cornerstone layings and ground-breaking ceremonies, he created a mood of general mobilization. In hundreds of let’s-get-to-work speeches he initiated labor campaigns which, in the military jargon of the regime, soon developed into labor battles and were triumphantly concluded by a series of victories or by breakthroughs on the agricultural front. The metaphor of warfare that made such formulas effective also sparked a readiness for sacrifice. And all sorts of slogans furthered the mood, though sometimes these slogans verged on the preposterous, as for example: “The German woman is knitting again!”
Like the festivals and parades, these stylistic devices aimed at making the regime popular by concretizing it. Hitler had a remarkable knack for translating into simple images the abstract character of modern political and social functional relationships. Of course, the masses had lost their political autonomy; their rights had been reduced or abolished. But those liberties of the past had hardly profited them—they remembered them with nothing but contempt—whereas Hitler’s unrelenting image projection, his eagerness for public display, engendered in the masses a clear feeling that they were participating in the operations of government. After years of gloom it seemed to many people that their work was once again becoming meaningful. The most menial jobs were being raised to praiseworthy importance. As Hitler put it, it was an honor “to clean the streets as a citizen of this Reich.” Remarkably enough, he seemed to succeed in generating this state of mind.
This capacity for awakening initiative and self-confidence was all the more amazing in view of the fact that Hitler had no specific program. At the cabinet meeting of March 15 he for the first time admitted his dilemma, saying that it was necessary to employ demonstrations, pomp, and a show of activity “to divert attention to the purely political affairs, because the economic decisions will have to be postponed for a while.” And as late as September at the groundbreaking ceremony for the first section of the Frankfurt-Heidelberg autobahn he let slip the revealing statement that it was now essential “by grand, monumental works to set the German economy in motion again at some point.” As Hermann Rauschning saw it, Hitler took power with virtually no other guideline than his total confidence in his own ability to deal with things on the primitive but effective maxim: give an order and it will get done, more or less roughly, perhaps, but for a while something will be moving, and meanwhile we’ll look around for the next step.
As things stood, however, this conception proved to be a kind of magic, since it overcame the prevailing feeling of discouragement. Although there was no visible improvement in material conditions until 1934, from almost the very first day Hitler’s approach generated an enormous “suggestion of consolidation.” At the same time, it assured Hitler considerable room for maneuvering, which enabled him to adjust his plans to changing requirements. The style of his rule has rightly been called “permanent improvisation.” Even while he insisted on the unalterability of the party program, he was filled with that lively instinct of the born tactician not to commit himself. Thus he forbade the press in the first few months to publish unauthorized quotations from
There could be no doubt, from his actions, that programs did not concern him. He forced the “reactionary” Hugenberg out of the cabinet, even as he compelled Gottfried Feder, now State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics, to modify to the verge of recantation the great idea of his life, his “breaking the bondage of interest.” Hitler now dismissed Feder’s idea, which had long ago flashed through him like an illumination, as one of a group of “officially approved fantasies.” The small shopkeepers, the original members of the party, were already looking over the department stores to find the spots where, according to Point 16 of the party program, they would set up their sales booths in the near future. As late as July, 1933, Rudolf Hess was still allowed to state that the attitude of the party on the question of the department stores was “unchanged in principle.” In reality Hitler had discarded that point in the program for good and all.
What had happened to Feder happened to many other old fighters in the party ranks, who. as ideological lone wolves, found themselves more and more openly ridiculed and excluded from the positions of power. As the party embracing all the discontented and resentful, during the period of its rise, the NSDAP had attracted many mini-utopians: people obsessed with an idea, a conception of a new order. They had imagined that their desire for reform was most emphatically represented by the dynamic Hitler party. Now, however, that there was a chance of these ideas being realized, the unreality and in many cases the ludicrous quality of many of these notions came to light, while others held no interest for Hitler, since they offered no promise for increasing his power. The idea of the corporate state, constitutional reforms, rearrangement of the relationships between the states and the Reich, the idea of Germanic law, nationalization of the trusts, land reform, or the idea of the state’s feudal tenure of the means of production—nothing ever came of these save for a few isolated projects no one ever followed up. Moreover, the ideas were often so contradictory that their spokesmen turned fiercely upon one another, whereupon Hitler again could leave everything suspended. Complaints about “lack of organization” left him unmoved. This lack allowed his will free scope and made it the real law of the regime.
But although the energies that National Socialism had unleashed were incapable of tracing more than the beginnings of a new order, they were nevertheless strong enough to undermine the old conditions. Even in this early phase the peculiar weakness of the regime was revealed. To be sure, it had with uncanny accuracy exposed the anachronistic structures and empty claims of the old order. But it was never able to legitimize its destructive ingenuity by a constructive sequel; in the larger historical context it assumed solely functions of clearance. It could not even develop rational, purposeful forms in which to clothe its power-political aims; even in establishing the totalitarian state it hardly went beyond initial steps. It was behemoth rather than leviathan, as Franz Neumann put it; a non-state, a manipulated chaos, not the terroristic coercive state that still is a state. Everything was improvised with one purpose or another in view. That was true for the great campaign of conquest that dominated Hitler’s imagination so powerfully that it overrode everything else. Certainly, he had no interest in ordering the social and political structures and arranging for their continuance beyond his own life. If he thought and spoke in terms of a millennium, this was vague literary phraseology. Consequently, the Third Reich developed into a peculiarly unfinished makeshift, a field of rubble patterned on contradictory sketches. Facades left over from the past covered newly laid foundations, among which jutted pieces of wall started and abandoned, fragments destroyed or torn down. What alone imposed meaning and consistency upon it all was Hitler’s monstrous will to power.
Socialistic notions still survived in the Nazi party, isolated leftovers from the Strasser phase. Hitler’s attitude toward these doctrines is interesting, for here again we see how all his decisions were governed by the power factor. As leader of a movement which had profited from the bourgeoisie’s dread of revolution, he had to avoid all activities that might move the regime anywhere close to the traditional concept of revolution. In particular, he must avoid the appearance of nationalization or an overplanned economy. But since this was what he really intended, he used the slogan of “national socialism” to proclaim unconditional co-operation by everyone, on all levels, with the state. And since all authority ultimately issued from him, this meant nothing less than the abolition of all private economic life under the fiction of its continuance. As compensation for the state’s intrusion into their affairs, the businessmen received imposed labor peace, guaranteed markets, and in the course of time a good many vague hopes of a tremendous expansion of the national economic base. The whole idea was conceived, however, for short-term benefits: it was Hitler’s way of providing himself with henchmen. Among his intimates he justified this course with some cynicism and acuteness: he had not the slightest intention, he declared, of killing off the propertied class, as had been done in Russia. Rather, he would force it in, every conceivable way to use its abilities to build the economy. Businessmen, that much was sure, would be glad if their lives and property were spared, and in this way they would become true dependents. Why should he change this advantageous relationship when to do so would only mean he would afterward have to thresh everything out with Old Fighters and overzealous party comrades who would be forever reminding him of all they had done for the party? Formal title to means of production was only a question of detail, was it not? How much landed property or how many
