Hitler

one of the greatest orators of history, he coined not a single memorable phrase. And similarly there are no anecdotes about him, although while holding power he operated entirely by his own lights, more arbitrary and unrestricted than any other political actor since the end of absolutism.

Because of this bizarre personal element, a good many observers have called Hitler a dilettante. And, in fact, if we mean by this the prevalence of inclination over duty and of mood over regularity and permanence, then the advent of Hitler did indeed mean the entrance of the dilettante into politics. The circumstances of his early life were wholly marked by the dilettantism that ultimately brought him into politics, and the period during which he exercised power was one prolonged demonstration of personal idiosyncrasy at the helm of state. The audacity and radicality that made him so successful also came from the same source. A true homo novus, he was not hampered either by experience or by respect for the rules of the game. He did not feel the scruples of the specialists and shrank from nothing he conceived. Above all, he intuitively knew how to initiate great projects but was unaware of the practical difficulties in carrying them through; he always saw everything as child’s play or dependent only on an act of will, not even realizing the extent of his boldness. With his “layman’s delight in decision making”⁵⁸ he interfered, took over everywhere, formulated and carried out what others scarcely dared conceive. He had a dilettante’s fear of admitting a mistake and the tyro’s need to show off his knowledge of tonnages, calibers, and all kinds of statistical matters. His aesthetic preferences were also uninformed; they came down to his love of massiveness, his delight in tricks, surprises, and prestidigitator’s effects. Significantly, he trusted inspiration more than he did thought and genius more than diligence.

He tried to cover up his dilettantism by utter lack of moderation, by making his amateurish projects so monumental that their amateurishness would be invisible. Magnitude justified everything, in buildings as well as in people. In this respect he was a man of the nineteenth century. He heavily concurred with Nietzsche’s saying that a nation was nothing but nature’s byway for producing a few important men. “Geniuses of the extraordinary type,” he remarked, with a side glance at himself, “can show no consideration for normal humanity.” Their superior insight, their higher mission, justified any harshness. Compared with the claims genius could make to greatness and historical fame, the sum of individuals amounted to no more than “planetary bacilli.”

These muddled images of genius, greatness, fame, mission, and cosmic struggle reveal a characteristic element of the Hitlerian imagination. He thought mythologically, not socially, and his modernity was permeated by archaic traits. The world and humanity, the intricate weft of interests, temperament, and energies, were thus reduced to a few antitheses to be grasped instinctively: friend and foe, good and evil, pure and impure, poor and rich, the radiant white knight against the horrid dragon crouched over the treasure. It is true that Hitler had objected to the “perverted title” of Rosenberg’s principal work; National Socialism, he said, did not constitute the myth of the twentieth century against reason, but “the faith and the knowledge of the twentieth century against the myth of the nineteenth century.” But in fact Hitler was far closer to the party’s philosopher than such comments would suggest. For Hitler’s rationality was always limited to methodology and did not light up the gloomy corners of his anxieties and prejudices. His sober plans were based on a few mythological premises, and this close conjunction of coolness and wrongheadedness, Machiavellianism and black magic, rounds out the picture of the man.

A few crude assumptions, borrowed at random from the trashy tracts of whole generations of patriotic professors and pseudoprophets, had shaped the traditional German view of the country’s history. It was all a matter of hereditary foes and enemies bent on encirclement. Hence the popularity of such notions as the stab in the back, Nibelungen loyalty, and the stark alternatives of victory or annihilation. National Socialism was not, it is true, quite so prone to the phenomenon of “seduction by history”⁵⁹ that characterized Italian or French Fascism, and which is in fact among the fundamental traits of Fascist thinking in general. Hitler had no ideal era he could invoke. His use of history was passionate rejection; he would operate by invoking a distorted image of past weakness and dissension. Hitler derived just as powerful a force from castigating the past as did Mussolini from singing the praises of the Roman Empire. Hitler played on national feeling by recalling concepts like “Versailles” or the “period of the Weimar System.” Sure enough, a “language regulation” issued by Goebbels to local propaganda chiefs required that the period from 1918 to 1933 be always designated as “criminal.” History, Paul Valery once remarked, is the most dangerous product ever brewed by the chemistry of the human brain; it makes nations dream or suffer, impels them to become megalomaniacal, bitter, vain, insufferable. The hatreds and passions of the nations during the first half of this century have been stirred by false history far more than by all the racist ideologies or by envy or desire for expansion.

It was necessary for Hitler to reject the past because there was no era in German history that he admired. His ideal world was classical antiquity: Athens, Sparta (“the most pronounced racial state in history”), the Roman Empire. He always felt closer to Caesar or Augustus than to the Teutonic freedom fighter Arminius; they, and not the illiterate inhabitants of the Teutonic forests, were for him among the “most glorious minds of all history,” whom he hoped to find again in the “Olympus… that I shall enter.”⁶⁰ The downfall of those ancient dominions preoccupied him: “I often think about what destroyed the ancient world.” He made open fun of Himmler’s antediluvian primitivism and reacted sarcastically to all the potsherd cult and Teutonic herbalism: “At the same period that our forebears were presumably making the stone troughs and clay pitchers that our archaeologists fuss so much about, an Acropolis was being built in Greece.”⁶¹ And elsewhere: “The Germanic tribes who remained in Holstein were still boors after two thousand years… on no higher a level of culture than the Maori [today].” Only the tribes that had migrated to the south had risen culturally, he said. “Our country was a wallow…. If anybody asks about our ancestors, we always have to refer to the Greeks.”⁶²

In addition to the classical lands, England was the country he admired and wanted to emulate. It had known how to combine national coherence, a sense of masterfulness, and the ability to think in terms of vast areas. England was the opposite of German cosmopolitanism, German faintheartedness, German narrowness. And finally—again the object of reluctant wonder as well as of unnamable anxieties—he admired the Jews. Their racial exclusiveness and purity seemed to him no less admirable than their sense of being a chosen people, their implacability and intelligence. Basically, he regarded them as something akin to negative supermen. Even Germanic nations of relatively pure racial strains were, he declared in his table talk, inferior to the Jews: if 5,000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions.⁶³

Muddled and heterogeneous these ideal images might be, but out of them he constructed the idea of the “new man”: the type that combined Spartan hardness and simplicity, Roman ethos, British gentlemanly ways, and the racial morality of Jewry. Out of greed for power, patriotic devotion and fanaticism, out of persecutions and the miasma of the war, this racist phantasmagoria repeatedly arose: “Anyone who interprets National Socialism merely as a political movement knows almost nothing about it,” Hitler declared. “It is more than religion; it is the determination to create a new man.”

His sincerest and most solemn thought, the idea that compensated for all his anxieties and negations, his one positive concept, was this: to gather again the Aryan blood that had wasted itself on all the seductive Klingsor gardens of this world and to guard the precious grail for all time in the future, thus becoming invulnerable and master of the world. All the calculations of power tactics and all cynicism stopped short of this vision: “the new man.” As early as the spring of 1933 Hitler had seen to the issuance of the first laws, which were soon extended into a comprehensive catalogue of purposeful legislation partly aimed at putting an end to what he called racial decadence, partly at bringing about “the rebirth of the nation… by the deliberate breeding of a new man.” At the Nuremberg party rally of 1929 Hitler had declared in his concluding speech: “If Germany would have a million children annually and eliminate seven to eight hundred thousand of the weakest, the result in the end might be an increase in her energies.” Now the intellectual pimps of the regime took up such suggestions and codified them into a world-wide campaign against the “degenerate and the infected.” Racial philosopher Ernst Bergmann declared that he would gladly see “a million of the human sweepings of the big cities shoved aside.”⁶⁴ Many actions to “safeguard the good blood” ran parallel to the anti-Semitic measures; they ranged from special laws regulating marriage and genetic hygiene to programs of sterilization and euthanasia.

Pedagogical measures supplemented the eugenic measures; for “an intellectual race is something more solid and more durable than a race itself,” Hitler commented. He supported this remark on the grounds of the “superiority of the mind over the flesh.” A novel educational system with National Political Educational Institutions, Adolf Hitler Schools, Order Castles (Ordensburgen), and special academies organized mainly by Rosenberg (which never got beyond their bare beginnings), were to school an elite selected on racial principles, and to prepare it for