A week after the meeting in the Hofbrauhaus the DAP also changed its name. Borrowing from the related German and Austrian groups, it called itself National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—NSDAP) and simultaneously adopted the battle symbol of its Austrian counterparts, the swastika. Dr. Walter Riehl, chairman of the Austrian national socialists, had shortly before set up an “international secretariat” that was to serve as a liaison office for all national socialist parties. There already existed active contacts with various other such groups espousing racial-socialist programs, above all the German Socialist Party of Alfred Brunner, a Dusseldorf engineer. This party tried to be extremely leftish and boasted, “Our demands are more radical than those of the Bolshevists.” It had units in many of the larger cities. The one in Nuremberg was headed by a schoolteacher named Julius Streicher.
On April 1, 1920, Hitler finally left the army, for he at last had an alternative. He was determined to devote himself henceforth entirely to political work, to seize the leadership of the NSDAP, and to build the party according to his own ideas. He rented a room at 41 Thierschstrasse, near the Isar River. Although he spent most of his days in the cellar headquarters of the party he avoided being listed as a party employee. What he lived on was something of a mystery, and enemies within the party soon raised this question. His landlady thought the somber young man monosyllabic and seemingly very busy, a “real bohemian.”
His self-confidence grew, based on his talent for oratory, his coldness, and his readiness to take risks. He had nothing to lose. Ideas as such mattered little to him. In general he was less interested in a concept than in its potential uses, in whether, as he once remarked, it could yield a “powerful slogan.” His total lack of comprehension for thinking without politically malleable substance came out in his outbursts of “detestation” and “profoundest disgust” for the “antiquated folkish theoreticians,” the “bigmouths,” and “idea thieves.” Similarly, he took the floor for his earliest rhetorical displays only when he had something to strike back at polemically. For him it was not evidence that made an idea persuasive but handiness, not truth but the idea’s aptness as a weapon. “Every idea, even the best,” he noted, “becomes a danger if it parades as a purpose in itself, being in reality only a means to one.” Elsewhere he emphasized that in the political struggle force always needs the support of an idea— significantly, he did not put it the other way round. He regarded National Socialism, too, as chiefly a means to his own ambitious ends. It was merely a romantic, attractively vague cue with which he stepped on the stage. The idea of reconciliation implicit in the phrase seemed more modern, closer to the needs of the age, then the slogans of class struggle. The conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who in the early years of the century had promulgated the idea of nationalistic socialism, now declared that it was “certainly a part of the German future.” Its potentiality was above all apparent to the cool politicians who had axes to grind. There were many such men, all competing in the same game. But before long Hitler knew that he himself would be that part of the German future.
Local Triumphs
This Hitler will some day be our greatest!
In those arduous and intoxicated days of his entrance into politics, in the spring of 1920, Hitler was not much more than a local Munich agitator. Night after night he made his way through boisterous smoke-filled taverns to win frequently hostile or scoffing audiences over to his doctrines. His reputation increased steadily. The temper of the city was susceptible to his theatrical style and favored his success as much as the more tangible historical factors.
In the rapture of those first oratorical triumphs, he was capable of extraordinary feats.
His “talent for combination” seized upon the most disparate elements and fitted them together into compact formulas. He learned more from his opponents than from his models or comrades; he always admitted this frankly. He had learned a great deal from the opposite camp; only fools or weaklings feared that in adopting ideas from others they would lose their own. And so he put together Richard Wagner and Lenin, Gobineau, Nietzsche and Le Bon, Ludendorff, Lord Northcliffe, Schopenhauer and Karl Lueger, and formed a composite. The system was arbitrary, queer, full of half-educated rashness, but it had a certain coherence. Mussolini and Italian Fascism also fitted into it, and their importance was to grow. Hitler even took lessons from the so-called Wise Men of Zion; though by now it had been conclusively proved that the “Protocols” were forgeries,12 that did not lessen the power of their Machiavellian theses.
But Hitler learned his most lasting lessons from Marxism. The energy he devoted to the development of a National Socialist ideology, in spite of his essential indifference to such matters, testifies to the effects of the Marxist model upon him. One of the starting points for his political activity was the insight that the traditional bourgeois type of party could no longer match the force of the leftist mass organizations. Only a similarly organized but even more resolute ideological party would be able to combat Marxism.13
Tactically, he learned most from the experiences of the revolutionary period. The Bolshevik take-over and the soviet rule in Bavaria had shown how a handful of determined men could seize power. From Lenin one could learn how to heighten a revolutionary impulse, from German socialists like Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann how such an impulse could be wasted. Hitler later declared:
I have learned a great deal from Marxism. I admit that without hesitation. Not from that boring social theory and materialist conception of history, not at all from that absurd nonsense…. But I’ve learned from their methods. Only I seriously went about doing what these little tradesmen and secretary minds timidly started. The whole of National Socialism is implicit in that. Just examine it closely…. These new methods of political struggle do go back to the Marxists in their essentials. I needed only to take over these methods and develop them, and in essentials I had what we needed. I needed only to pursue consistently what the Social Democrats interrupted ten times over, because they wanted to carry out their revolution within the framework of a democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism could have been had it freed itself from the absurd, artificial link with a democratic system.14
He not only applied everything he took over consistently; he also went much further than his model. In his nature there was an infantile fondness for the grand, surpassing gesture, a craving to impress. He dreamed of superlatives and was bent on having the most radical ideology, just as later on he was bent on having the biggest building or the heaviest tank. He picked up his tactics and his aims, as he later observed, “from all the bushes alongside the road of life.” He himself contributed the harshness and consistency with which he applied everything, the characteristic boldness about taking the last step.
At the beginning he went at things according to a sensible plan. His first task was a personal one, to break out of anonymity, to emerge from the welter of small-time nationalist-racist parties with an unmistakable image. When he recounted party history in his later speeches he would always allude to his unimportant beginnings— evidence of the pain of those days when he had known the pangs of repressed ambition and unrecognized greatness. With a total lack of scruple, which was the real novelty of his public life and which once and for all proclaimed his refusal to abide by any rules or conventions, he now set about making a name for himself—by unceasing activity, by brawls, scandals, and riots, even by terrorism if that would bring him to the forefront. “Whether they represent us as clowns or criminals, the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again.”15
This intention shaped the style and methods of all he did. The garish red of the party’s banners was chosen not only for its psychological effect but also because it provocatively usurped the traditional color of the Left. The posters also would often be a blatant red. They would have a slogan for headlines and offer a pithy editorial in gigantic format. To further the impression of bigness and forcefulness the NSDAP repeatedly organized street processions. Its leaflet distributors and poster squads went about tirelessly. In acknowledged imitation of leftist
