Hitler

publication; he was protecting a “colleague” in order not to detract from the constant dignity that should surround a dictator.

For similar reasons he was tormented by fears that his private life would be exposed. Significantly, not a single personal letter of his exists. Even Eva Braun received only terse, sober notes; yet he was so wary that he never entrusted even these to the mails. The comedy of aloofness from her, which he played out to the last with the less intimate members of his wider entourage, likewise testifies to his inability to lead a life without posing. The most personal letter he left is paradoxically a letter to authorities: that petition to the magistracy of the city of Linz which he wrote at the age of twenty-four in explanation of his draft evasion. On one occasion he remarked that it was “especially important” and “an old experience in the life of a political leader: One should never write down anything that one can discuss, never!” And elsewhere he stated: “Far too much is written; this begins with love letters and ends with political letters. There is always something incriminating about doing so.” He constantly observed himself and literally never spoke an unconsidered word, as Hjalmar Schacht commented. His desires were secret, his feelings hidden, and the widespread notion of an emotionally ungoverned, wildly gesticulating Hitler actually reverses the proportion of rule and exception. In fact his was the most concentrated life imaginable, disciplined to the point of unnatural rigidity.

Even Hitler’s famous outbursts of rage were apparently quite often deliberate instances of play-acting. One of the early gauleiters has described how Hitler raged so in the course of one of these fits that spittle literally ran out of the corners of his mouth and down his chin, so helplessly infuriated did he appear to be—but his consistent, intellectually controlled argumentation, which never ceased throughout the outburst, belied appearances. It would be too much to say that he deliberately tried to engender something like a “shudder of awe” at pathological frenzy. But we can assume that in such situations he did not lose control and that he was exploiting his own emotions just as purposefully as he did those of others. He usually had a reason for making such scenes and unleashed his temperament according to circumstances. He could be just as engaging and charming as he was brutal or ruthless. He was capable of shedding tears, pleading, or working himself up into one of his famous rages, which to the very end aroused the horror of all his interlocutors and often broke their resistance. He possessed “the most terrifying persuasiveness.” Along with this he had the power of exerting a hypnotic effect upon his interlocutor. The leadership of the party, the gauleiters and Old Fighters who had shoved their way to the top alongside him, undoubtedly were “a band of eccentrics and egotists all going in different directions,” and certainly were not servile in the traditional sense. The same is true for at least a part of the officers’ corps. Nevertheless, Hitler imposed his will on them as he pleased. And he did so not only at the height of his power but equally well before, when he was a marginal figure on the political Right, and at the end, when he was only the burned-out husk of a once mighty man. Several diplomats, particularly those of Germany’s allies, fell so completely under his spell that eventually they seemed to be rather his familiars than representatives of their governments.

Caricatures of Hitler long portrayed him as addressing individuals as if they were a mass meeting. But in fact he did nothing of the kind. He had a large scale of nuances at his disposal and was even more effective in personal conversations than on the platform. A public demonstration kindled in him a mood of shrill exaltation, particularly since his first use of the microphone, when he listened intoxicated to the amplification of his voice.

It has been rightly pointed out that Hitler’s ability to exploit his own temperament for demagogic purposes was most clearly manifested in his attitudes toward the German minorities outside German borders.⁴¹ Depending on his needs of the moment, he could lament or forget their fate. He did not worry about the Germans in South Tyrol, Poland, or the Baltic republics as long as they had no place in his grand design for foreign policy. But as soon as the situation changed, the “intolerable wrongs of these most loyal sons of the nation” threw him into raging indignation. His outbursts were obviously not just pretense. But the keener observer noted the element of artificial hysteria in them. Secretly, Hitler was exploiting the rage of which he seemed to be the defenseless victim. His remarkable capacity for empathy, his actor’s gift for merging wholly with a role, stood him in good stead. In the course of a conversation he would quite often show the most variegated sides of his personality, for example, would shift with pantomimic transitions from a muted tone to an abrupt outburst, pounding on the table or drumming nervously on the arm of his chair. At intervals of a few minutes he would show himself detached, sincere, suffering or triumphant. Before he became Chancellor, he would occasionally play the mimic when he was with his intimates; once, according to a participant, he put on a performance—with masterly malice—of Mathilde Kemnitz, later Ludendorff’s wife, vainly attempting to induce him, Hitler, “to marry her…. Hitler stripped the fine lady, as it were, of her priestly, philosophical, scholarly, erotic and other skins, until all that remained was a nasty, acrid onion.”⁴²

He regarded himself as a lover of music, but in actuality it meant little to him. He had, it is true, gone countless times to all of Wagner’s operas and heard Tristan or Die Weistersinger more than a hundred times each. But symphonic works and chamber music he largely ignored. On the other hand, he could sit through endless performances of Die Lustige Witwe or Die Fledermaus; it was again the characteristic grouping of grandiose and silly preferences. He listened to records only when nothing better offered, for they cheated him of the visual setting; with records, he limited himself to grand bravura scenes. After his visits to the opera he spoke exclusively on questions of stage technique or the character of the production, virtually never mentioning problems of musical interpretation.⁴³ Music meant little more to him than an extremely effective acoustic means to heighten theatrical effects; as such, however, it was indispensable, for drama without music had not the slightest appeal to him. One of his secretaries has remarked that his library contained not a single literary classic, and even on his many visits to Weimar, with its theatrical tradition going back to Goethe, he never went to the theater but only to the opera. The supreme expression of opera to him was the finale of Gotterdammerung. In Bayreuth, whenever the citadel of the gods collapsed in flames amid musical uproar, he would reach out into the darkness of the box, take the hand of Frau Winifred Wagner, who was sitting behind him, and breathe a deeply moved Handkuss upon it.⁴⁴

This craving for theater touches at the core of his being. He had the feeling that he was always acting on a stage and needed resounding alarums, explosive effects with lightnings and fanfares. Obsessed with the actor’s immemorial fear of boring the audience, he thought in terms of catchy numbers, trying to surpass the preceding scene, whatever it was. The restiveness that marked his political activities and gave them that character of surprise which so confused his opponents was as much related to this fear of being boring as his fascination with catastrophes and universal conflagrations. Fundamentally he was a theatrical person, trusting dramatic effects more than ideological persuasion, and really himself only in those sham worlds that he opposed to reality. His lack of seriousness, the hypocritical, melodramatic and cheaply villainous quality that clung to him originated in the theatricality as much as in his contempt for the appearances of reality—an element of strength whenever it coincided with his peculiarly sharp perception of underlying real conditions.

One of the conservatives who smoothed Hitler’s path to power commented that he never lost a sense of the disproportion between his lowly origins and the “successful leap to the heights.” As he had done in his youth, he continued to think in terms of social status. Occasionally he tried to divert attention from his embarrassing petty bourgeois origins by ostentatiously calling himself a “worker,” sometimes even a “proletarian.”⁴⁵ But most of the time he strove to cover up his low status by a mythologizing aura. It is an ancient, tested recipe of political usurpation that the lowliest and the most inconspicuous are summoned to rule. In the introductory passages of his speeches he again and again evoked the “myth of the man from the people,” the days when he had been an “unknown frontline soldier in the First World War,” a “man without a name, without money, without influence, without a following,” but summoned by Providence. He liked to introduce himself as the “lonely wanderer out of nothingness.” Thus he liked to have resplendent uniforms around him, for they pointed up the simplicity of his own costume. His air of unassuming austerity and soberness, together with his unwedded state and his withdrawn life, could be splendidly fused in the public mind into the image of a great, solitary man bearing the burden of his election by destiny, marked by the mystery of self-sacrifice. When Frau von Dircksen once remarked to him that she often thought of his loneliness, he agreed: “Yes, I am very lonely, but children and music comfort me.”

As such remarks reveal, he lacked cynicism in regard to his own person and role, and was rather inclined to consider himself in a deadly serious light. Looking out from the Berghof, he could see the blocklike massif of the Untersberg, where according to legend Charlemagne lay sleeping until the day when he would return to scatter Germany’s enemies. With a good deal of sentimental feeling Hitler considered the fact that his home was situated