Hitler

bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine tolerating no other beside itself than by the granting of liberalistic freedom with which, as a rule, they can do little, and are prone to feel that they have been abandoned. They are equally unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization and the hidden abuse of their human freedom, for they absolutely fail to suspect the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. All they see is the ruthless force and brutality of its calculated manifestations, to which they always submit in the end…. I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses.

Here, too, the psychological effect can be calculated with precision.

Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.⁴⁰

At the beginning of August Hitler and Hanisch quarreled. Hitler had spent several days painting a view of the Vienna Parliament, a building in the style of a classical temple, which he had called “a Hellenic masterpiece on German soil.” His admiration evidently led him to outdo himself. At any rate, he thought the picture was worth fifty crowns, but Hanisch claimed he had sold it for only ten. They quarreled, and when his partner then stayed away for some time, Hitler abruptly had him arrested and instituted legal proceedings. At the trial, on August 11, 1910, Hanisch was sentenced to seven days in jail. He subsequently asserted that the court was prejudiced against him because he was registered at the home for men under the false name of Fritz Walter. The buyer’s widow subsequently declared that her husband had indeed paid only about ten crowns for the picture; but Hanisch did not call him as a witness.

Subsequently, a Jewish companion named Neumann, who also lived in the home for men hawked Hitler’s pictures, and on occasion even Hitler himself conquered his embarrassment and went after his customers himself.

Hitler spent three and a half of his formative years in this setting. We can well understand how repellent it would all have been to an artistically inclined young man full of highflown ambitions. Even years later, by his own testimony, he shuddered With horror at the memory of the “sordid scenes of garbage, repulsive filth, and worse.” Characteristically, he felt no compassion.

His experiences and circumstances during this phase of his life helped Hitler arrive at that philosophy of struggle that became the central core of his view of the world, its “granite foundation,” as he stressed, which he had no need of ever again changing. The views he formed from his contacts with the inmates in the home for men came to the fore again and again in later years, whenever he professed his belief in brutal struggle, in harshness, cruelty, destruction, the rights of the stronger—as he did in countless speeches and discussions, in the pages of his book, and in his table talk at the Fuhrer’s headquarters during the war. He never forgot the lessons he had learned in that school for meanness in Vienna.

Nevertheless, the component of Social Darwinism in Hitler’s thought cannot be attributed solely to his personal experiences in the home for men. He was really reflecting the tendency of the age. Science had become the one truly unchallenged authority. As the laws of evolution and selection put forth by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were popularized in numerous pseudoscientific publications, the average man soon came to know that the “struggle for existence” was the fundamental principle of life, the “survival of the fittest” the basic law governing the societal conduct of individuals and nations. The so-called “Social Darwinist” theory served, for a while at least, all camps, factions, and parties in the second half of the nineteenth century. It became a component of leftist populist education before the Right took up the creed for its own purposes, and argued the unnaturalness of democratic or humanitarian ideas by appealing to Darwinist principles.

The initial concept was that just as in untrammeled nature, social processes and the destinies of nations are determined by biological premises. Only a rigorous process of selection, involving both extermination and deliberate breeding, can prevent faulty lines of evolution and assure one nation superiority over others. Writers like Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Madison Grant, Ludwig Gumplowicz, and Otto Ammon took up the theme and were popularized in their turn by lesser journalists. They had already hit on the whole sinister program : the annihilation of unworthy organisms, the techniques of deliberate population policy, the forcible institutionalization and sterilization of the unfit, the determination of genetic superiority by the size of the head, the shape of the ears or the length of the nose. Often these views were accompanied by a frank rejection of Christian morality, tolerance, and humanitarian progress—all of which, it was argued, favored the weak and were therefore counterselective. To be sure, Social Darwinism was never elaborated into a comprehensive system, and some of its advocates later retracted their views. But this did not diminish its widespread popularity. On the whole, Social Darwinism was one of the classical ideologies of the bourgeois age. The imperialistic practices and robust capitalistic aggrandizement of the period could be justified as part and parcel of inescapable natural law.

The close link between the ideas of Social Darwinism and the antidemocratic tendencies of the period led to the condemnation of liberalism, parliamentarism, egalitarianism, and internationalism as violations of natural law and symptoms of degeneracy due to racial mixture. Count Arthur de Gobineau, the first important racial ideologist (Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines, 1853), became the spokesman for pronounced aristocratic conservatism. He denounced democracy, revolution from below, and everything that he contemptuously called the “community spirit.”

Even more influential, as far as the German middle class was concerned, was an Englishman who subsequently became a German citizen. This was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, scion of a noted family of military men. Highly educated, but of feeble, nervous constitution, Chamberlain devoted himself to study, writing, and the work of Richard Wagner. In the year of Hitler’s birth he came to Vienna, and instead of the intended casual visit remained in the city for twenty years. At once fascinated and repelled by it, he derived many of the ideas that underlay his racial theory of history from the Hapsburg multinational state. In his best known work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), he interpreted European history—in a series of bold hypotheses—as the history of racial struggle. He regarded the decline of the Roman Empire as the classical model of historical decadence resulting from contamination of blood lines. Like declining Rome, he posited, the Dual Monarchy was being swamped by the admixture of Oriental races; the “disease” was advancing at a furious pace. In both cases “not one specific nation, not just one people or one race” was causing disintegration, but “a motley agglomeration” of races who in their turn were the consequence of multiple mixings. “Easy talents, and also, peculiar beauty, what the French call un charme troublant, is frequently characteristic of bastards. Nowadays this can daily be observed in cities where, as in Vienna, a wide variety of races meet. But at the same time one can also perceive the peculiar spinelessness, the low resistance, the lack of character, in short, the moral degeneration of such people.”⁴¹

Chamberlain carried the parallel even further, comparing the Teutons thronging to the gates of Rome with the noble race of Prussians who had rightly been victorious in their clash with the racially chaotic Austro-Hungarian monarchy. But the mood of this elitist individualist was far from being cocky, was rather one of anxiety and defensiveness. In recurrent pessimistic visions he saw the Teutons “on the brink of the racial abyss,” engaged “in a mute life-and-death struggle.” He was tormented by fantasies of bastardization: “It is still morning, but again and again the powers of darkness stretch out their octopus arms, fasten their sucking cups on us in a hundred places and try to draw us back into the darkness.” Hitler’s Social Darwinist views, therefore, were not simply the “philosophy of the doss-house.”⁴² Rather, they show him once again in harmony with the bourgeois age, whose product and destroyer he was. He merely picked up the kind of ideas current in the newspapers he found in cheap cafes, in the books and pamphlets on newsstands, in operas, and in the speechifying of cynical politicians. His experiences in the home for men were reflected only in the whiff of corruption that rises like a penetrating stench from his theories. Of similar origin was the ugly vocabulary that came to his lips, even when he was a statesman and master of a continent, so that he would speak of the “filthy trash from the East,” the “swinish pack of parsons,” the “crippled dung art,” or would characterize Churchill as a “hopeless square-snout,” and the Jews as “this vilest sow’s brood that ought to be beaten to a pulp.”⁴³

Hitler absorbed the complex notions that gave his period its mood and peculiar coloration, absorbed them with that heightened sensitivity which was in fact the only quality he shared with the artist. Along with anti- Semitism and Social Darwinism, the age passed on to him the nationalistic missionary faith that was the obverse of pessimistic anxiety dreams. His views, highly confused and haphazardly arranged, also contained scraps drawn from the broader intellectual fads of the turn of the century: skepticism about reason and humanity, romantic