Hitler

semi-idiot in the lowest social and psychological bohemianism, the arrogant rejection of any sensible and honorable occupation because of the basic feeling that he is too good for that sort of thing. On what is this feeling based? On a vague sense of being reserved for something entirely indefinable. To name it, if it could be named, would make people burst out laughing. Along with that, the uneasy conscience, the sense of guilt, the rage at the world, the revolutionary instinct, the subconscious storing up of explosive cravings for compensation, the churning determination to justify oneself, to prove oneself…. It is a thoroughly embarrassing kinship. Still and all, I would not want to close my eyes to it.³⁷

But there are other striking parallels between Hitler and Wagner: the uncertainty about ancestry, the failure at school, the flight from military service, the morbid hatred of Jews, even the vegetarianism, which in Wagner ultimately developed into the ludicrous delusion that humanity must be saved by vegetarian diet. Also common to both was the violent quality of their moods: the abrupt alternation of depressions and exaltations, triumphs and disasters. In many of Richard Wagner’s operas the theme is the classic conflict between the outsider, subject only to his own laws, and a rigid social order governed by tradition. In Rienzi or Lohengrin or Tannhauser, Hitler, the rejected Academy candidate sitting over his water colors in the reading room of the home for men, recognized magnified aspects of his own confrontation with the world. Both Wagner and Hitler, moreover, possessed a furious will to power, a basically despotic tendency. All of Richard Wagner’s art has never been able to conceal to what extent its underlying urge was the boundless need to dominate. From this impulse sprang the taste for massive effects, for pomposity, for overwhelming hugeness. Wagner’s first major composition after Rienzi was a choral work for 1,200 male voices and an orchestra of one hundred. This blatant reliance on mass effects, employed to cover up basic weaknesses, this medley of pagan, ritual and music- hall elements anticipated the era of mass hypnosis. The style of public ceremonies in the Third Reich is inconceivable without this operatic tradition, without the essentially demagogical art of Richard Wagner.

Another point in common was a kind of cunning knowledge of the popular mind along with a remarkable insensitivity to banality. This combination resulted in an air of plebeian pretentiousness in which again they were remarkably similar. Gottfried Keller once called the composer a “barber and charlatan”; similarly, a contemporary observer described Hitler, with the acuteness born of hatred, as having “the aura of a headwaiter”; another spoke of him as a speechmaking sex murderer.³⁸ The element of vulgarity and unsavoriness that phrases of this sort tried to catch was present in both Hitler and Wagner. They were masters of the art of brilliant fraudulence, of inspired swindling. And just as Richard Wagner could call himself a revolutionary yet pride himself on his friendship with a king (“Wagner, the government bandleader,” Karl Marx said scornfully), so Hitler, in his vague dreams of mounting the social ladder, reconciled his hatred of society with his opportunistic instincts. Wagner dismissed the patent contradictions in his views by declaring that art was the goal of life and that the artist made the ultimate decisions. It was the artist who would intervene to save the situation 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.” His doctrine then was that of the aesthetician who would subordinate life entirely to the dictates of the artist. The state was to be raised to the heights of a work of art; politics would be renewed and perfected by the spirit inherent in art. Elements of this program are clearly visible in the theatricalization of public life in the Third Reich, the regime’s passion for histrionics, the staginess of its practical politics—a staginess that often appeared to be the sole end of the politics.

There are still other parallels. The innate tendency toward “dilettantism,” which Friedrich Nietzsche noted even while Wagner was still his admired friend, was likewise a trait of Hitler’s. In both men there was the same striking need to intervene officiously in all sorts of spheres; both had to be forever proving themselves, dazzling the world with their many talents. Yesterday’s glory rapidly turned stale for both of them; they had constantly to be surpassing themselves. In both cases we find an outrageous pettiness side by side with far-ranging inspiration; this very conjunction seems to have defined their peculiar mentality.

Hitler, to be sure, entirely lacked the self-discipline and the artist’s capacity for taking pains that distinguished Wagner. Hitler’s lethargy, his almost narcoticized dullness, are his alone. But at bottom we find in both men a horror of proletarianization, which they are determined to fend off at any cost. Their struggle to raise themselves to the level for which they felt themselves destined represents a remarkable achievement of the will. That sense of destiny was crucial: they were sustained by their premonitions that some time in the future everything would change for them, and all the humiliations they had endured, all the wretchedness of years in the lower depths, would be fearfully avenged.

Hitler’s theatrical, essentially unpolitical relationship to the world, in the vein of Richard Wagner, emerges from an anecdote he himself relates. Once, after days of “musing and brooding,” he came upon a mass demonstration of Viennese workers. His description of the experience, recollected fifteen years later, still vibrates with the impression that those “endless columns four abreast” made upon him. For nearly two hours, he says, he stood “watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by,” before he turned away “in oppressed anxiety” and went home. What had chiefly moved him, to all appearances, was the theatrical effect of the parade. At any rate, he writes not a word about the background or the political motivations for the demonstration. Evidently these concerned him much less than the question of how to achieve such effects upon masses of human beings. He brooded on theatrical problems; as he saw it, the chief concerns of the politician were matters of staging. Kubizek had in fact been struck by the importance his friend, in his occasional attempts at drama, attributed to “the most magnificent possible staging.” Although this naive early admirer of Hitler could not recall afterward the contents of Hitler’s plays, he never forgot the “enormous pomp” Hitler went in for, which put anything Richard Wagner had ever demanded for the stage “completely in the shade.”³⁹

In retrospect, Hitler laid claim to an intense intellectual development. During the approximately five years he spent in Vienna, he maintained, he read “enormously and thoroughly.” Aside from architecture and visiting the opera, he wrote, he “had but one pleasure: books.” But it would probably be more accurate to say that the real influences of this phase of his life stemmed not so much from the intellectual realm as from that of demagogy and political tactics. As a construction worker, a declassed bourgeois filled equally with his sense of superiority and fear of intimacy, he kept carefully to one side while the other men had their lunch. Nevertheless, he eventually was drawn into political wrangles. When his fellows threatened, according to his story, to throw him off the scaffolding, he learned something from the clash. As he later put it, with an undertone of admiration, he discovered that a very simple method existed to deal with arguments: “bashing in the head of anybody who dared to oppose.” The pages of Mein Kampf that deal with his political awakening are extremely scanty on theory; they do not suggest that grappling with the ideas of the time which he claims to have engaged in. Rather, he uncritically followed the existing, widespread ideology of the German bourgeoisie. On the other hand, questions of the manipulation of ideas, of their power over the masses, aroused his eager interest and produced his first flashes of insight.

In the Vienna period we can already see those themes emerging which haunt many of his later utterances: the persistent search for “those who are behind it,” the “secret wirepuller” who makes a dupe of the masses. Hanisch tells how one day Hitler emerged “altogether overwhelmed” from a movie based on the novel The Tunnel (Der Tunnel), by Bernhard Kellermann, in which one of the chief characters was a popular orator. “Henceforth there were eloquent speeches in the Home for Men,” Hanisch reports. And Josef Greiner tells of having once referred Hitler to a woman named Anna Csillag who sold a hair-growing lotion by means of false testimonials. For almost an hour, Greiner’s story goes, Hitler waxed enthusiastic about the woman’s skill and the vast potentialities of psychological persuasion. “Propaganda, propaganda!” he is supposed to have raved. “You must keep it up until it creates a faith and people no longer know what is imagination and what reality.” Propaganda, he is quoted as saying, is “the fundamental essence of every religion… whether of heaven or hair tonic.”

These accounts are dubious. We are on firmer ground when we read what Hitler himself had to say about his study of Social Democratic practice: its propaganda, its demonstrations, and its speeches. The lessons he derived were to shape his own approach:

The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted or weak.

Like a woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather