life are divided between the first thirty years with their dullness, their obscure asocial circumstances, and the suddenly electrified political half. The later period, however, falls into three distinct segments. At the beginning there are approximately ten years of preparation, of ideological development, and of tactical experimentation. During this time Hitler ranked as no more than a marginal radical figure, distinguished, it is true, by an unusual talent for demagoguery and political organization. Then followed the ten years in which he riveted the attention of the age, and in retrospect seems to stand before a film of flashing scenes of mass jubilation and crowd hysteria. He himself was fairly sensitive to the fairy-tale character of this phase of his life; indeed, he could not fail to feel that he had been “elected” to his role and remarked that it “had not been the work of men alone.” And then followed six more years of grotesque errors, mistake piled upon mistake, crimes, convulsions, destructive mania, and death.
Reviewing this, we are once again drawn to look at the person of Adolf Hitler. His individual outline is still blurred; at times it might seem as if he emerged more distinctly from the imprint he made upon political and social conditions than from any account of his personal biography; as if the statue into which he stylized himself reveals, amid all the pomp of his political self-display, more of his essence than the human being behind it.
Political events during these years of success were accompanied by incessant fireworks: grand spectacles, parades, dedications, torchlight processions, demonstrations, bonfires leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop. We have already made the point of the close connection in totalitarian regimes between foreign and domestic policy; but even closer was the connection of both with propaganda policy. Memorial days, deliberately created incidents, state visits, harvest festivals or the death of a party member, the conclusion or breach of treaties—all these served as the pretext for great spectacles, whose purpose was to integrate the nation more and more closely, preparing it for mobilization in every sense of the word.
In Hitler’s government the connection between policy and propaganda was so intimate that sometimes the emphasis shifted, so that politics took second place to become merely the handmaiden of theatrical effects. In planning the grand boulevard of the future rebuilt Berlin, Hitler was even willing to conceive of a rebellion against his rule. Carried away, he described how the armored vehicles of the SS would come rolling invincibly up the 400- foot-wide avenue, advancing slowly upon his palace. His theatrical nature was never quite submerged and led him to subordinate political to histrionic categories. In this amalgam of aesthetic and political elements, Hitler’s origins in late-bourgeois bohemia and his lasting connection with that sphere can clearly be recognized.
The style of National Socialist spectacles also points back to these origins. Some have perceived the influence of the showy, colorful ritual of the Catholic Church. But equally evident is—once again—the heritage of Richard Wagner, whose splendiferous theatrical liturgy was carried to its ultimate point in the operatic excesses of the party rallies. The hypnotic fascination of these spectacles, which still comes through in the cinematic records of them, is partly due to these origins. “I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet,” Sir Nevile Henderson wrote, “but for grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it.”33 The spectacles testify to a precise knowledge of the dramaturgy of grand scenes and of the psychology of the common man. The forest of flags and the flickering torches, the marching columns and the blaring bands combined to make a magic that the mentality of the age, haunted by images of anarchy, could scarcely resist. Each detail was tremendously important to Hitler. Even in the festivals with their vast blocks of humanity he personally checked seemingly trivial points. He approved every scene, every movement, as he did the selection of flags or flowers, and even the seating order for guests of honor.
Significantly, Hitler’s talents as stage manager reached their summit when the object of the celebration was death. Life seemed to paralyze his inspiration, and his attempts in that direction never went beyond a dreary nod to peasant folklore: hailing the joys of dancing about the Maypole or the rearing of large families. On the other hand, he could always invent impressive effects for funeral ceremonies. Though the form may vary, the message was always the same. As Adorno said of Richard Wagner’s music: “Magnificence is used to sell death.”34
He also had a distinct preference for nocturnal backdrops. Torches pyres, or flaming wheels were continually being kindled. Though such rituals were supposed to be highly positive and inspirational, in fact they struck another note, stirring apocalyptic associations and awakening a fear of universal conflagrations or dooms, including each individual’s own.
The ceremony of November 9, 1935, commemorating the dead of the march to the Feldherrnhalle twelve years before, was a model for many other such solemnities. The architect Ludwig Troost had designed two classicistic temples for Munich’s Konigsplatz; these were to receive the exhumed bones, now deposited in sixteen bronze sarcophagi, of the first “martyrs” of the Nazi movement. The night before, during the traditional Hitler speech in the Burgerbraukeller, the coffins had been placed on biers in the Feldherrnhalle, which was decorated with brown drapes and flaming braziers for the occasion. Shortly before midnight Hitler, standing in an open car, drove through the Siegestor into Ludwigstrasse, lit by flares set on masts, and on to the Odeonsplatz. SA and SS units formed a lane, their torches making two moving lines of fire down the length of the broad avenue. The audience was massed behind these lines. The car crawled slowly to the Feldherrnhalle. With raised arm, Hitler ascended the red-carpeted stair. He paused before each of the coffins for a “mute dialogue.” Six thousand uniformed followers, carrying countless flags and all the standards of the party formations, then filed silently past the dead. On the following morning, in the subdued light of a November day, the memorial procession began. Hundreds of masts had been set up with dark red pennants bearing the names of the “fallen of the movement” inscribed in golden letters. Loudspeakers broadcast the Horst Wessel song, until the procession reached one of the offering bowls, at which the names of the dead were called out. Alongside Hitler at the head of the procession walked the former corps of leaders, in brown shirts or in the historic uniforms (gray windbreaker and “Model 23” ski cap, supplied by the “Bureau for November 8–9”). At the Feldherrnhalle, where the march had once ended before the blazing guns of the army, the representatives of the armed forces now joined the marchers—a piece of revisionist symbolism. Sixteen artillery salvos boomed over the city. Then solemn silence descended while Hitler laid a gigantic wreath at the memorial tablet. While “Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles” was played at a mournful tempo, all began to move toward Konigsplatz down a lane of thousands upon thousands of flags dipped in salute to the dead. United in the “March of Victory,” the names of the fallen were read out in a “last roll call.” The crowd answered, “Present!” in their behalf. Thus the dead took their places in the “eternal guard.”
A tribute to the dead also took center stage at the Nuremberg party rally. But the reference to death was present in nearly every ceremonial and in the speeches and appeals throughout the several days of the annual party congress at Nuremberg. The Bodyguard Regiment stood saluting while Hitler drove, to the pealing of bells, into the flag-decked city. The regiment’s black dress uniforms added an accent that was repeated in the ritual surrounding the “blood banner” and in the ceremonial in the Luitpoldhain: Hitler, with two leading paladins at a respectful distance behind him and to either side, walked up to the monument between more than 100,000 SA and SS men stationed in enormous squadrons along the broad ribbon of concrete, the “Street of the Fuhrer.” While the flags dipped, he stood meditating for a long time, the manifest embodiment of the concept “leader”: in the midst of the mute soldiers of the party, but “surrounded by empty space, the insuperable gulf of Caesarian loneliness, which belongs to him alone and to the dead heroes who gave their lives because they believed in him and his mission.”35
For maximum impressiveness, many spectacles were shifted to the evening or night hours. At the party rally in 1937 Hitler arrived to address the lined-up political leaders toward eight o’clock in the evening. As soon as Robert Ley had reported to him the presence of these subleaders, “the enveloping darkness was suddenly illuminated with a flood of whiteness. Like meteors,” the official report read, “the beams of the one hundred and fifty giant searchlights shoot into the obscured, gray-black night sky. The tall columns of light join against the cloud ceiling to form a luminous halo. An overwhelming sight: caught by a faint breeze, the flags in the stands ringing the field quiver gently in the glittering light…. The grandstand is… bathed in dazzling brightness, crowned by the shining golden swastikas in the oak wreath. On the left and right terminal, pyres leap from great basins.”
With fanfares blaring, Hitler entered the high central section of the grandstand, and at a command a torrent of more than 30,000 flags poured from the stands opposite into the arena. The silver tips and fringes of the flags sparkled in the beams of the searchlights. As always, Hitler himself was the first victim of this orchestration of masses, light, symmetry, and the tragic sense of life. Especially in speeches to old followers, after the period of silence in memory of the dead, he frequently fell into a tone of total rapture; in strange phrases he held a kind of mystic communion until the searchlights were lowered to strike the middle of the arena and flags, uniforms, and band instruments flashed red, silver, and gold. “I have always felt,” he cried in 1937, “that man, as long as life is
