Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Only a few times during this year and a half of nonstop electioneering did circumstances jolt Hitler out of his impersonality and for brief moments offer a glimpse of his real character.

  On September 18, 1931, just as the frantic chase across Germany was beginning and while he was setting out on an election campaign visit to Hamburg, word reached him that his niece Geli Raubal had committed suicide in the apartment they shared on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich. According to the accounts, Hitler, stunned and horrified, abruptly turned about; and unless all the indications are deceptive, no other event in his personal life affected him as strongly as did this one. For weeks he seemed close to a nervous breakdown and repeatedly swore to give up politics. In his fits of gloom he spoke of suicide; this was, once again, the mood of total capitulation into which he recurrently fell when misfortune struck. This melancholia testified to the highly charged quality of his life, demanding constant effort of will in order to be the person he wanted to seem to be. The energy that emanated from him was not the exuberance of a vigorous man but the forced product of neurosis. In keeping with his belief that the great man must have no feelings, he hid away for several days in a house on the Tegernsee, in southern Bavaria. According to his intimates, tears would come to his eyes whenever he spoke of his niece in later years; it was an unwritten rule that no one but he might mention her name. Her memory was surrounded with a kind of cult. Her room at the Berghof was kept just as she had left it; a bust of her was set up in the room at Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, where her body had been found. There, year after year, on the anniversary of her death, Hitler would lock himself in for a meditation that might last for hours.28

  There was a strangely exaggerated, idolizing quality about all of Hitler’s reactions to his niece’s death—in strong contrast to his usual coldness and inability to relate to others. We have reason to think that he was not putting on a performance, that in fact the incident was one of the key events in his personal life. It seems to have fixed forever his relationship to the opposite sex, which was curious enough in any case.

  If our evidence is to be believed, for some time after his mother’s death, women had played only the most peripheral part in his life. The men’s home, chance acquaintanceships in Munich beer halls, the dugout, the barracks, the male circles of politics and the party—these had been his world. The realm that complemented them tended to be the brothel, which, however, he found despicable, or light, casual relationships—but these were not easy for him to form, with his stiff unyielding nature. The shy inhibited attitude he had toward women was early expressed in his youthful crush on Stefanie. His fellow soldiers in the field considered him a “woman hater.” Though later on he was always involved in close social relationships, always surrounded by a host of people, his biography is eerily empty of other human beings. His fear of all undignified attitudes included, according to a remark by a member of his entourage, constant anxiety about “having his name linked with a woman.”

  His complexes seemed to loosen up only after Geli Raubal appeared with her sentimental and at first, evidently, half-childish fondness for “Uncle Alf.” It may be that he could be more relaxed with someone of his own blood. In fact, his feelings for Geli may have sprung from this very incestuous factor. There is a precedent in his own immediate family. His father had taken a niece into his house when she was sixteen and made her his mistress. Among the many women who crossed Hitler’s path—from Jenny Haug, the sister of his first chauffeur, to Helena Hanfstaengl, the first wife of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Leni Riefenstahl, and all those he addressed or referred to in the Austrian intimate style as “Mein Prinzesschen,” “Meine kleine Gräfin,” “Tschapperl,” or “Flietscherl,” and up to Eva Braun—none meant as much to him as Geli Raubal. She was, oddly inappropriate though the phrase sounds, his great love, a tabooed love of Tristan moods and tragic sentimentality.

  One must wonder at Hitler’s obtuseness in regard to Geli, for he could be acute enough psychologically where others were concerned. Did he not see that the situation was becoming impossible for this impulsive and unbalanced girl? It has never been established that she was Hitler’s mistress. Some informants claim to know she was, and explain the suicide as a desperate escape from what had become the unendurably oppressive relationship with her uncle. Another story is that certain abnormal acts demanded of her by a perverted Hitler drove the girl to suicide. Still a third version denies that there was any sexual relation between the two, but lays stress on Geli Raubal’s promiscuity with the men of Hitler’s uniformed staff.29

  It is fairly certain that she enjoyed her uncle’s fame and naively participated in his celebrity. But the relationship, which for years had been sustained by joint enthusiasms, by love for the opera and the pleasures of coffeehouses and country outings, had gradually developed oppressive aspects. Hitler’s shadow fell heavily upon his niece. He was given to furious jealousy, and to making inordinate demands upon her. Though she had only a moderate gift and scarcely any ambition, he insisted on sending her to famous singing teachers so that she could be trained as a Wagnerian heroine. And his tyranny cut her off from any opportunity to lead a life of her own. Members of his entourage reported that immediately before his departure for Hamburg there had been a loud, violent scene between them, triggered by the girl’s wish to go to Vienna for a while. It seems probable that all these complex and seemingly hopeless circumstances finally sent her over the brink. Less plausible is the story popular among his political enemies that the girl shot herself because she was expecting a child by Hitler. Still others held that Hitler himself ordered her murdered, or purported to know that the SS had passed a Feme (vigilante) sentence on Geli because she had distracted her uncle from his historic mission. Hitler himself occasionally grumbled that all this “terrible filth” was killing him. He also declared darkly that he would never forgive his enemies for the nasty gossip of those weeks.30

  As soon as he had recovered his composure, he continued on to Hamburg after all. There, amid the cheers of thousands, he delivered one of his passionate speeches that whipped the audience into a kind of collective orgy, all waiting tensely for the moment of release, the orgasm that manifested itself in a wild outcry. The parallel is too patent to be passed over; it lets us see Hitler’s oratorical triumphs as surrogate actions of a churning sexuality unable to find its object. No doubt there was a deeper meaning to Hitler’s frequent comparison of the masses to “woman.” And we need only look at the corresponding pages in Mein Kampf, at the wholly erotic fervor that the idea and the image of the masses aroused in him, to see what he sought and found as he stood on the platform high above the masses filling the arena—his masses. Solitary, unable to make contact, he more and more craved such collective unions. In a revealing turn of phrase (if we may believe the source) he once called the masses his “only bride.” His oratorical discharges were largely instinctual, and his audience, unnerved by prolonged distress and reduced to a few elemental needs, reacted on the same instinctual wave length. The sound recordings of the period clearly convey the peculiarly obscene, copulatory character of mass meetings: the silence at the beginning, as of a whole multitude holding its breath; the short, shrill yappings; the minor climaxes and first sounds of liberation on the part of the crowd; finally the frenzy, more climaxes, and then the ecstasies released by the finally unblocked oratorical orgasms. The writer René Schickele once spoke of Hitler’s speeches as being “like sex murders.” And many other contemporary observers have tried to describe the sensually charged liquescence of these demonstrations in the language of diabolism.

  Nevertheless, anyone who thought the entire secret of Hitler’s success as an orator lay in this use of speech as a sexual surrogate would be making a serious mistake. Rather, once again it was the curious coupling of delirium and rationality that characterized his oratory. Gesticulating in the glare of spotlights, pale, his voice hoarse as he hurled his charges, tirades, and outbursts of hatred, he remained always the alert master of hi
s emotions. For all his seeming abandon, he never lost control. We are dealing here with the same ambiguity that governed his entire behavior and was one of the basic facts of his character. His oratorical technique was as tangibly marked by it as his tactic of legality and later the methodology of his conquest of power or his maneuvers in foreign policy. The very regime he set up assumed this character and has actually been defined as a “dual state.”31

  In fact, the triumphs of this phase were distinguished from those of earlier years by the greater planning that went into his performances, as well as the elaborated stagecraft. Essentially, Hitler’s effectiveness still depended upon his always going to the utmost extreme; but he was now more radical not only in his emotions but also in his calculations. As long ago as August, 1920, he had, in a speech, described his task as “to arouse and whip up and incite… the instinctive” on the basis of sober understanding. He had, it would seem, a fairly good grasp of these basic principles right from the start. But only now, under the impact of the worldwide Depression, did he consciously shape his style of agitation to achieve the psychological “capitulation” that he had called the goal of all propaganda. When he planned his campaigns, every detail was, as Goebbels wrote, “organized down to the least item.” Nothing was left to chance: the route, the massing of party units, the size of the meetings, the carefully determined proportions of the audiences, the mounting suspense produced by processions with waving banners, march rhythms, and rapturous shouts of Heil, while the speaker’s appearance was again and again artificially delayed. Then, suddenly, he would step out in a blaze of lighting effects in front of an audience deliberately starved and prepared for frenzy. Ever since Hitler had once, in the early days of the party, arranged a morning meeting and in spite of the full hall had felt “profoundly unhappy at being unable to create any bond, not even the slightest contact” between himself and his audience, he had held his meetings only in the evening hours. Even during his campaign by plane throughout Germany, he kept to this rule as far as possible, although concentrating the already concentrated meetings within a few hours made for many difficulties. Thus it could happen that on a flight to Stralsund he was delayed and did not arrive at the demonstration until half past two in the morning. But 40,000 persons had waited it out nearly seven hours, and by the time he began his speech dawn was breaking.

  He assigned a high significance to space as well as time. The “mysterious magic” of the darkened Bayreuth Festspielhaus during a performance of Parsifal and the “artificially created, yet mysterious twilight in Catholic churches” were, he believed, almost perfect examples of places treated for their maximum psychological effect. This was, in his words, what all propaganda aimed at: to achieve “an encroachment upon man’s freedom of will.”32

  In that solemn annunciatory tone he reserved for his fundamental insights he declared: “For, in truth, every such meeting represents a wrestling bout between two opposing forces.” In accord with his views on the nature of fighting, he approved of any and all means by which the agitator might overwhelm his adversary. His methods were meant for the “elimination of thinking,” “paralysis by suggestion,” creating a “receptive state of fanatical devotion.” Along with the place, the time, the march music, and the play of lights, the mass meeting was itself a form of psychotechnical warfare. Hitler offered the following explanation:

  When from his little workshop or big factory, in which he feels very small, [the individual] steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him, when, as a seeker, he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm, when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm to him the rightness of the new doctrine and for the first time arouse doubt in the truth of his previous conviction—then he himself has succumbed to the magic influence of what we designate as “mass suggestion.” The will, the longing, and also the power of thousands are accumulated in every individual. The man who enters such a meeting doubting and wavering leaves it inwardly reinforced: he has become a link in the community.33

  He boasted that an “exact calculation of all human weaknesses” underlay his ideas and demagogic maxims, and this assured them a virtually “mathematical” certainty of success. In the course of his second airplane campaign he discovered the emotional effect the illuminated plane had in the night sky as it circled above tens of thousands of people staring in fascination. He thereupon used this trick again and again. Any invocation of the martyrs of the movement was also, he found, highly effective, though not as much as it might be. After the first defeat in the presidential election he criticized the party press for “dullness, monotony, lack of independence, lukewarm absence of passion.” Above all, he wanted to know what the press had done with the deaths of so many SA men. Mismanagement of this matter drove him into a fury. As one person present at the meeting recalled his words, he declared that the party comrades had “been buried with pipes and drums and the party sheet had written a pompous and self-pitying sermon about it. Why hadn’t the newspapers displayed the corpses in their own windows, so the people could see the dead men with shattered skulls, their shirts bloody and ripped by knives? Why had these newspapers not preached funeral sermons calling on the people to riot, to rise up against the murderers and their manipulators, instead of bleating out ridiculous political half-truths? The sailors of the battleship Potemkin made a revolution out of rotten food, but we could not make a national struggle of liberation out of the deaths of our comrades.”34

  But his thoughts returned again and again to the subject of the mass meetings which “burned into the small, wretched individual the proud conviction that, paltry worm that he was, he was nevertheless a part of a great dragon, beneath whose burning breath the hated bourgeois world would some day go up in fire and flame.”35 The procedure of these meetings followed an unchanging tactical and liturgical order, which he was forever improving, to dramatize his own appearance. While the flags, the marches, and the shouts of expectation sent the audience into a state of restlessness and receptivity, he himself sat nervously, drinking mineral water almost continually, in a hotel room or a party business office. Every few minutes he would check on the mood in the hall. Quite often he issued final instructions or suggested some message to be relayed to the audience. Only when the excitement of the masses threatened to sag would he set out for the meeting.

  He had learned that long processions increased the suspense and therefore made a principle of entering the meeting halls only from the rear. He had chosen the “Badenweiler March” for his own entrance music, reserved for him alone. The distant sound of it would hush the murmuring and send the people springing from their seats with raised arms, shouting wildly—overwhelmed in the double sense of being manipulated and ecstatic: now HE was here. Many films of the period have preserved his appearance as he strode down the path of light made by the spotlights between lines of shouting, sobbing people—a “via triumphalis… of living human bodies,” as Goebbels extravagantly wrote. Often women pressed to the front, while he himself remained unapproachable, tight-lipped, in no way lending himself to their hungers. He ruled out introductory speeches or greetings that could only distract the audience from his person. For a few moments he would linger before the platform, mechanically shaking hands, mute, absent-minded, eyes flickering restively, but ready like a medium to be imbued and carried aloft by the strength that was already there, latent, in the shouting of the masses.

  The first words were dropped mutedly, gropingly, into the breathless silence; they were often preceded by a pause that seemed to become utterly unbearable, while the speaker collected himself. The beginning was monotonous, trivial, usually lingering on the legend of his rise: “When in 1918 as a nameless soldier at the front I…” This formal beginning prolonged the suspense once more, into the very speech itself. But it also allowed him to sense the mood and to adjust to it. A catcall might abruptly inspire
him to take a fighting tone until the first eagerly awaited applause surged up. For that was what gave him contact, what intoxicated him, and “after about fifteen minutes,” a contemporary observer commented, “there takes place what can only be described in the primitive old figure of speech: The spirit enters into him.” With wild, explosive movements, driving his metallicly transformed voice mercilessly to its highest pitch, he would hurl out the words. Quite often, in the furor of his conjuring, he would cover his grimacing face with his clenched fists and close his eyes, surrendering to the spasms of his transposed sexuality.

  Although his speeches were carefully prepared and strictly followed the notes he always had in front of him, they nevertheless all sprang from his close communication and immediate exchange with the masses. It seemed to one of his temporary followers that he actually inhaled the feelings of his audience. This remarkable sensitivity of his, which endowed him with an unmistakably feminine aura, made possible those orgiastic unions with his public; it “knew him” in the Biblical sense of the word. To be sure, he was a shrewd psychologist and a superb stage manager. Yet he could not have bewitched the masses if he had not shared their secret emotions and incorporated all their psychoses into his own psyche. When he spoke, the masses met, hailed, and idolized themselves. An exchange of pathologies took place, the union of individual and collective crises in heady festivals of released repression.

  It has often been asserted that Hitler told every meeting only what it wanted to hear, that he merely brought its true intentions to the fore and flaunted them for all to see. That, too, is true. Nevertheless, he was not an opportunistic flatterer of the crowd; rather, he was the spokesman for the massed feelings of being victimized, of fear, of hatred. He at once integrated those feelings and transformed them into political dynamics. The American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker noted after a mass meeting in Munich: