Intending to take over and dominate the demonstration, he set out in a special train with some 800 men, a display of standards, and a sizable contingent of band musicians. On arrival he was asked not to march into the city in a solid formation. According to his own report, he “flatly refused” the request and ordered his men to march in formation “with bands playing.” Growing hostile crowds formed along both sides of the street. But since the expected mass riot did not begin, they had no sooner reached the meeting hall when Hitler ordered his units to march back the way they had come. Moreover, he added a theatrical touch that brought the tension to an intolerable height: the bands stopped playing and the men marched only to throbbing drumrolls. This time the predictable street battle erupted. It dragged on in a series of small skirmishes all through the day and into the night, and ultimately the National Socialists emerged as the victors.
This was the first of those challenges to the political authorities that were to dominate the following years. Significantly, Cohurg became one of the most reliable NSDAP bases. The participants in the trip were honored by a special medal struck as a memorial to the occasion. The braggadocio of Hitler’s men during the following weeks repeatedly led to rumors of coups. Finally, Interior Minister Schweyer sent for Hitler and issued a grave warning. If there were any resort to force, Schweyer said, he would order the police to shoot. But Hitler assured him he would “never as long as I live make a putsch.” He gave the minister his word of honor.
Such incidents as this, however, encouraged him to think that he could call the next move. All these bans, summonses, and warnings were evidence of how far he had come, starting from nothing. In his emotional states he envisioned a historic role for himself. For confirmation there were Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s seizure of power in Ankara and Mussolini’s recent march on Rome. All keyed up, he listened to an informant describe how the black shirts, thanks to their enthusiasm, resolution, and the benevolent passivity of the army, had marched tempestuously to victory, snatching one city after the other from the “Reds.” Later Hitler spoke of the enormous impetus this “turning point in history” had given him. Very much as in his boyhood, he let himself be carried away on the wings of imagination. At such times he would vividly see the swastika banner “fluttering over the Schloss in Berlin as over the peasant’s hut.” Or during some quiet coffee break he would casually remark, returning from some distant dream world, that in the next war “the first order of business would be to seize the grain-growing areas of Poland and the Ukraine.”
Coburg had given him fresh confidence. “From now on I will go my way alone,” he declared. Only a short time before he had still thought of himself as a harbinger and dreamed that “one day someone will come along, with an iron cranium and possibly with filthy boots, but with a pure conscience and strong fist, who will put an end to the blabber of these armchair heroes and give the nation deeds.” Now, tentatively at first, he began to think of himself as the coming man and actually ended by comparing himself to Napoleon. His army superiors during the war would not promote him to a noncom on the ground that he would be incapable of arousing respect. Now, by his extraordinary and ultimately devastating capacity to evoke loyalty, he demonstrated his talent for leadership. For it was solely for his sake that his followers went to the lengths they did; it was only with eyes on him that they were ready to stake their lives, trample over their own compunctions, and from the very beginning to commit crimes. He liked to be called “Wolf” in his intimate circle; the name, he decided, was the primitive Germanic form of Adolf. It accorded, moreover, with his jungle image of the world and suggested the qualities of strength, aggressiveness, and solitariness. He also used “Wolf” as a pseudonym occasionally and later gave it to the sister who ran his household. And when it was decided to establish the Volkswagen plant, Robert Ley declared: “We shall name the town Wolfsburg, after you, my Fuhrer.”36
He early developed a sense that all his actions were taking place under the eyes of the “goddess of history.” Though his real party membership number was 555, he invariably claimed to be member number 7. This not only raised his status as an early member but gave him the nimbus of a magic number. Along with this he began blotting out his private life. He made a principle of not inviting even the most intimate members of his entourage to his home. He tried as far as possible to keep them apart from one another. Meeting one of his early acquaintances in Munich at this time, he urgently begged him “never to give information to anyone, not even his closest party comrades, about his youth in Vienna and Munich.” He tried out poses, attitudes, posturings; at the start he often made rather a botch of them and showed the strain of trying to be what he was not. But even in the later years close study will separate out the strands, show the constant alternation between rehearsed self-control and attacks of literally senseless rage, between Caesaristic postures and lax stupefaction, between his artificial and his natural existence. In this early phase of the process of stylization he seemed unable to hold to his image consistently. He had only begun to sketch it, and the various elements were hardly congruous. An Italian Fascist at the time saw him as “a Julius Caesar with Tyrolean hat.”
Still and all, he had very nearly attained the dream of his youth. He was living unattached, without the bother of an occupation, subject only to his own whims; he was “master of his time” and, moreover, his drama, explosive effects, glitter and applause. It was an artist’s life, more or less. He drove fast cars, cut something of a figure at various salons, and was at home in the “great world” among aristocrats, captains of industry, notables, and scientists. There were moments when he thought of settling for bourgeois security within the present framework. He would not ask much, he commented at such times: “All I desire is for the movement to keep going and for me to make a living as chief of the
But those were moods. Such modesty did not really suit his nature. He had no sense of proportion; some demon was constantly driving him to the edge of the possible and beyond. “Everything in him urged him on to radical and total solutions,” the friend of his youth had concluded. Now another observer tersely called him a fanatic, “with a streak of craziness in him. Now that he is being pampered, he is altogether out of control.”
Certainly the period of painful obscurity was over, and in hindsight Hitler had come an amazingly long way. Even the neutral onlooker must be astounded at the personal progress he had made in the past three years. He was quite a different person from the pallid and inconsequential drifter he had been at thirty. His life seemed to be made out of two wholly separate pieces. With extraordinary boldness and coldness, he had emerged from his condition as underling. All he needed now was to become a little more polished, to get used to his new part. Everything else suggested that he was on the point of entering a new and larger sphere of action to which he was entirely equal. At any rate Hitler had proved able to cope with whatever came his way, taking in at a glance people, motivations, forces, ideas, and bending everything to his own aim—the enlarging of his power.
Not unreasonably, his biographers have tended to look for a particular “breakthrough experience.” They have spoken of incubation periods, the disappearance of some block or other, and even demonic powers. But perhaps he was now no different from what he had been, except that he had found some key to himself and been able to reshuffle the unchanged existing elements of his personality into a new arrangement, so that the oddball was transformed into a magnetic demagogue, the “dreamer” into the man of action. He was the catalyst of the masses; without contributing anything new, he set in motion enormous accelerations and crises. But the masses in turn catalyzed him; they were his creation and he, simultaneously, was their creature. “I know,” he said to his public in phrases of almost Biblical ring, “that everything you are, you are through me, and everything I am, I am through you alone.”
In that lies the explanation for the peculiar rigidity which was present almost from the start. In fact Hitler’s world view had not changed since his days in Vienna, as he himself was wont to declare. For the elements remained the same; all that the masses’ grand cry of reveille did was to charge that world view with enormous tension. But the emotions themselves, the fears and obsessions, were fixed. Hitler’s taste in art also, and even his personal preferences, remained what they had been in the days of his boyhood and youth: Tristan and starchy foods, neoclassicism, anti-Semitism, Karl Spitzweg, and a weakness for cream cake. Though he later declared that while in Vienna he had been “in respect to thinking a babe-in-arms,” in a sense he had always remained so. If we compare the drawings and painstaking water colors of the twenty-year-old postcard painter with those of the First World War soldier or with those of the Chancellor twenty years later, their quality hardly differs. No personal experience, no process of development is reflected in these tight little sketches. As if petrified, Hitler remained what he had been.
Yet it may be that these immature features were essential for Hitler’s successes. From the summer of 1923 on, the nation reeled from one crisis and emergency to the next. Under such circumstances, fortune favored only the man who despised circumstances, who instead of engaging in politics challenged fate, and who promised not to improve conditions but to overturn them radically and thoroughly. “I guarantee you,” Hitler phrased it, “that the impossible always succeeds. What is unlikeliest is surest.”
