interests of the nation. Still, it was vehement enough to be taken as a challenge and aroused widespread resistance. This must be said even though Hitler formulated the defensive emotions of an age and a continent, and even though his messianic slogans proved effective far beyond the borders of Germany, so that through him Germany was the object of respect and even envy.6 In spite of such “internationalism,” Hitler never managed to give his own defensive intentions more than a harsh and narrow nationalistic profile. In the bunker mediations of the spring of 1945 he referred to himself as “Europe’s last chance,” and in light of that idea tried to justify his application of force against the whole Continent: “It [the Continent] could not be conquered by charm and persuasiveness. I had to rape it in order to have it.”7 But Europe’s chance was precisely what Hitler was not, not even prospectively, not even as an illusion or a possible way. At no time was he able to convince people beyond his own borders that he offered them a viable political alternative. During the war, when the campaign against the Soviet Union could have been presented as a European crusade, he revealed himself as the sworn enemy of “imposed internationalism” that he had been from the start. He remained profoundly a European provincial with his gaze irretrievably fixated on the antagonisms of a vanished era.
We are thus once again compelled to confront Hitler’s oddly fractured position in time. Despite his fundamentally defensive posture, he was long regarded as the really progressive, modern figure of the age. To most of his contemporaries it was clear that he was striding toward the future. Yet to our present-day sensibility, what is most striking is the anachronistic quality he displays. During the twenties and thirties the melange of elements that were regarded as modern and in keeping with the spirit of the age were technology and collectivist ideas, monumental proportions, bellicose attitudes, the pride of the mass man, and the aura of stardom. One of the reasons for Nazism’s success was that Hitler ingeniously appropriated all these elements. Another of these “modern” elements was the imperious manner of great individuals. Hitler’s rise and sovereignty took place within a pattern of Caesaristic tendencies stretching all the way from the totalitarian cult of personality in Stalin’s Soviet Union to the autocratic style of President Roosevelt. Against such a background Hitler, who blatantly proclaimed himself a ruler of this type, seemed the perfect representative of the new age. He himself also consistently stressed the optimistic, future-oriented character of Nazism. Its reactionary features, its pessimistic nostalgia with regard to civilization, were largely given voice by Himmler, Darre, and a sizable band of the SS leadership.
In reality the prospect of the future horrified him. He was glad, he commented at the dinner table in the Fuhrer’s headquarters, that he was experiencing only the beginnings of the technological age. Later generations would no longer know “how beautiful the world once was.”8 In spite of all his deliberately progressivist gestures, he was profoundly retarded, a captive of the images, standards, and impulses of the nineteenth century—which in fact he considered to be, alongside classical antiquity, the most important era in history. Even his death, trivial and botched though it may seem, reflected both aspects of the era that he admired and once again represented: something of its sonorous splendor, as expressed in the
The rigidity we have noted so often in the course of his life can be seen in its real significance only against this background: he wanted to cling fast to the unique moment in which the world had presented itself to him during his formative years. Unlike the Fascist type in general, he was not seduced by history but by his own educational experience, the shudders of happiness and terror that had been his in puberty. The salvation he wanted to bring about was therefore always aimed at restoring something of the great nineteenth century. Hitler’s entire vision of the world, his manias about the fight for survival, race, space, his never-questioned admiration for the idols and great men of his youth, and in fact for great men in general (so that history seemed a mere reflection of their will, as was shown by his absurd hopes at the death of Roosevelt)—all this and much else may serve to define the extent of his fixation. All sorts of mental blocks restricted him to the horizon of the nineteenth century. For example, the supposedly dire figure of 140 inhabitants per square kilometer, which continually recurs in his speeches to justify his claims to
He understood the nature of greatness itself in picture-book terms, in the vein of old adventure novels, embodied in the figure of the solitary superman. Among the constants of his thought was the desire to be not only great in himself, but also great in the manner, style, and temperament of an artist. When, in one of his speeches, he proclaimed the “dictatorship of genius,” he was obviously thinking of the artist’s claim to dominion. Significantly, he chose as his examples the persons of Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner, who both bestraddled the artistic and the political realms. Theirs was what he called “heroism”—and the gravest charge he hurled at his early opponent, Gustav von Kahr, was that Kahr was “not a heroic figure.” To us the psychopathic nature of this attitude is only too apparent; we are repelled by the naive, puerile nature it betrays, and its strained, artificial quality. The imperious pose he had adopted was also only a sham; and we will recall how much apathy and nervous weakness were concealed behind his posturings, what artificial stimulants he required for those grand gestures of energy he practiced—in which, however, the mechanical twitching of galvanized muscles can always be detected. His amorality was similarly artificial and forced. He liked to put on the manner of a temperamental, violent autocrat in order to conceal the petty malevolence with which he was filled. In spite of all his highhanded crimes, he was much more the type of the pallid murderer, and certainly not free from the naggings of a morality that he scorned as a “chimaera.” A glacial temperament and digestive troubles; such a constitutional type also belongs to the nineteenth century. Nervous weakness compensated for by superman poses: in this, too, Hitler revealed his link with the late-bourgeois age, with the period of Gobineau, Wagner, and Nietzsche.
Yet even this link was not a strong and firm one but marred by brittleness and alienation. Hitler has rightly been called “detached.” Despite his many petty bourgeois inclinations, he did not really belong to that class, either; or at any rate was never rooted in it deeply enough to share its limitations. For this reason his defensiveness was so full of resentments, and for this reason he defended the world he allegedly wanted to protect until he succeeded in destroying it.
So it was that this reactionary man, unmistakably molded by the nineteenth century, propelled both Germany and large parts of the world into the twentieth century. Hitler’s place in history is much closer to that of the great revolutionaries than to that of the conservative, preserving autocrats. Granted, he drew his crucial impulses from the desire to prevent the dawn of modern times and to return, by means of a grand, world- historical correction, to the starting point of all errors and mistaken developments. As he himself phrased it, he had come forth as a revolutionary against revolution.9 But the mobilization of forces and the sense of commitment this rescue mission of his required enormously accelerated the emancipatory process. And the excessive stress on authority, style, and order, which were associated with his conduct, actually weakened the binding force of these social cements and ushered in those democratic ideologies that he had opposed with the energy of desperation. Abhorring revolution, he became in reality the German form of revolution.
Certainly Germany had been engaged since 1918 at the latest in an acute process of transformation. But this had been pushed forward halfheartedly and with great indecisiveness. It remained for Hitler to confer upon it the radicalness that made it properly revolutionary, thus profoundly changing a country that had become petrified in a good many authoritarian social structures. Under the demands of the totalitarian leader state, venerable institutions collapsed, people were wrenched out of their traditional slots, privileges were done away with, and all authorities that were not derived from or protected by Hitler were smashed. At the same time, Hitler succeeded in muting those anxieties and fears of uprooting that generally accompany any breach with the past. Or else he turned these emotions into socially useful energy, since he knew how to make himself credible to the masses as an all-embracing substitute authority. But above all he eliminated the one most obvious revolutionary phenomenon of which people were most afraid: the Marxist Left.
Certainly force and violence were involved. But Hitler’s real feat consisted in pitting his own rival ideology against the mythology of world revolution and the historical destiny of the proletariat. Clara Zetkin had seen the Fascist followings composed principally of the disappointed of all groups, the “ablest, strongest, toughest and boldest elements of all classes.”10 None other than Hitler succeeded in fusing them all in a novel, vigorous mass movement. It was not destined to last. Nevertheless, for one alarming moment the slogan “Adolf Hitler Devours Karl Marx!”—with which Joseph Goebbels had taken up the struggle for “Red” Berlin—proved to be