The verdict handed down by the Munich Volksgericht was not so far removed from the verdict of “the eternal court of history” that Hitler had invoked. The presiding judge had a hard time cajoling the three lay judges into passing any guilty verdict at all; he had to assure them that Hitler would certainly be pardoned before serving his full sentence. The reading of the verdict was a real event for Munich society. The courtroom was crowded with spectators ready to applaud this troublemaker with so many friends in high places. The verdict once more laid stress on the “pure patriotic motives and honorable intentions” of the defendant, but sentenced him to a minimum of five years in prison. However, he would become eligible for parole after six months. Ludendorff was acquitted. The law called for the deportation of any troublesome foreigner, but the court decided to waive this in the case of a man “who thinks and feels in such German terms as Hitler.” This decision called forth a storm of approving bravos from the audience. When the judges had filed out, Brückner raised the cry: “It’s up to us now!” Hitler appeared at a window of the court building to show himself to the cheering crowd. Bouquets of flowers were piling up in the room behind him. The state had once again lost the match.
Nevertheless, it seemed as though Hitler’s period of ascent was over. To be sure, immediately after November 9, there had been mass demonstrations in Munich in his favor. The elections to the Bavarian Landtag as well as to the Reichstag brought sizable gains for the völkisch forces. Yet the party, or the front that had taken its place after it was banned, began to show the effects of Hitler’s absence. It would seem that only his personal magic and Machiavellian gifts held it together. It broke down into jealous, bitterly hostile factions of little significance. Drexler was already accusing Hitler of “destroying the party for good with his insane putsch.” The party had drawn its strength principally from general discontent; toward the end of 1923 this element was in somewhat shorter supply. Conditions in the country began to stabilize. The inflation was overcome, and the “happy years” of the so far ill-fated republic commenced. The events of November 9, though local in character, in a way represented the turning point in the larger drama of the Weimar Republic; they marked the end of the postwar period. The shots fired in front of the Feldherrnhalle seemed to introduce a new sobriety and draw the gaze of the nation away from dreams and delusions and back to reality.
For Hitler himself and the history of his party the debacle also proved a turning point, for the tactical and personal lessons he drew from it were to guide his entire future course. Later on, he would stage a memorial procession year after year, marching to the Königsplatz, where he called on the victims of that grim November day to rise from their bronze caskets and come to the last reveille. This may be explained not merely in terms of his love for theater, his penchant for turning historical event into political spectacle. It may also be seen as the act of a successful politician paying tribute to one of his most instructive experiences, indeed to “perhaps the greatest stroke of good luck” in his life, the “real birthday” of the party. For the first time the name of Hitler reached far beyond the boundaries of Bavaria. The party acquired martyrs, a legend, the romantic aura of persecuted loyalty, and the nimbus of stern resolve. “Let there be no mistake about it,” Hitler would stress in a later memorial address, “had we not acted then, I would never have been able… to found a revolutionary movement. People would have justifiably told me: you talk like all the others and you act as little as they.”
At the same time, Hitler’s dropping to the ground before the guns of the police at the Feldherrnhalle had clarified once and for all his relationship to government. The events of November 23 taught him that it was hopeless to attempt to conquer a modern state by violent means. His struggle for power would succeed only if he based it on the Constitution, he concluded. Of course, this did not mean any real deference to the Constitution on Hitler’s part; rather, it meant cloaking his illegal acts in the guise of legality. In subsequent years he left no doubt that all his protestations of loyalty to the Constitution were valid only for this interim period; he spoke openly of the time of reckoning that would follow. As early as September 24, 1923, Scheubner-Richter had stated in a memorandum: “The nationalist revolution must not precede the acquisition of political power; rather, control over the nation’s police constitutes the prerequisite to the nationalist revolution.” Hitler transformed himself into a man of strict law and order. Thus he won the good opinion of dignitaries and powerful institutions, and veiled his revolutionary intentions with untiring protestations of how well he was determined to behave and how dearly he cherished tradition. He muted his earlier aggressive tone, only now and then dropping into it for the shock effect. For he purported to seek not the defeat but the co-operation of the state. This pose deceived many observers and interpreters, and continued to deceive them. “Adolphe Légalité,” as some of his witty contemporaries dubbed him, could well be taken for a boring, reactionary petty bourgeois.
Hitler’s new strategy called for a changed relationship to the Reichswehr. He attributed his defeat on November 9 in no small part to his inability to win over the leaders of the army and the police. In his concluding words before the Munich court he already intimates the goal of his future tactics : “The hour will come,” he cried to the courtroom, “when the Reichswehr will be on our side.” With this goal in mind, he firmly consigned his own party army to a secondary role. But at the same time he freed his storm troops from their dependency on the army; the SA was to be neither a part nor a rival of the Reichswehr.
Hitler emerged from the defeat at the Feldherrnhalle, therefore, with a good deal more than a clearly formulated tactical recipe. His relationship to politics in general had changed. Up to this time he had distinguished himself by his categorical refusal to compromise, by his radical alternatives. He had behaved “like a force of nature,” had thought of politics—drawing his model from the battle fronts—as storming the enemy positions, breaking through the lines, fighting at close quarters, and coming out in the end either victorious or dead. Only now did Hitler seem to grasp the meaning and the opportunities of the political game, the tactical dodges, the sham compromises and maneuvers by which one played for time. Only now did he progress beyond his emotionally overcharged, naively demagogic, “artistic” relationship to politics. The image of the agitator carried away by events and by his own impulsive reactions was replaced by that of the cool and methodical technician of power. The unsuccessful putsch of November 9 marks an important caesura: it concludes Hitler’s political apprenticeship. In fact, strictly speaking, it marks Hitler’s first real entry into politics.
Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, and later governor of Poland, remarked at the Nuremberg trials that Hitler’s “entire historical life,” the “substance of his whole personality” were revealed in the course of the November putsch. The most striking qualities are the jumble of contradictory states of mind and the whipping up of his own emotions, which are so in character with the hysterical daydreaming and egotistic fantasies of the adolescent city planner, composer, and inventor—as are the sudden collapse, the desperate gambler’s grandiose gesture of abdication, the headlong plunge into apathy. In September he had told his entourage: “Do you know Roman history? I am Marius and Kahr is Sulla; I am the leader of the people, but he represents the ruling class. This time, however, Marius will win.” But with the first signs of difficulty he had dropped everything. He was not the man of action but its herald. He could set himself great tasks, that was clear, but his nerves were not equal to his lust for action. He had predicted a “battle of the Titans” and then disgracefully taken to his heels, “not wanting to have anything more to do with this mendacious world,” as he explained in court. He had once more played for highest stakes—and lost.
Yet he saved himself through rhetoric. His version of the incident revealed how little he understood reality and how well he understood how to present reality, color it, mold it to his propagandist purposes. The
elements of the gambler and the knight-errant were always present, as well as his propensity for the hopeless situation, the lost cause. In every critical juncture during 1923 Hitler had shown a pathological tendency not to leave himself any tactical options. He seemed always to be seeking out a wall to have at his back. He was always doubling his stakes, which were already too high for him. One might well consider this a suicidal mentality. Then again, he would always pour scorn on other politicians who tried to follow a prudent course, calling them “political Tom Thumbs.” He had nothing but contempt for those who “never expose themselves to extreme strain.” Bismarck’s description of politics as the art of the possible Hitler considered “a cheap excuse.” We can see a consistency, too, in the fact that from 1905 on he repeatedly threatened to take his own life. But he kept postponing the act until the very last moment, until the alternatives of world power or downfall ceased to exist, and nothing remained but a sofa in the shelter under the Berlin chancellery. Certainly much of his behavior continued to seem overwrought and verged on grandiose farce. But are we only projecting from later experience when we see the high-strung actor of that early phase already surrounded by an aura of catastrophe?
On that ambiguous noon of November 9, 1923, when the procession of demonstrators neared the Odeonsplatz, a passer-by had asked whether the man at the head of the marching column was “really that fellow from the street corner.” Now “that fellow” had entered history.
III. THE LONG WAIT
The Vision
They had better realize that we see events in terms of a historical vision.
Adolf Hitler
The laurel wreath Hitler hung on his wall in the Landsberg fortress-prison was more than a token that his spirit was unbroken. The forced isolation from political activity was of benefit to him politically and personally. For one thing, it permitted him to escape the aftermath of the disaster of November 9. He could follow the wrangles of his embittered and scattered adherents from the sidelines, while remaining the untarnished martyr of the nationalist cause. It also gave him time for introspection after years of almost mindless unrest and excitement. He recovered his faith in himself and in his mission. And, as his turbulent emotions died down, he felt himself strengthened in his role as leader of the völkisch right wing. He had at first claimed this role hesitantly, but in the course of the trial he became more confident, and finally he boldly came forth as the divinely appointed one and only Führer. Filled with this consciousness, Hitler managed to impress this image of himself upon his fellow prisoners. From this time on, the sense of mission never left him. It froze his features in that mask which no smile, no altruistic gesture, no moment of spontaneity ever softened. Even before the November putsch Dietrich Eckart had complained of Hitler’s delusions of grandeur, his “messiah complex.” Now Hitler hardened more and more into the monument that corresponded to his notions of what a great man and a Führer would be like.
Thus his imprisonment in no way hampered the process of self-stylization. In a subsequent trial some forty more participants in the putsch were convicted and sent to Landsberg. They included members of the “Hitler shock troop,” Berchtold, Haug, Maurice, Amann, Hess, Heines, Schreck, and the student Walter Hewel. Hitler now had what amounted to an entourage. The prison authorities were highly accommodating to the special requirements of their prisoner. When he took his meals in the large common room, at a special table with his followers, he was allowed to sit at the head of the table under a swastika banner. Fellow prisoners were assigned the task of cleaning and tidying his room. He himself was not required to participate in the work program or the prison athletics. It was taken for granted that his followers, on arrival at the prison, were to “report to the Führer without delay.” Every morning at ten o’clock, moreover, they came in for the daily “conference with the Chief.” Hitler devoted much of his time to his extensive correspondence. One adulatory letter he received came from a recent Ph.D. in philology named Joseph Goebbels, who commented on Hitler’s closing address at the trial: “What you stated there is the catechism of a new political creed coming to birth in the midst of a collapsing, secularized world…. To you a god has given the tongue with which to express our sufferings.[5] You formulated our agony in words that promise salvation.” He also received a letter from Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Hitler often took walks in the fortress garden. He was still having his old trouble arriving at a consistent style, for he combined his airs of a Caesar with Lederhosen, a Bavarian peasant jacket, and often a hat. When he spoke at the so-called comradeship evenings, we are told, “all the officials of the fortress gathered silently in the stairwell outside and listened.” As if wound up by his defeat, he continued to elaborate his legends and visions and to work out practical plans for the state, whose dictator he still expected to be. Supposedly the idea for the building of the autobahns and the creation of the Volkswagen dated from this period. Although visiting hours were officially restricted to six hours weekly, Hitler received visitors for up to six hours a day—adherents, petitioners, and friendly politicians, all of whom made the pilgrimage to Landsberg. The visitors included many women, for which reason the prison had been jokingly referred to as the “first Brown House.”1 On Hitler’s thirty-fifth birthday, with the trial not far behind him, the flowers and packages for the famous prisoner filled several rooms.
But principally he used his time for taking stock. He attempted to give some rational form to his jumble of emotions and to combine all the scattered pieces of earlier readings and half-baked ideas with his most recent literary gleanings into an organized ideological system. “This period gave me a chance to obtain clarity on certain concepts which I had previously understood only instinctively.”2
We know about Hitler’s reading matter only through what others have reported, for he himself very seldom spoke of books or favorite writers; like so many self-educated people, he was afraid of being considered derivative in his ideas. The only writer he mentioned fairly often and in various connections was Schopenhauer, whose works he claimed to have taken to the front with him, and from whom he could quote longish passages. He also referred to Nietzsche, Schiller, and Lessing. In an autobiographical sketch written in 1921 he maintains that in his youth he “thoroughly studied economic theory, as well as the entire anti-Semitic literature available at the time,” and he comments: “From my twenty-second year on, I threw myself with special eagerness upon writings on military and political matters, and I never ceased my probing preoccupation with general world history.” Yet he does not name a specific work in these fields. It was part of his character always to try to create the impression that he had mastered whole areas of knowledge. Similarly, he goes on to speak of his deep study of art history, cultural history, the history of architecture, and “political problems.” Yet it seems all too probable that up to the time of his imprisonment Hitler had acquired his knowledge of those areas only from second- or third-hand digests. Hans Frank mentions Hitler’s reading Nietzsche, Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, and Bismarck, as well as war memoirs of German and Allied statesmen—all this during the period in Landsberg. Yet he went on extracting the elements of his world view from pseudoscientific secondary works: tracts on race theory, anti-Semitic pamphlets, treatises on the Teutons, on racial mysticism and eugenics, as well as popular treatments of Darwinism and the philosophy of history.
In all that various witnesses have said about Hitler’s reading, the one detail that rings true is the description of his intensity, his hunger for material. Kubizek reports that back in Linz the young Hitler had cards at three separate libraries and never appeared before his mind’s eye other than surrounded by books. Indeed, Hitler’s vocabulary reflects extensive reading. Yet his speeches and writings, right up to the table talk, as well as the memoirs of his entourage, show him to have been remarkably indifferent to intellectual and literary questions; in the good 200 monologues that make up his table talk, the names of two or three German classics turn
up casually; Mein Kampf refers to Goethe and to Schopenhauer only once, and that in a somewhat tasteless anti-Semitic connection. In actual fact, knowledge meant nothing to Hitler; he was not acquainted with the pleasure or the struggle that go with its acquisition; to him it was merely useful, and the “art of correct reading” of which he spoke was nothing more than the hunt for formulations to borrow and authorities to cite in support of his own preconceptions: “correctly coordinated within the somehow existing picture.”3
At the beginning of July Hitler plunged into the writing of Mein Kampf in the same immoderate spirit he had shown in his reading. He finished the first part in three and a half months. He later commented that he had had “to write in order to get everything off my chest.” “The typewriter rattled late into the night, and he could be heard in his little room dictating to his friend Hess. On Saturday evenings he usually read… the finished passages to his fellow prisoners, who sat around him like disciples.” The book was originally conceived as an account and evaluation of “four and one half years of struggle.” But it more and more developed into a mixture of autobiography, ideological tract, and theory of tactics; it also helped complete the Führer legend. In Hitler’s mythologizing self-portrait, the unhappy and vacant years before his entrance into politics are boldly filled out with elements of want, asceticism, and solitude to represent a phase of inner growth and preparation, a sojourn, so to speak, in the desert. Max Amann, the book’s publisher, had apparently expected a memoir of quite another sort, full of political revelations. He was at first terribly disappointed by the stiff, long-winded, and boring manuscript.
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