed to find a job in the office of a construction company, but even there his fantasies kept him busier than the work itself as he imagined he was an architect, sketching his first plans for the reconstruction of Berlin. Everything he imagined and designed had to be on a grandiose scale because that’s how Wagner did things.

Wagner had always tried to make every next project bigger, more spectacular and even more breathtaking than before. After
Rienzi
, he composed a choral work for 1,200 male voices and a
hundred-strong
orchestra. He believed in the ability to hypnotise his audience en masse, not simply with music but with spellbinding visuals and spirit-soaring tales from legend. Hitler would
eventually
learn to use all of these techniques in his speeches and the mass rallies so that he too could hypnotise his audiences en masse, incorporating and magnifying the marching animal effect that intimidated the outsider while encompassing the insider.

But politics were not on Hitler’s mind, only art, and yet he began to see what Wagner believed, that art was the purpose of life and that the artist made the crucial choices wherever ‘the statesman despairs, the politician gives up, the socialist vexes himself with fruitless systems, and even the philosopher can only interpret but cannot prophesy.’
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Wagner prophesied that the state would be elevated to the stature of a work of art, and Hitler saw that
prophecy
fulfilled by conceiving the most vivid and theatrical aspects of the Third Reich: vast columns of marching soldiers with flags and banners, torchlight parades, and stirring Wagnerian music. Even his oratories were spoken operas. It was as though the whole
political
spectrum of Hitler’s career existed purely for him to stage his own grand operas.

But he achieved all of that not for the sake of good government but only so he could perform and be celebrated as a great artist. The problem was, he had yet to discover what it was that would lift him to the lofty heights of celebrity, and he was brought back down to earth when he lost his job and became a mere construction worker, forced to work with the lower classes he wanted to avoid.

He maintained his sense of superiority by keeping apart from them, but when he became drawn into their political wrangles the many Communists among them threatened to throw him off the scaffolding, leading him to the conclusion, as he wrote in
Mein
Kampf
, that the simple solution to dealing with those who
disagreed
was ‘bashing in the head of anybody who dared to oppose’. Hitler concluded, ‘The masses love a commander more than a petitioner,’ and the masses see only ‘the ruthless force and brutality of its calculated manifestations to which they always submit in the end’. Terror at work, in the meeting halls and at mass rallies ‘will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror’.
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He believed:

The psyche of the broad masses does not respond to anything weak or half-way. Like a woman, whose spiritual sensitiveness is determined less by abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for fulfilling power and who, for that reason, prefers to submit to the strong rather than the weakling – the mass, too, prefers the ruler to a pleader.
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In the years ahead, he would add terror to his campaign of
theatrical
government to advance his growing cult of celebrity until, at the height of his power, it would be led more by fear than art for art’s sake. In August 1910 Hanisch sold Hitler’s painting of the Vienna parliament for ten crowns. Hitler believed it was worth fifty and accused Hanisch of pocketing forty crowns, so had him arrested; Hanisch was sentenced to seven days in jail. In 1938, Hitler, afraid of the damage Hanisch could do to his political career – because he knew the truth about Hitler’s squalid existence – he had him tracked down and murdered.
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Around the end of 1910 and the start of 1911, Hitler received a
considerable sum of money from an aunt, Johanna Pölzl; yet he continued to drift aimlessly. In his mind, destiny would intervene, so he needed to do nothing to help himself but just continue living among the homeless men of Vienna until his time came. But that may well have been the perfect excuse for him, for he was simply lazy. It was an excuse and a dream that never went away, even through the years when he held the fate of the world in his hands and played with it like it was a prop in the hands of an actor living his own fantasy as Wagner’s white knight.

In May 1913, at the age of twenty-four, Hitler finally moved out of the men’s home and away from Vienna. He had to leave the city to escape the Austrian military draft when he was summonsed. Withdrawn and friendless, he went to Germany and arrived in Munich, a city considered the centre of art and science in Germany.

He spent his time in cafés reading newspapers and sketching, and in taverns where he made casual and often temporary
acquaintances
who were happy to join him in denouncing the volatility of the Dual Monarchy and the calamitous outcome of the German– Austrian Alliance, as well as the evils of Slavs, Jews and anything they considered anti-German. He was known to shout suddenly if something was said that excited him, and he enjoyed making political predictions in prophetic tones.

He was certainly among the cheering crowd in Odeonsplatz in Munich on 1 August 1914 when the state of war was declared. Many, including Hitler, saw the war as renewal for Germany.

He enlisted in the German army and not the Austrian, and was assigned to the 16th Bavarian Reserve infantry regiment and served as a courier. He was never promoted above corporal because his superiors felt he lacked the qualities of leadership. He was aloof, and kept his distance from his comrades, who considered him an oddity. His officers, however, found him reliable and obedient.

In December 1914 he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, and in May 1918 a regimental certificate for bravery in the face of the enemy. In August that year, he also received the Iron Cross First Class, which was rarely awarded to enlisted men. The precise
reasons for these awards are not known and Hitler never explained, preferring to remain silent on the matter – possibly because his regimental adjutant, Hugo Gutmann, who proposed these
decorations
, was Jewish. He concluded that behind all of this, and the war itself and all its causes, were the Jews.

Like many German soldiers, he considered that the old
leadership
had failed and the social order they were all defending, and that many were dying for, was crumbling from within. He attracted attention from his comrades by ‘philosophising about political and ideological questions in the crude manner of ordinary folk’. The catalyst for his series of oratories might be seen in an anecdote told by Reinhold Hanisch, who claimed that around 1910 he and Hitler went to see the film
Der Tunnel
, in which one of the main characters was a popular orator. He and Hitler emerged ‘altogether overwhelmed’ from the movie, and ‘henceforth there were eloquent speeches in the Home for Men.’
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The anecdote is false:
Der Tunnel
had not yet been made when Hanisch was Hitler’s companion, being released in 1915. However, it is very likely that Hitler saw it while rehabilitating in Germany, and the ‘eloquent speeches’ might well have begun in Berlin. If this was Hitler’s inspiration to become an orator, he might have acquired his exaggerated style of arm-waving and chest-thumping by emulating the larger-than-life style used in the silent film to suggest passion and verve – a would-be political speaker
performing
like a silent screen actor.

While convalescing in the Pasewalk hospital in Pomerania after being blinded by poison gas, he learned, on 10 November 1918, that the war was lost, the House of Hohenzollern had fallen, and a republic had been proclaimed in Germany which was submitting to all and any conditions laid down by the former enemies.

On 28 June 1919 Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which cited Germany’s responsibility for the war, along with Austria and Hungary. Germany had to agree to relinquish several of its territories, demilitarise the Rhineland, and disarm. Economic sanctions were imposed and heavy reparations levied. A
number of countries were involved in negotiating this treaty, but most dropped out; in the end it was the result of demands made by Britain, France and the United States.

Germany was now gripped by revolution as Communist groups and other left-wing organisations attracted
disillusioned
Germans, and a soviet was established in Munich. The new German Republic, under the Social Democrats and the army, sent units of paramilitary soldiers into Munich to quell the red revolution. Hitler was among those mistakenly arrested and
questioned
, but he was released when he was recognised by officers who knew him.

He supplied information to the tribunals set up by the Second Infantry Board and helped to trace soldiers who had participated in the soviet regime. For his services, Hitler was posted to the propaganda department of the Group Command, where he attended lectures given by Gottfried Feder, an economist who developed hostility towards wealthy bankers during the war, writing a ‘manifesto on breaking the shackles of interest’ (
Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft
). He was an excellent speaker, and inspired, Hitler became active in hosting discussions, as noted by historian Karl Alexander von Miller, who one time found his way blocked by a group of men who ‘stood fascinated around [Hitler] who was addressing them without pause and with growing passion in a strangely guttural voice’.
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