Democratic Party held the same preponderance, yet did not take part in most of the cabinets. Also ignored is the fact that Hitler had always been the declared foe of the very Constitution in whose spirit such views are propounded. The Communists might have won far more votes than the Nazis, yet would have encountered massive resistance. The truth was that Hitler’s conservative backers thought he could be trusted to carry out their intentions—in a more vulgar manner than they liked, granted, but effectively. They realized too late that he was just as radically (though differently) opposed to them and the world they wanted to preserve as was the Communist leader Thalmann. The nameless Bavarian plain-clothes man who attended a demonstration of the NSDAP in the summer of 1921 and reported to his office that Hitler was “nothing but… the leader of a second Red Army” had grasped the essence of the man more keenly than the conservative notables of 1933.58
Given all these favoring forces and circumstances, we may be tempted to ask what Hitler’s particular feat was during those weeks. The fact is that his real abilities scarcely show up very convincingly during the period just before January 30, 1933. His principal feat was a passive one: he was able to wait in spite of his impatience, was able to control his refractory following, keep his composure during a fiasco, and even at the last moment, in the President’s anteroom, play his cards with the icy poise of a great gambler who accepts all risks. A retrospective look at the years since the plebiscite on the Young Plan makes it plain to what extent he had outgrown the riot- and-propaganda phase of his career and had become a politician. At the same time, the experience of those weeks once again confirmed his gambler’s instinct. What was most amazing about his life, he declared during this period, was that he was always being saved when he himself had already given up.59
That night, after the cheering was over, after the music and the thunder of marching feet had faded, Hitler stayed up until early morning in the small room adjacent to the Chancellor’s reception room. Deeply moved, he lost himself in one of his endless rambling monologues. He recalled the morning’s swearing-in ceremony, happily went over his triumphs, commented on the consternation of his “Red” adversaries, and reverted to one of his favorite topics: the art of propaganda. He had not looked forward to any election campaign as much as he did to this one, he declared. Some people thought there would be war, he then remarked. His chancellorship, he continued, was inaugurating the final struggle of the white man, the Aryan, for mastery of the earth. The non-Aryans, the colored races, the Mongols, were already striving to seize the mastery for themselves under Bolshevism, but this day marked the beginning of “the greatest Germanic racial revolution in world history.” His eschatological visions intersected with architectural projects: the first thing he would do, he said, would be to rebuild the chancellery; it was a “mere cigar box.”60 It was close to dawn before he left the building through a small door in the rear wall and went across to his hotel.
The day had been an overwhelming one, full of satisfactions and vindications. But this was not yet his goal; it was only a stage along the way to it. Though we have no actual text of his protracted monologue of that night, it is clear that his mind was now dwelling on the revolution he had repeatedly proclaimed as imminent. Like every real revolutionary, he believed that with his coming a new day in history had begun.
Significantly, he framed this idea in negative terms. “We are the last who will be making history in Germany,” he declared at this time.
German Catastrophe or German Consistency?
The idea is not so impotent as to amount to no more than an idea.
Thought precedes action like lightning thunder. Admittedly the German thunder is also German and not very nimble; it rolls up rather slowly. But it will come, and once you hear it peal, as nothing has ever pealed before in the history of the world, know this: the German thunder has reached its goal.
The dramatic ceremonial with which Hitler took over the chancellorship, the accompaniment of torchlight parades and mass demonstrations, bore no relationship to the constitutional importance of the event. For, strictly speaking, January 30, 1933, brought nothing more than a change of administrations. Nevertheless, the public sensed that the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor could not be compared with the cabinet reshufflings of former years. Despite all the vaunted intentions of the German Nationalist coalition partners “to keep the frustrated Austrian painter on the leash,” the Nazis from the start made ready to seize full power and to apply it in revolutionary ways. All the efforts of Papen and his fellows to play a part in the oratory, the celebrating, or the directing of affairs only gave the impression of breathless running to keep up. Numerical superiority in the cabinet, influence with the President, or in the economy, the army, and the bureaucracy could not conceal the fact that this was their rival’s hour.
After January 30 a mass desertion to the Nazi camp began. Once again the axiom was proved that in revolutionary times principles are cheap, and perfidy, calculation, and fear reign supreme. This was true, but not the whole truth. For the massive political turncoatism bespoke not only lack of character and servility. Quite often it represented the spontaneous desire to give up old prejudices, ideologies, and social restrictions and to join with others in making a fresh start. “We were not all opportunists,” wrote the poet Gottfried Benn in retrospect, speaking as one of that vast host of people who were carried along by the force of the spreading revolutionary mood.1 Powerful traditional parties and associations cracked under the propagandist^ onslaught; and even before they were forcibly dissolved and banned they left a leaderless following to its own devices. The past—republic, divisiveness, impotence—was over and done with. A rapidly shrinking minority did not succumb to the frenzy. But such holdouts were driven into isolation; they saw themselves excluded from those celebrations of the new sense of community, from those who could reveal in mass oaths in cathedrals of light, in addresses by the Fuhrer, in mountaintop bonfires and choral singing by hundreds of thousands of voices. Even the first signs of the reign of terror could not mute the rejoicing. The public mind interpreted the terror as an expression of a ruthlessly operating energy for which it had looked all too long in vain.
These concomitants of enthusiasm are what have given Hitler’s seizure of power its distressing note. For they undermine all the arguments for its having been a historical accident, the product of intrigues or dark conspiracies. Any attempt to explain the events of those years has always had to face the question of how Nazism could so rapidly and effortlessly have conquered the majority, not just attained power, in an ancient and experienced civilized nation. And how could it have thrown that majority into a peculiarly hysterical state compounded of enthusiasm, credulity, and devotion? How could the political, social, and moral checks and balances, which a country belonging to the “nobility of nations”2 after all possesses, have so glaringly failed? Before Hitler came to power, an observer described what he considered the inevitable course of events: “Dictatorship, abolition of the parliament, crushing of all intellectual liberties, inflation, terror, civil war; for the opposition could not simply be made to disappear. A general strike would be called. The unions would provide a core for the bitterest kind of resistance; they would be joined by the Reichsbanner and by all those concerned about the future. And if Hitler won over even the Army and met the opposition with cannon—he would find millions of resolute antagonists.”3 But there were no millions of resolute antagonists and consequently no need for a bloody coup. On the other hand, Hitler did not come like a thief in the night. With his histrionic verbosity he revealed, more perhaps than any other politician, what he had been aiming for through all the byways and tactical maneuvers: dictatorship, anti-Semitism, conquest of living space.
Understandably enough, the euphoria of those weeks gave many observers the impression that Germany had rediscovered her true self. Although the Constitution and the rules of the political game as played in the republic remained valid for the time being, they nevertheless seemed curiously obsolete, cast off like an alien shell. And for decades this image—of a nation that seemed to have found itself in exuberantly turning away from the European tradition of rationality and humane progress—determined the interpretation of events.
The first attempts at tracing the success of Nazism to a special mentality rooted in German history thus
