“the wirepuller of the destinies of mankind.”18 The whole world was in danger, Hitler cried imploringly; it had fallen “into the embrace of this octopus.” He groped for images in which to make his horror tangible, saw “creeping venom,” “belly-worms,” and “adders devouring the nation’s body.” In formulating his anxiety he might equally hit on the maddest and most ludicrous phrases as on impressive or at least memorable ones. Thus he invented the “Jewification of our spiritual life,” “the mammonization of our mating instinct,” and “the resulting syphilization of our people.” He could prophesy: “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”19
The appearance of Hitler signaled a union of those forces that in crisis conditions had great political potential. The Fascistic movements all centered on the charismatic appeal of a unique leader. The leader was to be the resolute voice of order controlling chaos. He would have looked further and thought deeper, would know the despairs but also the means of salvation. This looming giant had already been given established form in a prophetic literature that went back to German folklore. Like the mythology of many other nations unfortunate in their history, that of the Germans has its sleeping leaders dreaming away the centuries in the bowels of a mountain, but destined some day to return to rally their people and punish the guilty world. Into the twenties pessimistic literature repeatedly called up these longings, which were most effectively expressed in the famous lines of Stefan George:
Around the same time, Max Weber also sketched a picture of the towering personality of the leader with what he termed “plebiscitary legitimacy” and the claim to “blind” obedience. But Weber saw such a leader as a counterforce to the inhuman bureaucratic organizational structures of the future. We would have to probe more deeply than is possible within the present context if we were to examine all the many sources from which the idea of the leader took support.
It is clear, however, that within the Fascistic movements the idea was again heavily influenced by the war. For those movements did not think of themselves as political parties in the traditional sense, but as militant ideological groups, as “parties above the parties.” And the struggle they took up with their sinister symbols and resolute miens was nothing but the prolongation of the war into politics with virtually unchanged means. “At the moment we are in the continuation of the war,” Hitler repeatedly proclaimed. The leader cult, viewed in terms of the “fiction of permanent warfare,” was in one sense the translation of the principles of military hierarchy to political organization. The leader was the army officer lifted to superhuman heights and endowed with supernal powers. Those powers were conferred by the craving to believe and the yearning to surrender self. The tramp of marching feet on all the pavements of Europe attested to the belief in militaristic models as offering a solution to the problems of society. It was the future-minded youth in particular who were drawn to these models, having learned through war, revolution, and chaos to prize “geometrical” systems.
The same factors underlay the paramilitary aspects of the Fascistic movements, the uniforms, the rituals of saluting, reporting, standing at attention. The insigne of the movements all came down to a few basic motifs— various forms of crosses (such as the St. Olaf’s cross of the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling and the red St. Andrew’s cross of Portugal’s National Syndicalists), also arrows, bundles of fasces, scythes. These symbols were constantly displayed on flags, badges, standards, or armbands. To some extent they were meant as defiance of the boring old bourgeois business of tailcoats and stiff collars. But primarily they seemed more in keeping with the brisk technological spirit of the age. Then, too, uniforms and military trappings could conceal social differences and bring some dash to the dullness and emotional barrenness of ordinary civilian life.
The combination of petty bourgeois and military elements gave the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) a peculiar dual character from the very start. This duality was apparent in the organizational division between the Storm Troops (SA) and the Political Organization (PO). It was apparent also in the confusing disparate character of the membership. For the party was made up of idealists as well as of social outcasts, of semicriminals as well as of opportunists. The oddly equivocal conservatism of most Fascistic organizations can also be traced to this initial dualism. For although these organizations were officially bent on preserving the troubled and violated world order, they nevertheless manifested—wherever they had the power—a desire for change without regard to tradition. An odd mixture of medievalism and modernity was typical of them all: they considered themselves a vanguard but stood with their backs to the future; they would plant their folkloristic villages on the asphalt pavements of a coercive totalitarian state. Once again, they dreamed the faded dreams of their forefathers and hailed a past in whose mists they saw glimmerings of a glorious future of territorial expansion: a new Roman Empire, a Spain of Catholic majesty, a Greater Belgium, Greater Hungary, Greater Finland. Hitler’s fling at hegemony, carefully planned, cold-blooded, and realistic as it was, and dependent on the most modern weaponry, was justified in the name of a quaint and vanished Germanism. The world was to be conquered for the sake of thatched roofs and an upright peasantry, for folk dances, celebrations of the winter solstice, and swastikas. Thomas Mann spoke of an “explosion of antiquarianism.”
But behind it there was always more than muddled reactionary impulses. Hitler was by no means interested in bringing back the good old days. The sentimental reactionaries who in persistent blindness supported him thought he would reinstitute the old feudal social structure. Hitler had no such ideas. What he proposed to overcome was the sum of human alienation caused by the development of civilization.
He was not counting on doing so by economic or social means, which he despised. Like Marinetti, one of the spokesmen of Italian Fascism, he regarded European socialism as a “despicable fuss over the rights of the belly.” Instead, he aimed at inner renewal out of the blood and the dark realms of the soul. What was wanted was not politics but the restoration of instinct. In its aims and slogans Fascism was not a class revolution but a cultural revolution; it claimed to serve not the emancipation but the redemption of mankind. One reason for its considerable appeal may well have been that it sought utopia where all paradises are located by the natural inclination of the human mind: in mythic, primordial states of the past. The prevailing fear of the future only strengthened the tendency to shift all apotheoses backward. In Fascistic conservatism, at any rate, the desire was to reverse historical development and to return once more to the starting point, to those better, more nature- oriented, harmonious times before the human race began to go astray. In a 1941 letter to Mussolini, Hitler wrote that the last 1,500 years had been nothing but an interruption, that history was on the point of “returning to the ways of yore.” Without attempting, perhaps, to restore the conditions of the past, it craved the past’s system of values, the style, the austerity, the morality, as a defense against the forces of dissolution thrusting from all sides. “At last a bulwark against approaching chaos!” as Hitler exclaimed.
In spite of all its revolutionary rhetoric, National Socialism could never conceal its basically defensive attitude, which contrasted perceptibly with the brash gladiatorial poses its advocates loved to adopt. Konrad Heiden called the Fascistic ideologies “boasts while in flight”; they were, he said, “fear of ascent, of new winds and unknown stars, a protest by the flesh, craving its rest, against the restless spirit.” And Hitler himself, soon after the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, remarked that he now understood how the Chinese had come to surround themselves with a wall. He, too, was tempted “to wish for a gigantic wall to shield the new East against the Central Asiatic masses. In spite of all history, which teaches that a people’s vigor slackens off in a bulwarked area.”
The success of Fascism in contrast to many of its rivals was in large part due to its perceiving the essence of the crisis, of which it was itself the symptom. All the other parties affirmed the process of industrialization and emancipation, whereas the Fascists, evidently sharing the universal anxiety, tried to deal with it by translating it
