Hitler

proclamation: “Will you wait until you see thousands of people hanging from the lamp posts in every city? Will you wait until, as in Russia, a Bolshevistic murder commission sets to work in every city…? Will you wait until you stumble over the corpses of your wives and children?” The threat of revolution no longer had to be pictured as emanating from a few lonely, harried conspirators. It could now be seen coming from great, uncanny Russia, the “brutal power colossus,” as Hitler called it.⁴ Moreover, Bolshevik propaganda heralded the imminent conquest of Germany by the united strength of the international proletariat; this would be the decisive step on the road to world revolution. The obscure activities of Soviet agents, the continual unrest, the soviet revolution in Bavaria, the Ruhr uprising of 1920, the revolts in Central Germany during the following year, the risings in Hamburg and later in Saxony and Thuringia, were all too consistent with the Soviet regime’s threat of permanent revolution.

This threat dominated Hitler’s speeches of the early years. In garish colors he depicted the ravages of the “Red squads of butchers,” the “murderous communists,” the “bloody morass of Bolshevism.” In Russia, he told his audiences, more than thirty million persons had been murdered, “partly on the scaffold, partly by machine guns and similar means, partly in veritable slaughterhouses, partly, millions upon millions, by hunger; and we all know that this wave of hunger is creeping on… and see that this scourge is approaching, that it is also coming upon Germany.” The intelligentsia of the Soviet Union, he declared, had been exterminated by mass murder, the economy utterly smashed. Thousands of German prisoners-of-war had been drowned in the Neva or sold as slaves. Meanwhile, in Germany the enemy was boring away at the foundations of society “in unremitting, ever unchanging undermining work.” The fate of Russia, he said again and again, would soon be ours!⁵ And years later, when he was already in power, he spoke again of “the horror of the Communist international hate dictatorship” that had preyed on his mind at the beginning of his career: “I tremble at the thought of what would become of our old, overcrowded continent if the chaos of the Bolshevistic revolution were to be successful.”

National Socialism owed a considerable part of its emotional appeal, its militancy, and its cohesion to this defensive attitude toward the threat of Marxist revolution. The aim of the National Socialist Party, Hitler repeatedly declared, “is very brief: Annihilation and extermination of the Marxist world view.” This was to be accomplished by an “incomparable, brilliantly orchestrated propaganda and information organization” side by side with a movement “of the most ruthless force and most brutal resolution, prepared to oppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater terrorism.” At about the same time, for similar reasons, Mussolini was founding his Fasci di combattimento. Henceforth, the new movements were to be identified by the general name of “Fascism.”

But the fear of revolution would not have been enough to endow the movement with that fierce energy, which for a time seemed to stem the universal trend toward democracy. After all, for many people revolution meant hope. A stronger and more elemental motivation had to be added. And in fact Marxism was feared as the precursor of a far more comprehensive assault upon all traditional ideas. It was viewed as the contemporary political aspect of a metaphysical upheaval, as a “declaration of war upon the European… idea of culture.” Marxism itself was only the metaphor for something dreaded that escaped definition.

Anxiety was the permanent emotion of the time. It sprang from the intuition that the end of the war meant not only the end of familiar prewar Europe with its grandeur and its urge to world domination, its monarchies, and gilt-edged securities, but also the end of an era. Along with the old forms of government, the accustomed framework of life was being destroyed. The unrest, the radicalism of the politicalized masses, the disorders of revolution were interpreted as the afterpains of the war and simultaneously as harbingers of a new, strange, and chaotic age. “That is why the foundations of life quake beneath our feet.”⁶

Rarely has any age been so aware of its own transitional state. In accelerating the process, the war also created a general consciousness of it. For the first time Europe had a glimpse of what awaited it. Pessimism, so long the basic attitude of an elite minority, abruptly became the mood of the whole period.

The war had led to gigantic new forms of organization, which helped the capitalistic system attain its full development. Rationalization and the assembly line, trusts and tycoons pitilessly exposed the structural inferiority of smaller economic units.

The trend to bigness was also expressed in the extraordinary increase in cartels—from several hundred to approximately twenty-five hundred—so that in industry “only a few outsiders” remained unattached to some cartel. The number of independent businesses in the major cities had diminished by half in the thirty years before the World War. Now that war and inflation had destroyed their material base, their number dwindled more rapidly. The cruelty of the corporation, which absorbed, consumed, and dropped the individual, was felt more keenly than ever before. Fear of individual economic disaster became generalized. A considerable literature grew up around the theme that the individual’s function was disappearing, that man was becoming a cog in a machine he could not understand. “In general, life seems full of dread.”⁷

This fear of a standardized, termitelike existence was expressed in the hostility to increasing urbanization, to the canyon streets and grayness of the cities, and in lamentations over the factory chimneys cropping up in quiet valleys. In the face of a ruthlessly practiced “transformation of the planet into a single factory for the exploitation of its materials and energies,” belief in progress for the first time underwent a reversal. The cry arose that civilization was destroying the world, that the earth was being made into “a Chicago with a sprinkling of agriculture.”.

The early issues of the Volkische Beobachter give shrill voice to this panic. “How large must our cities still grow before a retroactive movement sets in, before the tenements are torn down, the accumulations of stone shattered, the caves ventilated and… gardens planted among the walls so that men can catch their breath again?” Prefabricated housing, Le Corbusier’s machines for living, the Bauhaus style, tubular steel furniture—the “technical matter-of-factness” on which such creations plumed themselves were a further threat to the traditionbound, who spoke of all this as “jailhouse style.” The romantic hostility to the modern world also gave rise to a large back-to-the-country movement in the twenties. The Artaman Leagues contrasted the earthbound happiness of the simple life to the woes of “asphalt civilization” and hailed the comfort of natural ties against the alienation of the urban world.

The abrupt and challenging breach with previous standards of morality touched people at their most sensitive point. Marriage, as a book titled Sexual Ethics of Communism (by E. Friedlander) stated, was nothing but the “evil spawn of capitalism”; the revolution would do away with it along with any prohibition against abortion, homosexuality, bigamy, or incest. But many of the members of the respectable middle classes still felt themselves guardians of time-honored morality and took such attacks as personal threats. In their minds marriage as a mere matter of civil registration, as it was understood in the Soviet Union, was just as intolerable as the “glass of water theory” that sexual desire, like thirst, was a natural appetite and should be satisfied without fuss. The fox trot and brief skirts; pleasure seeking in “Berlin, the national sewer”; the “swinish pictures” of Magnus Hirschfeld, the scientific explorer of sexual pathology; or the prototype of the stylish young man about town (“the rubber cavalier with sleeked-back hair, crepe-soled shoes and Charleston trousers”) aroused a shocked resentment in the popular consciousness, which in hindsight is hard to grasp and requires some effort on the historian’s part. The theater during the twenties staged celebrated provocations, treating of parricide, incest, and crime. There was a strong streak of self-mockery, typified by the final scene of the Brecht-Weill opera Mahagonny, where the actors step up to the footlights and raise placards reading “Up with the chaotic state of our cities,” “Up with love for hire,” “Up with honor for assassins,” or “Up with the immortality of vulgarity.”⁸

In the visual arts the revolutionary breakthrough had already come about before the First World War, though, as we have remarked, both in Vienna and Munich Hitler had paid scant attention to this development. Before the war the new art could be considered the quirk of a handful of visionaries. But against the background images of upheaval, revolution, and disintegration it took on the cast of an assault upon the traditional European conception of humanity. The Fauves, the Blaue Reiter, the Brucke, or Dada seemed to be as great a menace as the revolution, and in fact were branded by the popular phrase “cultural Bolshevism.” The defensive reaction was therefore just as furious; again what was feared was anarchy, arbitrariness, and formlessness. Modern art was “chaotic hack work”; that was the general opinion.

The fashionable pessimism of the time found a formula for all this: “the decline of the West.” It was feared the day would come when all these resentments would fuse and lead to exasperated counteraction. For the Germans, with their conservative temperament, reacted violently to these blithe inroads on familiar social and cultural forms. More than elsewhere, their quickly rising opposition could link up with attitudes and arguments of the end of the nineteenth century. The process of technical and economic modernization had been late in coming to Germany, but for that very reason struck with unusual speed and force. In the abruptness, thoroughness, and