painfully held together and straining to fly apart. This government was headed by the Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Muller. When diminished tax receipts forced rigorous belt tightening, a stubborn fight ensued between the capitalistic and the left-wing groups within the government, each trying to make the other assume the burdens of the Depression.
Actually, by this time it was obvious that nobody was going to be spared. The most prominent characteristic of the Depression in Germany was its totality. Although the ancillary economic and social consequences in, say, England—and especially in the United States—were no less far-reaching, they did not lead in those countries to an overwhelming psychological crisis that destroyed all political, moral, and intellectual standards and was felt to be something far greater than its specific causes: a shattering of faith in the existing order of the world. The turn of events in Germany simply cannot be adequately considered in terms of the objective economic conditions. For it was more than an economic slump; it was a psychological shock. Weary of everlasting troubles, their psychic resistance worn thin by war, defeat, and inflation, sick of democratic rhetoric with its constant appeals to reason and sobriety, people let their emotions run rampant.
First reactions, to be sure, were nonpolitical: resignation in the face of the fatefulness and inscrutable character of the disaster. People thought primarily about their own survival, about the daily trek to the employment offices, standing in front of grocery stores or on breadlines. And along with all the trivial daily vexations, there was the terrible idleness of men who had nothing to do but to hang around, apathetically or desperately, in dreary taverns, on street corners or in darkened apartments, feeling life was going to waste. In September, 1930, the number of jobless once again crossed the 3 million mark; a year later it had reached almost 4.5 million, and in September, 1932, more than 5 million—which was an improvement over the beginning of the year, for in January more than 6 million unemployed had been registered, not including temporary workers. Approximately every second family was directly affected, and from 15 million to 20 million persons found themselves dependent on the dole. This “relief” was in a sense sufficient to sustain life since, according to the figures of the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, it would take ten years to starve to death on it.
A sense of total discouragement and meaninglessness pervaded everything. Among the most striking concomitants of the Great Depression was an unprecedented wave of suicides. At first the victims were chiefly failed bankers and businessmen, but as the Depression deepened, members of the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie more and more frequently took their own lives. With their keen sense of status, many office workers, owners of small shops, and persons with small private incomes had long regarded poverty as a badge of social degradation. They suffered less from the deprivations than the disgrace. Quite often whole families chose death together. Dropping birth rates and rising death rates led to decreasing populations in at least twenty of Germany’s major cities. The combination of public misery and the unfeelingness displayed by a hard-pressed and sickly capitalism led to the sense that everything was doomed to go down to destruction very soon. And, as always, such eschatological moods were accompanied by wild hopes that sprang up like weeds, along with irrational longings for a complete alteration of the world. Charlatans, astrologers, clairvoyants, numerologists, and mediums flourished. These times of distress taught men, if not to pray, pseudoreligious feelings, and turned their eyes willy-nilly to those seemingly elect personalities who saw beyond mere human tasks and promised more than normality, order, and politics as usual—who offered, in fact, to restore to life its lost meaning.
With remarkable instinct, Hitler grasped these cravings and knew how to make himself the object of them. This was his hour in every sense. For the past years he had been given to spells of apathy, had seemed inclined to withdraw into private life. But this was over now. For a long while the factors that could rouse his energies had simply been missing. The Dawes Plan, the vexations imposed by the occupying forces, or Stresemann’s foreign policy had hardly lent themselves to his purposes. He must have been aware that the disproportion between these facts and the excitement he tried to whip up over them could all too easily lead to absurd effects. Now, however, he saw emerging that state catastrophe which made the perfect background for his demagogic flights. To be sure the staples of his propaganda remained what they had always been: Versailles and Stresemann’s foreign policy, parliamentarism and the French occupation, capitalism, Marxism, and above all the Jewish world conspiracy. But now each of these items could easily be linked with the prevailing malaise, with the misery everyone was conscious of.
Hitler surpassed all his rivals in knowing how to give the color of a political decision to the personal wishes and despairs of the masses, and to insinuate his own aims into those who held the most divergent views and expectations. When spokesmen of other parties encountered the populace, their own lack of faith became apparent despite their efforts to win the people. They, too, had no answers and could count only on the solidarity of the powerless in the face of disaster. Hitler, on the other hand, took an optimistic and aggressive tone. He showed confidence in the future and cultivated his animosities. “Never in my life,” he declared, “have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days.”3
Hitler was also able to ring many changes on his cries of alarm. He appealed to bewildered people terrified by the prospect of being declassed, people who felt threatened equally by the Right and the Left, by capitalism and by Communism, and who blamed the existing system for having failed them. The program Hitler outlined rejected everything: it was anticapitalistic and antiproletarian, revolutionary and restorational; it conjured up its dire visions of the future along with nostalgic pictures of the good old days. It was of a piece with and helped sustain the paradox of a revolutionary attitude that denounced the present state of things and aimed at reinstating the way things used to be. Hitler deliberately cut across all the traditional fronts. But while he took up a radical position far outside the “system,” he kept asserting that he was in no way responsible for the prevailing misery, and that those very conditions proved how right he was in condemning the existing state of affairs.
As if to confirm his charges, the parliamentary institutions of the republic failed their first serious test. The coalition government fell apart in the spring of 1930, even before the Depression reached its peak. The end of the coalition was a signal for multitudes to abandon the republic. What precipitated the breakup of the coalition was a long-simmering but essentially trivial disagreement among the parties on how the costs of unemployment insurance were to be distributed. But in fact Chancellor Hermann Muller’s government was shattered by the general tendency to flee to the extremes, a tendency that manifested itself in all the political camps. The process revealed how thin the underlying support of the republic was, how little loyalty it could command. In the preceding few years the Weimar Republic had made some considerable achievements; but there had been a grayness about its competence, so that even during its best years it had, fundamentally, only bored people. It had remained for Hitler to tap those wellsprings which the republican politicians in their hard-working, commonplace efficiency had neither recognized nor utilized. Among these were: the craving for utopia and for suprapersonal goals; an idealism that welcomed the appeal to generosity and the spirit of sacrifice; the quest for leaders in whom the opaqueness of modern power processes would be made visible; and the demand for some interpretation of the present misery that would give heroic stature to those who were suffering it.
The slogans that formulated the “spiritual” alternatives did far more than the vague economic pledges to lead the disoriented masses toward the Nazi party. Hitler himself put aside his reservations about a mass party. For the first time the flexibility of the widely ramified party organization proved its worth. The NSDAP could effortlessly absorb the most heterogeneous elements, for it was not restricted to a single class and not hampered by a rigid program. It could offer room to persons of every background, every age, every motivation. Its membership appeared peculiarly structureless; certainly no strict class analysis applied to it. We would be wrong to see it solely as a movement of the reactionary bourgeois and peasant masses, whose impetus came chiefly from the material interests of its following. To take this view would be to miss the decisive factor in its rise.
Small tradesmen, peasants, industrialists and consumers had all become indispensable to the party. The manifold contradictions among these groups stood in the way of the formation of a class movement. Sooner or later every party had come up against this barrier. It seemed insuperable. Certainly in a period of intense economic and social distress it could not be overcome simply by making empty promises to all and sundry. There were too many politicians trying the same dodge; it soon ceased to fool anyone. Those who concerned themselves with material questions could win the masses only by promising higher wages and lower prices, more dividends and fewer taxes, better pensions, higher tariffs, higher prices to the farmers and lower prices to the consumers. But Hitler’s great trick was to leap over the economic contradictions and offer instead high-sounding principles. When he spoke of material interests it was chiefly to make an effective contrast between himself and his opponents. “I do not promise happiness and prosperity, like the others,” he would occasionally proclaim. “I can only say this one thing: we want to be National Socialists; we want to realize that we cannot rightfully be nationalistic and shout, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles’ when millions of us have to go on the dole and have
