the very term “republic” seemed synonymous with disgrace, dishonor, and powerlessness. The feeling persisted that the republic had been imposed on the Germans by deception and coercion, that it was something altogether alien to their nature. It is true that in spite of all its drawbacks it held a certain promise; but even in its few fortunate years it was “unable to arouse either the loyalty or the political imagination of the people.”69
These developments led to a surge of political consciousness. Large segments of the population, who previously had lived in a political limbo, abruptly and violently found themselves caught up in events that aroused in them political passions, hopes, and despairs.
Adolf Hitler, now some thirty years old, was seized by this general mood in the hospital at Pasewalk. A vague but furious sense of misfortune and betrayal swept over him. It brought him a step closer to politics, but his decision to go actively into politics, which in
Certainly his behavior during the following months suggests this interpretation. For when he was discharged from Pasewalk hospital at the end of November, he went to Munich and reported to the reserve battalion of his regiment. Munich had played an important part in the November events and had led the way in the overthrow of the German ruling houses. But although the city was vibrating with political excitement, Hitler remained indifferent. In spite of his alleged decision to go into politics, he neither joined nor opposed the political currents. Rather tersely, he comments that Red rule was repugnant to him. But since by his own contention the “Reds” were in power basically throughout the period of the republic, such an observation scarcely justifies the meager interest he took in politics at this period.
At the beginning of February, craving something to do, he volunteered for guard duty in a prisoner-of-war camp at Traunstein, near the Austrian border. But about a month later the few hundred French and Russian soldiers were released, and both camp and guard detail were dissolved. Once more, Hitler was left at loose ends. He returned to Munich.
Since he did not know where else to go, he took up quarters in the barracks in Oberwiesenfeld. Presumably, the decision did not come easily to him, for it meant he had to subordinate himself to the dominant Red Army and don its red armband. Nevertheless, he put up with taking orders from the revolutionary Left at a time when he might have joined units of the Right, a fact revelatory of his underdeveloped political instincts and lack of discrimination at the time. Later, the mere mention of the word “Bolshevism” would drive him wild. But all subsequent revision of the facts to the contrary, at this stage his political indolence was obviously stronger than any horror he might have had at being counted a soldier of the world revolution.
It is true that he also had no choice. The army was the only social framework in which he could feel sheltered. To leave it meant returning to the realm of the shipwrecked. Hitler was distinctly aware of the hopelessness of his personal predicament: “At that time endless plans chased one another through my head. For days I wondered what could be done, but the end of every meditation was the sober realization that I, nameless as I was, did not possess the least basis for any useful action.”70 Plainly, he was as far as ever from thinking of a job, of earning a living, and achieving bourgeois status. Instead, he was agonizingly aware of his insignificance. According to his story, his political activity at that time had incurred “the disapproval of the Central Council” of the new soviet government in Munich, so that at the end of April they came to arrest him. “Faced with my leveled carbine, the scoundrels lacked the necessary courage and marched off as they had come.” But in reality the Central Council was no longer in existence at the time he gives.
It is much more likely that his behavior at this time was a mixture of embarrassment, passivity, and opportunistic adjustment. He took no noticeable part even in the. turbulent events of early May, when the troops of Colonel von Epp’s Free Corps, a paramilitary organization, together with other formations, overthrew the soviet government in Munich. Otto Strasser, who for a time was one of his followers, later asked publicly: “Where was Hitler on that day? In what corner of Munich was the soldier hiding who ought to have fought in our ranks?” In fact Red Army man Adolf Hitler was arrested and questioned by the invading troops; some officers who knew him intervened, and he was released again. Possibly the story of the attempted arrest by the Central Council is the retouched version of this incident.
Afterward, a commission was set up to look into events during the soviet rule, and there has been much speculation on the role Hitler may have played in conjunction with these investigations. All that is certain, however, is that he offered his services to the board of inquiry established by the Second Infantry Regiment. He supplied information for the tribunals, which often handed down very harsh sentences reflecting the bitterness of the recent struggle. He located fellow soldiers who had taken part in the soviet regime, and seems to have carried out his assignment so well that he was soon sent to a training course in “civic thinking.”
Now for the first time he was beginning to attract attention, to emerge from the anonymity that had so long concealed and depressed him. He himself called his work for the investigating commission his “first more or less purely political activity.”71 He was still letting himself drift; but the direction in which he now floated rapidly brought him to the end of his formative years, which were compounded of asocial apathy and a messianic sense of vocation.
Looking back over this period, it is astonishing to see that Adolf Hitler, who was to become the century’s political phenomenon, did not feel tempted by politics until his thirtieth year. At a comparable age, Napoleon was already First Consul, Lenin in exile after years of persecution, Mussolini editor in chief of the socialist paper
On November 23, 1939, when his faith in his own power was at its height, he himself made the astonishing remark to his military commanders that in 1919 he had entered politics only after a long struggle with himself. That had been, he said, “the most difficult decision of all.” And although this was said to emphasize that beginnings are always the hardest part of a venture, it also reveals his strong inner reservations about a political career. One element may have been the traditional German contempt for politics as something by nature lower than creative activity. He would have thought a political career demeaning by comparison with his unattainable youthful dream of becoming “one of the foremost architects of Germany, if not the foremost architect.” Even at the climax of the war he remarked that he would far sooner have gone to Italy as an “unknown painter” and that only the deadly menace to his own race had forced him on to the road of politics, which was fundamentally alien to him.
If this was so, we can understand why not even the revolution drove him to enter the fray on one side or the other. The November events, the collapse of all authority, the downfall of the dynasties and the prevailing chaos had certainly challenged his conservative instincts. But even these violent changes did not rouse him to active protest. Even stronger than his contempt for political affairs was his repugnance for riot and rebellion. Bourgeois that he was, he was not one to go into the streets. Even twenty-five years later, he told his dinner companions, referring to his experiences at the time of the November revolution, that rebels were no more or less than criminals. He could see in them nothing but an “asocial lot”; the best thing to do with them was to kill them.
Only when he discovered his own oratorical powers did he overcome his qualms against the political life and his fear of odium as a disturber of public order. Even so, when he leaped on the stage as a revolutionary personality, he became, as he justified himself four years later in his trial before the Munich People’s Court, a revolutionary against the revolution. But was he any the less an unsociable, easily depressed artist personality whom the peculiar circumstances of the times, together with a monstrous special gift, had propelled into a realm for which he was never intended? The question will arise repeatedly in the course of this biography, and repeatedly we will be tempted to ask whether politics ever meant more to him than the means he employed to practice it: rhetorical overpowering of his enemies, for example; the histrionics of processions, parades, and Party Days; the spectacle of military force applied in war.
There is no denying that the collapse of the old order opened the way for him to enter politics. As long as
