Konrad Heiden, Hitler’s biographer, believed that Hitler had made a pact with the authorities not to divulge too much about the recent conspiracy. That may or may not be so. But in any case, it seems certain that Hitler’s ambition aimed higher than the kind of recital that Amann envisaged. Hitler saw his chance to give a deeper rationale to his recently developed claim to leadership and to show himself as that compound of politician and theoretician that he had invoked as the only possible savior for the country. Here, in an inconspicuous spot midway in the first part, is a passage that reveals his true aims:
For if the art of the politician is really the art of the possible, the theoretician is one of those of whom it can be said that they are pleasing to the gods only if they demand and want the impossible…. In long periods of humanity, it may happen once that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more profound this fusion, however, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by any shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend. Therefore, his life is torn by love and hate….
The rarer [is] success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.4
The book constantly reinforces the insinuation that Hitler is in fact this prodigy. The image of the dying hero can be construed as an attempt to give a cast of tragic nobility to the recent defeats. Hitler went at the job with an application that was rare for him. Here was his chance to prove that despite his lack of schooling, despite his failure to be admitted to the Academy, despite his humiliating past in the home for men, he had reached the lofty heights of bourgeois culture. It may have seemed that he was doing nothing, but all through the years he had thought long and hard and could offer not only an interpretation of the present but also an outline for the future. Such were the pretensions that went into the making of Mein Kampf.
Behind the front of bold words lurks the anxiety of the half-educated author that his readers may question his intellectual competence. He tries to make his language imposing by stringing together long series of nouns, many of them formed from adjectives or verbs, so that they sound empty and artificial. Taken as a whole, it is a language that lacks all natural ease; it can scarcely move or breathe:
I again immersed myself in the theoretical literature of this new world, attempting to achieve clarity concerning its possible effects, and then compared it with the actual phenomena and events it brings about in political, cultural and economic life…. Gradually I obtained a positively granite foundation for my own convictions, so that since that time I have never been forced to undertake a shift in my own inner view on this question.[6]5
Several of Hitler’s followers put in long hard hours editing the book, but they could not weed out the stylistic slips and infelicities that were part and parcel of Hitler’s verbose, pseudoeducated manner. Thus we find the text studded with such phrases as “the rats that politically poison our nation” gnawing the meager education “from the heart and memory of the broad masses,” or “the flag of the Reich” springing “from the womb of war.” Rudolf Olden has pointed out the numerous absurdities of Hitler’s overwrought style. The following, for instance, is a typical Hitlerian metaphor. He is speaking of privation: “He who has not himself been gripped in the clutches of this strangulating viper will never come to know its poisoned fangs.” Olden comments: “That one sentence contains more mistakes than one could correct in an entire essay. A viper has no clutches, and a snake which can coil itself around a human being has no poison fangs. Moreover, if a person is strangled by a snake, he never comes to know its fangs.”6
Yet, along with all the pretentious and disordered thoughts, the book contains some deep insights, born directly of Hitler’s profound irrationality, as well as many sharp formulations and striking images. Hitler’s stiffness and doggedness make a strange contrast with his longing for the flowing period, as does his search for stylization with his lack of selfcontrol. His attempts at logic are at variance with his dull repetitiousness, and the one element in the book that nothing counteracts is the monotonous, manic egocentricity. This corresponds only too well with the lack of human feeling and human beings in its many pages. The book may be tedious and hard to read. Yet it does convey a remarkably faithful portrait of its author, who in his constant fear of being unmasked actually unmasks himself.
Probably realizing that the book betrayed him, Hitler later tried to disassociate himself from it, describing it as a stylistically unfortunate collection of editorials for the Völkische Beobachter and dismissing it as “fantasies behind bars.” “This much I know, that if I had suspected in 1924 that I was to become Reichskanzler, I would not have written the book.” But at the same time he implied that his reservations were purely tactical or stylistic in nature: “As to the substance, there is nothing I would want to change.”
The book’s convoluted style militated against it; the almost 10 million copies ultimately distributed suffered the same fate as all works bought out of duty or to show political orthodoxy. It remained unread. Another discouraging element may have been the grim, compulsive quality of Hitler’s mind. As a speaker, amidst the fanfare of carefully prepared appearances, Hitler was apparently able to cover this up. But a curiously nasty, obscene odor emanates from the pages of Mein Kampf. It is strongest in the incredible and revealing chapter on syphilis, but it also rises out of the grubby jargon, the stale images, and the poor-mouth attitudes that represent his stylistic stance. The mixed-up young man, who throughout the war and the frenzied activity of the following years never managed to find more than motherly woman friends, and who, according to someone close to him, “was terrified of even chatting with a woman,” projects his own starvations and repressions onto the world. Stamped on his concepts of history, politics, nature, or human life, are the anxieties and lusts of the former inmate of the home for men. He is haunted by the images of puberty: copulation, sodomy, perversion, rape, contamination of the blood.
The final Jewish goal is denationalization, is sowing confusion by the bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest, and dominating this racial stew by exterminating the folkish intelligentsias and replacing them by members of his own race…. Just as he himself [the Jew] systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest, and himself rising to be its master…. If physical beauty were today not forced entirely into the background by our foppish fashions, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible…. Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile our inexperienced young blond girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world…. The folkish ideology must at last succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men will no longer see it as their concern to breed superior dogs, horses and cats, but in the raising of man himself….7
The book’s peculiarly neurotic aura, its queerness, its fragmentary and disorganized quality, help account for the disdain so long accorded to the doctrines of National Socialists. “No one took it seriously, could take it seriously, or even understand this style at all,” wrote Hermann Rauschning.[7] He asserted, on the basis of his intimate background knowledge: “Hitler’s real goals… are not to be found in Mein Kampf.”8 With a good deal of persuasive brilliance Rauschning formulated a theory that widely influenced later historians, the theory that National Socialism was a “Revolution of Nihilism.” Rauschning maintained that Hitler and the movements he led had
no ideas, no systematic ideology; the Nazis merely exploited existing moods and trends that would help to swell their membership rolls. A joke current in the 1930’s made a similar point: National Socialist ideology was referred to as “the World as Will without Idea.”[8] Rauschning felt that all the tenets of Nazism, nationalism, anticapitalism, the cult of ritual, foreign-policy goals, even racial theory and anti-Semitism were the sport of Hitler’s completely unprincipled opportunism. Hitler the opportunist, Rauschning argues, respected nothing, feared nothing, believed in nothing, and broke the most solemn oaths with never a qualm. To Rauschning, the perfidy of National Socialism was literally boundless. All its ideology was merely sound and fury to mesmerize the masses. Central to it was a will to power that craved for nothing but power itself and regarded every success merely as a step to new and ever bolder adventures—without meaning, without goals, without the possibility of satisfaction. “This movement is totally without ideals and lacks even the semblance of a program. Its commitment is entirely to action; its crack troops are instinctively geared for mindless action; the leaders choose action on a cold, calculating and cunning basis. For National Socialists there was and is no aim which they would not take up or drop at a moment’s notice, their only criterion being the strengthening of the movement.”
Rauschning was right in recognizing that as a movement National Socialism always manifested a great willingness to adapt and that Hitler himself was remarkably indifferent to programmatic and ideological issues. He admitted that he adhered to his twenty-five points, even when they were obsolete, only for tactical reasons. Any change, he had observed, breeds confusion in the popular mind, and it really did not matter what one’s program was supposed to be. Of Alfred Rosenberg’s magnum opus The Myth of the Twentieth Century, widely considered one of the basic works of National Socialism, he openly stated that he had “read only a small part of it since it is… written in a style too hard to understand.” But even if National Socialism did not develop a true party line and was content to accept certain gestures and formulas as sufficient proof of orthodoxy, it was not entirely ruled by cynical considerations of success and power. National Socialism combined the practice of total control with the doctrine thereof; the two elements were continually intertwined, and even as Hitler and his cohorts confessed on occasion to the simplest and most unscrupulous power mania, they always revealed themselves the prisoners of their own prejudices and baleful utopias. Hitler’s astonishing career can be seen as the triumph of his tactical genius. Time and again he owed his salvation to some inspired tactical move. Yet his success in a deeper sense emanated from the entire complex of national anxieties, hopes, and visions that Hitler shared, even as he manipulated it. Nor can we overlook the compelling force he managed to impart to his thoughts on certain basic questions of history and politics, power and human existence.
Inadequate and clumsy Mein Kampf may have been. But it set forth, although in fragmentary and unorganized form, all the elements of National Socialist ideology. Here Hitler spelled out his aims, although his contemporaries failed to recognize them. As one begins to arrange the scattered sections and grasp their inner logic, one comes upon “a scheme of thought so consistent as to take one’s breath away.” In the following years Hitler did tinker somewhat with the text, rounding it off and making it more systematic, but on the whole the book evolved no further after his imprisonment at Landsberg. The phenomenon of early ossification, which stamps so much of this man’s life, is nowhere so evident as in the field of ideology, where ideas espoused in youth persist, dov/n to their very phraseology, throughout the rise to power and the years of dictatorship, and even when the end is in sight retain their crippling hold. Nationalism, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Semitism, linked by a Darwinistic theory of struggle, formed the pillars of his world view and shaped his utterances from the very first to the very last.
Hitler’s world view did not contain any new vistas or a new concept of social well-being. Rather, it was a synthesis of all that Hitler’s “spongelike memory” had soaked up in his early years of voracious reading. The material appears, however, in startling permutations and relationships. Hitler’s originality manifested itself precisely in his ability to force heterogeneous elements together and to impose solidity and structure on the patchwork creed. His mind, one might say, hardly produced thoughts, but it did produce energy. It concentrated and shaped the variegated ideas, pressing them into a glacial mass that from the very beginning clearly portended conquest, enslavement, mass murder. Hugh Trevor-Roper has described the cold insanity of this world in a telling image: “imposing indeed in its granite harshness and yet infinitely squalid with miscellaneous cumber—like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse—old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure,—the intellectual detritus of centuries.”9
Of special significance was Hitler’s way of perceiving everything from the angle of power. In contrast to the spokesmen of the völkisch movement, whose failure was in no small part due to their love for ideological subtleties, Hitler regarded ideas in themselves as “mere theory” and only took up those that lent themselves to useful practical application. When he spoke of “thinking in party terms,” he was describing his own habit of casting all ideas, trends, and beliefs into a form that fitted the needs of power, and was political in the true sense.
In fact he was formulating a last-ditch ideology for a bourgeoisie long on the defensive; he took its beliefs, diluted and coarsened them, and overlaid them with an aggressive and purposeful theory of action. His philosophy was a compound of all the nightmares and intellectual fads of the bourgeois age: the fear of revolution from the Left, a threat that had haunted Europe since 1789 and had actually been realized recently in Russia and, briefly, in Germany. Then there was the German Austrian’s psychosis about being overrun by foreigners; this emerged as an obsession with racial and biological questions. Then came the fear of the völkisch group, expressed in any number of ways, that awkward, dreamy Germany would be the loser in the contest of nations; this emerged as nationalist feeling. And finally there was the historical angst of the bourgeoisie who felt their period of greatness coming to an end and whose sense of security was eroding. “Nothing is anchored any longer,” Hitler declaimed. “Nothing is rooted within us any longer. Everything is superficial, flies away from us. The thinking of our people is becoming restless and hasty. All of life is being torn asunder….”10
Hitler himself had soaked up this basic mood of angst, and with his disposition to drive things to extremes, to see periods in terms of eons, he felt that the fate of mankind was at stake. “This world is at an end!” He was obsessed by the notion of a world-wide disease, by viruses, termites, and the tumors of humanity. He later turned to Hörbiger’s world ice theory, which held that fire and ice had always struggled for supremacy in the universe, and his imagination was caught by the idea that the history of the planet and the evolution of man could be traced back to massive cosmic cataclysms. With deep fascination he anticipated the fall of nations and civilizations, and this cataclysmic view of history came to be coupled with his belief in messianic figures and his sense of his own great destiny. Students of the period have marveled at the determination with which he pursued his program for destroying the Jews right up to the last possible moment during the war, without regard for military necessities. This determination cannot be explained as mere obstinacy. Rather, Hitler was convinced that he was in the midst of a titanic struggle whose importance outweighed any events of the moment. He felt himself to be that “other force” which hurls evil “back to Lucifer” in order to save the universe.11
The concept of a cosmic struggle runs all through Mein Kampf. However absurd or fantastical this may appear in retrospect, we cannot deny the metaphysical earnestness of Hitler’s thinking. “We may perish, perhaps. But we shall take a world with us. Muspilli, universal conflagration,” he once said in one of his apo
calyptic moods. There are many passages in Mein Kampf that soar into universal dimensions. “The Jewish doctrine of Marxism,” he asserts, “…as a foundation of the universe… would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man.” The very illogic of such a thesis, which raises an ideology to the level of a principle of order in the universe, demonstrates Hitler’s urge to think in cosmic terms. It was necessary for “the stars,” “the planets,” “the world ether,” and the “light years” to take part in his personal struggle, for which “creation,” the “planet Earth,” and the “Kingdom of Heaven” served as backdrop.
These terms could readily be combined with the principle of the struggle for life and of the survival of the fittest, resulting in a sort of eschatological Darwinism. “The earth,” Hitler was fond of saying, “is like a chalice passed from hand to hand, which explains the efforts to always get it into the hand of the strongest. For tens of thousands of years…” He discerned a sort of fundamental law of the universe in the perpetual and deadly conflict of all against all:
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