Section 5
My next immediate impression of Adolf Hitler after the inaugural speech at the beginning of the winter semester of 1930/31 came when Hitler gave a speech one morning in 1931 or 1932 in the Weimar National Theater, to which my wife and I had also traveled from Jena. In front of the packed theater, Hitler explained the goals of his party. The key sentence of the speech, repeated often but with increasing intensity, was that nationalism and socialism must be linked. He raised one arm with a clenched fist above his head towards the other arm with a clenched fist, so that the fists touched each other under pressure. One fist was meant to represent nationalism, the other socialism. The Weimar audience may have been more nationalistic than socialist in their thinking, and so were not easily inspired or even enraged. Hitler broke off his escalation and repeated the same statements, first moderately and then more intensely, using similar or different words and phrases.
I had long been familiar with the works of the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon, particularly his book on the nature of the masses: Psychology of the Foules (1st edition 1895). Le Bon had explained that the masses could be won over mainly by: 1. affirmation pure and simple, 2. by repetition, but that masses would only become bored and ultimately apathetic if they were given proof of their claims. For Hitler, this was my impression from his speech in Weimar, it was above all a matter of forming a mass out of the audience, the many individuals, that would fall to him, and he succeeded in doing this by increasing the intensity of repetition.
When what was then and to some extent still is called “never-ending applause” finally broke out, he stopped and left the stage amid such applause.
Hitler's fist, representing socialism, may have had an effect on my mind, but not on my heart; on my mind, because like any insightful person after 1918, I had to say to myself that socialism would be inevitable in every industrialized and urbanized population; if this socialism were "national": so much the better!
In my school years, around the age of 17-18, I was attracted to socialism. Any intellectually active young person at that age will be attracted to anything that promises "revolution". But in my home in Baden at that time I could not see any of the socialism that Oswald Spengler later described with approval in his work "Prussianism and Socialism". Only recently did I read that there was no such socialism as Spengler's in Prussia. In Baden - at least for me - the socialism of 1905-1910 had a streak of malicious petty bourgeoisie, a resentment that expressed itself almost exclusively in denials, discontent and envy. Even the most harmless expressions of love of country were derided with a wry mouth as "hurrah patriotism". It was not revolutionary, as I would have imagined it. My socialist tendencies eventually faded away. Although as a student I had studied Ferdinand Lassalle's national socialism in depth, Hitler's Weimar speech, which I must confess was rather boring, only won the approval of my mind, which considered the situation and the threat posed by communism, but not of my heart.
But now I am faced with the question of whether a person of my disposition is at all capable and entitled to judge Hitler's eloquence. The following consideration: Years previously I had read Plutarch's life story of the Athenian Phocion, a statesman and general from the late period of Athens, whom the population, already a mass, bore with reluctance, but whom they nevertheless repeatedly elected as their leader in times of danger. Once, when Phocion was speaking to the assembly from the speaker's platform, where his friends were sitting next to him, he was interrupted by applause. He turned to his friends in astonishment and asked: "Have I said something wrong?" - Anyone who can enjoy such a story as I do will not be suitable for a state office in a late period such as ours, but will also hardly be suitable to judge Hitler's oratorical gift.
But now, like many others at that time and later, I had to ask myself: what would have become of Germany if speakers like Hitler and Goebbels had not called on the urban masses to fight against communism, which had been raging bloodily since Spartacus? Stalin would have sent his governor to Berlin under the protection of tanks, and his armies to the Channel coast. Against people like me who tried to annoy politicians with silly questions of taste, Stalin's commissars would have had the simple option of a shot in the back of the neck.
After the speech, listeners who were close to the NSDAP gathered in a Weimar hotel, including my wife - who was, to my delight, completely apolitical - and I, although neither of us were party members. When I entered, I first looked for the seats at a long table that had been reserved for
my wife and me. I found them and was chatting with some of the other guests when my gaze fell on the other side of the hall. There, at the end of the table, at a large round table, sat Adolf Hitler all alone. I thought this was an unforgivable error of "protocol", i.e. of Hitler's followers, and explained to my wife that something like this should not happen, and that I would therefore sit
next to Hitler until the meal began. That's what happened: I went over to the round table, greeted Hitler politely, spoke a few words with him and finally sat down opposite him without being asked. We spoke a bit, he was rather absent and monotonous, I, as with the "first impression", was anxiously considering what I should say in response to his words. I don't remember the details; the situation was quite embarrassing for me, as I had to think quickly. But I believe that I was able to cope with the situation and showed the necessary politeness. Finally, a follower approached Hitler and said a few words to him that I didn't understand. Hitler's interest in this follower was as small as his interest in me. But I was able to use the opportunity to say goodbye.
Was Hitler still thinking about the impact of his speech? Was he still considering what he could have said differently and more effectively?
On the other side of the hall, near the place reserved for my wife and me, I unexpectedly came across Goebbels. I don't remember whether we had already been introduced to each other or whether I introduced myself in the hall. In any case, we spoke to each other, and immediately with lively mutual attention; we also quickly found ourselves making jokes. Goebbels, the demagogue, had been unpleasant to me in this very capacity since Sweden; I found Goebbels, the human being, to be a pleasant, articulate and stimulating conversation partner, although I did not like his answers to my questions about the aims of the NSDAP, which were as innocuous as possible. When the meal was served, we parted amicably. I never met him again after that; I was convinced that Goebbels rejected me as an anthropologist, or at least suspected me.
According to Voltaire, there is only one unbearable genre, the boring one, le genre ennuyeux. Goebbels certainly did not belong to this genre. But I found him repulsive as a demagogue. For a long time I could not shake the impression of Hitler sitting alone at the table. As far as I could tell after the meal - as a civilized person I could not turn around to look at Hitler during the meal - there was no real "contact" between Hitler and his entourage or between him and the other people. But Hitler left soon after the meal, while the rest of us left the hotel gradually. This encounter was the last one I have to report, apart from a very brief encounter in 1935, which I will mention later.
So I had to rely on observations by others who had met him, or on occasional recordings of the "weekly newsreel" and pictures of Hitler, as well as his speeches, as far as I heard them on the radio. All of this together gave me an impression that I tried to convey to my trusted circle as follows: "He may well be a human being, but he is not a fellow human being." I ask that you attribute the doubts about his humanity to my regrettable penchant for satire; I held on to the doubts about his fellow human being - at least for myself - for more than two decades, until my impression was confirmed by the testimony of two military leaders who had spoken to Hitler often and at length, and who had therefore had the opportunity to understand his psychological nature.
I found these testimonies by chance in newspapers, copied them out, but unfortunately lost the transcripts. They were written by the Colonel Generals Lothar Rendulic and Heinz Guderian and described a lack of relationships with other people, which is usually described today as "weakness in contact": Hitler did not get close to anyone; around him - wrote Rendulic - there was no man's land, like around Caesar and Napoleon. (I cannot agree with this assessment by Caesar, the connoisseur of human nature; it is contradicted by the reports of Roman contemporaries about Caesar's winning amiability in human interactions, about his urbanitas and comitas.) As I recall, Guderian wrote that Hitler had no friend in whom he could confide, and probably no woman came close to him either; he was always the one without relationships, whose isolation no one could penetrate. The late sculptor Tank, who had met and spoken to Hitler several times in an artistic circle, shared this opinion. He wrote in a magazine: "My first impression was that of a loner, with whom I could not empathize, so that I had to analyze him as if he were an alien being." So the sculptor, who was trained in capturing human characteristics in figures and faces, had the same experience as me. In a letter addressed to me, Tank had told me that Hitler was a mystery to him. But I had already felt something like the inability to be a fellow human being in Weimar.
If other people have had a different impression of Hitler, if such people have described him as an easy-going or even sociable person, then I fear that I have to assume that these people did not have the ability of a Tank, Rendulic or Guderian: to grasp more than the surface and external surfaces, or even to penetrate into the depths of a person like Hitler. But I must allow every reader to ask whether people like Tank or myself would have grasped the whole Hitler with their impression.
I would also like to explain a suspicion that I have always had about Hitler from Hitler's inability to be a fellow human being. I can express it with one of Kant's categorical imperatives: In my opinion, Hitler always saw other people as means, means to his political ends, never as an end at the same time. According to Kant, however, I should always treat other people as an end, never just as a means; dealing with another person should also promote this.
"He may well be a human being, but he is not a fellow human being" - that is probably how I would have expressed myself in my closest circle about Calvin, about this sinister man, if I had had to live in Geneva at the time. Based on contemporary reports, I would even doubt that Calvin was ever a fellow human being of his wife Idelette de Bure. The cold lack of relationships of this reformer, who judged his fellow citizens in the name of his Old Testament God, was probably only bearable for Idelette because her biblical faith required her to love such a sublime man of God with reverence. The lack of fellow human beings in Calvin is reported in the biographies that are not intended to be edifying - I mention, for example, Mc. Neill, The Character of Calvinism, 1945.
According to Lange-Eichbaum, Calvin was an "extremely schizoid psychopath"; he was the "Iypus of the fanatic". This fanaticism is also evident in the biographies, which are not intended to be edifying. The ordonnances ecclesiastiques issued between 1541 and 1545, which were implemented with relentless severity, give a horrific picture of the Genevan theocracy: fines, banishments, imprisonments, executions, punishments and torture of sorcerers and witches, etc. Historians estimate that around 300 executions, including the execution of children, were pronounced by the ecclesiastical court presided over by Calvin, with 17 death sentences in 1561 alone. One citizen had his tongue pierced for blaspheming the clergy. Harmless entertainment, such as dancing, was forbidden. Spy officers monitored the citizens; Those who did not attend church on Sunday or who did not show respect in church were punished, including children. Of all of these, the only one known is the burning of the noble Spaniard Servedo, who was accused of being a heretic and had previously been treated shamefully in prison. However, the reformer Calvin had reported him to the Papal Inquisition there as a heretic when Servedo was in Lyon.
Calvin saw himself as a tool of God, as a called and humble administrator of divine truth and justice. He was convinced that heretics must be executed for the glory of the Almighty. In a letter that reveals insight and self-knowledge, he once laments "the wild beast of his nature". He was, as Karl Jaspers wrote, "the pinnacle of that incarnation of Christian intolerance against which there is nothing but intolerance".
But a comparison of Hitler with Calvin is not really part of my "impression," because this comparison only occurred to me in the 1950s, when I was studying the history of the Reformation, that is, only after I had heard credible information about the atrocities ordered or permitted by Hitler, especially about the "final solution" to the Jewish question. Therefore, I am not comparing the deeds and misdeeds of the two men here, but only the fanaticism inherent in both men. But I had already noticed this in the living Hitler, just as the Hitler of the "fighting period" had already seemed to some people like a man possessed. I later learned that Hitler as a speaker seemed to some observers like a man possessed. The widow of a high-ranking party member, who had heard and seen Hitler speak up close at private events in Berlin in the early days of the NSDAP, told me some time ago that she had been horrified by the way in which he had incited his subordinates with his sweat-stuck hair hanging over his forehead and with his hands spread. Even then, she had a different opinion of Hitler than her husband, who later died. So Hitler already seemed like a fanatic to many people in the 1920s, which I experienced in Norway and Sweden.
If a fanatic is a person who is so entrenched in his moral, ecclesiastical or political views that he can no longer see the legitimacy of other views, even to a small extent, but sees doubts about his own views as malice or hostility, then Hitler was also a fanatic and in this respect, as well as in his heightened sense of mission, he can be compared to Calvin, from whom he differed in other ways, however. Hitler loved the word "fanatical" and often used it emphatically in public. Since I had hated this word from my youth and, according to historical evidence, considered fanaticism to be an essentially oriental characteristic, in any case a decidedly un-German emotion, I was horrified every time I heard this word from Hitler's mouth while listening to the radio. I therefore clearly remember that Hitler once or several times after the war began, in a passionate, trembling speech, assured me: "If I return from this war, it will only be as an even more fanatical National Socialist." Dismayed, I said to my wife: "Then I will ask for early retirement and we will emigrate to Norway or to the Gaels in northern Scotland." I was not prepared to endure any more fanaticism. (Schultze-Naumburg had shown me pictures of the
fishing villages of the Celtic Gaels. I wanted to imagine these Celts as less anti-German than the Scots, and the Scots in turn as less anti-German than the English.)
The fanatical words quoted above meant that the compulsion to mass existence, which had been prepared since 1919, which had been understood since 1933 as a temporary means of restoring order in Germany, and since 1939 as a necessity for the duration of the war, was to continue even after a victory of the German armies - to continue until the socialist suppression of the freedom of the individual, as foreseen by J. St. Mill and H. Spencer.
After 1933, Hitler saw National Socialism as an end in itself rather than a means of restoring order. A lady who dared to say something like that in 1933 once asked Hitler when the last paragraph of the party program, which promised the dissolution of the NSDAP after a victory for the party, would be fulfilled. Hitler replied gruffly: "There is still a lot to do."
Hitler's fanaticism, like some fanaticisms combined with an exaggerated sense of mission, hardly evident in his speeches on foreign policy but in many domestic policy speeches, also in the arm movements accompanying these speeches and in his facial expressions, made it easy for his domestic and foreign policy enemies to prove through film footage and records - some of them may have been faked - that Hitler was "the type of fanatic", as Calvin was called. But when has an important German statesman or general, poet or thinker ever been fanatical? Have Germans ever used the word "fanatical" in a laudatory sense? Hitler's style of speech was never the "classic" style of a Pericles, always the style of a Cleon.
If "classicism" is, in the words of Wolfgang Schadewaldt, "the nobility of intellectual humanity, raised to the principle of form", then we live in a completely unclassical time and Hitler's style of speech was also unclassical. The style of Richard Wagner, whom Hitler highly valued - and who forced himself on the listener through exaggerations - is the counterexample to the "classical" style of Willibald Gluck, who kept a moderate distance from the listener. I will just mention the prelude to Gluck's "Iphigenie in Aulis". Compared to Gluck, not only the "works" of contemporary "music" but the "works" of all art forms praised by the press are unworthy, distorted and mocking of all human dignity, especially the dignity of the female sex. But the language of politics in Europe and North America has also been unclassical since 1919, because it no longer seeks to convince mature peoples but to persuade immature masses.
Hitler's sense of mission was of oriental strength. He did not shy away from publicly thanking "Providence" for having appointed him leader in such a situation in the German Reich. This sense of mission enabled him to achieve things that hardly anyone else could have done. This sense of mission also seems to have penetrated Hitler, who had been mentally shattered by the "remedies" of his personal physician - whom he had chosen.
Hitler's personal doctor: One evening in the internment camp I visited a fellow camp member in his room, a Silesian count of my age. Some comrades from an outside detail came back to their room and one of them said that he had read in a newspaper in town that Hitler had had a personal doctor; he mentioned the name, a name that was rare in Germany but more common
in England. The count banged his fist on the table and shouted: "What, that scoundrel! He drove my wife crazy." He reported that the countess, who was suffering from a nervous illness, had been treated by this doctor in Berlin, but that his medicines had destroyed her mind. He had therefore withdrawn her from this treatment and taken her to a sanatorium, from which she was released after a long time, cured. I later saw a picture of this doctor. How could Hitler have tolerated such a face around him every day? Knowledge of human nature?
With his sense of mission of almost oriental strength and with his fanaticism, Hitler can be reminiscent of Muhammad. Muhammad combined his fanaticism and sense of mission with clever consideration, his emotion by Allah, his chosenness, with an unswerving sense of reality and a considered adaptation to the changing external situation, unshakably convinced of his calling and equally convinced that other people were subject to error, but not he.
It is, however, more obvious to compare Hitler with Cromwell, especially since Hitler is said to have regarded this English statesman and military leader as one of his role models. A talented writer has written a novel about the Roman dictator Sulla in Hitler's honour, and another talented writer, understanding the "signs of the times", has written a novel about Cromwell. Now I must admit that I am biased towards Cromwell. I was never obliged to make an "objective" judgement about him, nor to make such a judgement about the Catholic Stuart king, whom the Protestant Cromwell sentenced to death. So I was quite allowed to express my dislike and like "subjectively" and must admit that my like was and will be for King Charles I (1600-1649), and my dislike for the Lord Protector Cromwell.
The king was not a great statesman, given his lack of sense of reality and his wavering judgment, and was also unreliable to his advisors because of his wavering, but he was always noble, art-loving, conscientious and morally pure, and he wanted the well-being of his people. The portrait of the king, painted by van Dyck, can win the viewer over to this amiable and noble person.
Cromwell saw himself as chosen by God - a God who, however, for the Anglo-Saxons' Calvinist piety was more of an Old Testament God than a New Testament God - chosen for the glory and growing power of a Puritan-Protestant England, to which world domination was due. When his letters mention the atrocities he ordered and permitted in the wars of conquest against the Catholic Irish, he always adds that he had carried them out as a servant of God. According to the psychiatrist H. Freimark, Cromwell was a hysteroepileptic. His sense of mission can thus be described as pathological, an exception in the Western world. My aversion to this pious general and statesman was strengthened when I saw Cromwell's death mask in Warwick Castle, the face of a "chosen" brute. If it is true that Cromwell was Hitler's model, what traits in this man's character and what successes as a statesman attracted Hitler? Did he find the Lord Protector's all-monitoring secret police exemplary? Did he find the suppression of freedom of the press, which Cromwell ordered to the chagrin of his Secretary of State, the poet Milton, worthy of imitation?
However, I do not want to tempt anyone to accept my assessment of the English statesman and general without considering it, and so I refer you to a book that was published in 1935 and which, as the subtitle "Four Essays on the Leadership of a Nation" might suggest, was probably intended both to encourage and to admonish Hitler: Hermann Oncken, Cromwell - as an admonition also because Oncken was keen to portray Cromwell as a Christian statesman and general. He sees Cromwell's greatness in "taking responsibility for his people, whom he knew to be bound to God", but also in leading an army "burning with religious fire". Oncken emphasises the "biblical" piety of Cromwell and his followers as well as his army, a piety that was convinced, according to the Psalms and the Prophets, that God's kingdom would come to no other people than the English. Oncken has overlooked the fact that only those who believe that the New Testament and, above all, the Sermon on the Mount constitute true Christianity can be considered Christian statesmen and generals. Nevertheless, I refer to this book from 1935 as a counterweight to my assessment.
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