Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Alongside the regular round there were many holidays prompted by special occasions. The outstanding one—which impressed on the world the deceptive picture of a Third Reich whose citizens enjoyed the austere felicity of a welfare state accompanied, regrettably, by a few drastic features—came with the Olympic games of 1936.

  The games had already been scheduled for Berlin before Hitler’s accession to power. The Nazis contrived to profit overwhelmingly by the opportunity of being hosts to the world. They did everything in their power to counter what they regarded as the distorted image of a hectically rearming Reich bent on war. Rather, they were determined to show the country in the most idyllic light. Weeks before the beginning of the games all ugly anti-Semitic tirades were stopped. No malicious caricatures were to be displayed. The district propaganda chiefs of the National Socialist Party were instructed to obliterate from building walls and fences any remaining traces of slogans hostile to the regime, even exhorted to make sure that “every home owner keep his front garden in irreproachable order.” To the solemn ringing of the Olympic bell, in the midst of royal highnesses, princes, cabinet ministers and many guests of honor, Hitler opened the games on August 1. And, while an earlier marathon winner, the Greek Spyridon Louis, handed him an olive branch as the “symbol of love and peace,” a chorus struck up the anthem composed by Richard Strauss, and swarms of doves of peace flew up. Hitler was offering a picture of a reconciled world. And, fittingly, some of the teams, including the French who had so recently been provoked, offered the Hitler salute as they marched past the grandstand. Later, in an impulse of tardy protest, they pretended that what they had given was the “Olympic salute.”38 All through the two weeks a series of brilliant spectacles kept the guests breathless and filled them with admiration. Goebbels invited a thousand persons to an Italian Night on Peacock Island. Ribbentrop hosted nearly as many in his garden villa in Dahlem. Göring gave a party in the Opera House, whose hall was draped in precious silk. And Hitler received the multitude of guests who had used the games as a pretext to see the man who seemed to hold in his hands the fate of Europe and perhaps of the world.

  The purpose of all the ceremonies and mass celebrations was obviously to engage the popular imagination and rally the popular will into a unitary force. But beneath the surface it is possible to discern motives that throw light upon Hitler’s personality and psychopathology. We are not referring only to his inability to endure routine, his naive craving for circuses, for the roll of drums, the blare of trumpets, the grand entrance, for dazzling illusions and the cheap brilliance of Bengal lights. The vault of light was not merely the fit symbol of Hitler’s craving to substitute illusion for reality. Albert Speer has told us how he happened to invent this device, which had the practical purpose of disguising a most prosaic reality: by a combination of darkness and glaring light effects he wanted to distract attention from the paunches of the middle and minor party functionaries who had grown fat in their prebends.39

  In addition, the resort to ceremonials also reveals a strenuous desire to stylize, to represent the triumph of order over a shifting existence forever threatened by chaos. We might call these efforts techniques of exorcism undertaken by a terrified mind. When certain contemporaries likened all the to-do with marching columns, forests of banners and blocks of humanity to the rites of primitive tribes, the comparison was not so artificial as it sounded. From the psychological point of view, what was operative here was the same urge to stylize that had dominated Hitler’s life from a very early period. Thus he had sought orientation and support against the world in a succession of new roles: from the early role of the son of good family and idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves, through the various roles of leader, genius, and savior, to the imitation Wagnerian end, where his aim was to enact an operatic finale. In every case he practiced autosuggestion, presenting himself in disguises and borrowed forms of existence. And when after one of his successful foreign-policy coups he called himself, with naive boastfulness, “the greatest actor in Europe,” he was expressing a need of his nature as well as an ability.

  It was, in turn, a need that emerged from the fundamental Hitlerian motif of insecurity and anxiety. He was good at portraying feelings; he took pains not to show them. He repressed all spontaneity. But certain small peculiarities betrayed him—especially his eyes, which never stood still. They roamed restlessly even in moments of statutelike rigidity. So fearful was he of a frank emotion that he held his hand before his face whenever he laughed. He hated being surprised while playing with one of his dogs, and as soon as he knew he was being observed, one of his secretaries has reported, he would “roughly chase the dog away.” He was constantly tormented by the fear of seeming ridiculous or of making a faux pas that would cause him to forfeit the respect of members of his entourage, down to his janitor. Before he ventured to appear in public in a new suit or a new hat, he would have himself photographed so that he could check the effect. He did not swim, never got into a rowboat (“After all, what business would I have in a rowboat!”), or mounted a horse, he said; altogether he was “not at all fond of show-off stunts. How easily they might go wrong; parades teach that time and again.”40 He regarded life as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience. Thus he occasionally would try to dissuade Göring from smoking by offering the highly characteristic argument that one could not be represented on a monument “with a cigar in one’s mouth.” When Heinrich Hoffmann returned from Russia in the autumn of 1939 with photographs that showed Stalin holding a cigarette, Hitler forbade their publication; he was protecting a “colleague” in order not to detract from the constant dignity that should surround a dictator.

  For similar reasons he was tormented by fears that his private life would be exposed. Significantly, not a single personal letter of his exists. Even Eva Braun received only terse, sober notes; yet he was so wary that he never entrusted even these to the mails. The comedy of aloofness from her, which he played out to the last with the less intimate members of his wider entourage, likewise testifies to his inability to lead a life without posing. The most personal letter he left is paradoxically a letter to authorities: that petition to the magistracy of the city of Linz which he wrote at the age of twenty-four in explanation of his draft evasion. On one occasion he remarked that it was “especially important” and “an old experience in the life of a political leader: One should never write down anything that one can discuss, never!” And elsewhere he stated: “Far too much is written; this begins with love letters and ends with political letters. There is always something incriminating about doing so.” He constantly observed himself and literally never spoke an unconsidered word, as Hjalmar Schacht commented. His desires were secret, his feelings hidden, and the widespread notion of an emotionally ungoverned, wildly gesticulating Hitler actually reverses the proportion of rule and exception. In fact his was the most concentrated life imaginable, disciplined to the point of unnatural rigidity.

  Even Hitler’s famous outbursts of rage were apparently quite often deliberate instances of play-acting. One of the early gauleiters has described how Hitler raged so in the course of one of these fits that spittle literally ran out of the corners of his mouth and down his chin, so helplessly infuriated did he appear to be—but his consistent, intellectually controlled argumentation, which never ceased throughout the outburst, belied appearances. It would be too much to say that he deliberately tried to engender something like a “shudder of awe” at pathological frenzy. But we can assume that in such situations he did not lose control and that he was exploiting his own emotions just as purposefully as he did those of others. He usually had a reason for making such scenes and unleashed his temperament according to circumstances. He could be just as engaging and charming as he was brutal or ruthless. He was capable of shedding tears, pleading, or working himself up into one of his famous rages, which to the very end aroused the horror of all his interlocutors and often broke their resistance. He possessed “the mos
t terrifying persuasiveness.” Along with this he had the power of exerting a hypnotic effect upon his interlocutor. The leadership of the party, the gauleiters and Old Fighters who had shoved their way to the top alongside him, undoubtedly were “a band of eccentrics and egotists all going in different directions,” and certainly were not servile in the traditional sense. The same is true for at least a part of the officers’ corps. Nevertheless, Hitler imposed his will on them as he pleased. And he did so not only at the height of his power but equally well before, when he was a marginal figure on the political Right, and at the end, when he was only the burned-out husk of a once mighty man. Several diplomats, particularly those of Germany’s allies, fell so completely under his spell that eventually they seemed to be rather his familiars than representatives of their governments.

  Caricatures of Hitler long portrayed him as addressing individuals as if they were a mass meeting. But in fact he did nothing of the kind. He had a large scale of nuances at his disposal and was even more effective in personal conversations than on the platform. A public demonstration kindled in him a mood of shrill exaltation, particularly since his first use of the microphone, when he listened intoxicated to the amplification of his voice.

  It has been rightly pointed out that Hitler’s ability to exploit his own temperament for demagogic purposes was most clearly manifested in his attitudes toward the German minorities outside German borders.41 Depending on his needs of the moment, he could lament or forget their fate. He did not worry about the Germans in South Tyrol, Poland, or the Baltic republics as long as they had no place in his grand design for foreign policy. But as soon as the situation changed, the “intolerable wrongs of these most loyal sons of the nation” threw him into raging indignation. His outbursts were obviously not just pretense. But the keener observer noted the element of artificial hysteria in them. Secretly, Hitler was exploiting the rage of which he seemed to be the defenseless victim. His remarkable capacity for empathy, his actor’s gift for merging wholly with a role, stood him in good stead. In the course of a conversation he would quite often show the most variegated sides of his personality, for example, would shift with pantomimic transitions from a muted tone to an abrupt outburst, pounding on the table or drumming nervously on the arm of his chair. At intervals of a few minutes he would show himself detached, sincere, suffering or triumphant. Before he became Chancellor, he would occasionally play the mimic when he was with his intimates; once, according to a participant, he put on a performance—with masterly malice—of Mathilde Kemnitz, later Ludendorff’s wife, vainly attempting to induce him, Hitler, “to marry her…. Hitler stripped the fine lady, as it were, of her priestly, philosophical, scholarly, erotic and other skins, until all that remained was a nasty, acrid onion.”42

  He regarded himself as a lover of music, but in actuality it meant little to him. He had, it is true, gone countless times to all of Wagner’s operas and heard Tristan or Die Weistersinger more than a hundred times each. But symphonic works and chamber music he largely ignored. On the other hand, he could sit through endless performances of Die Lustige Witwe or Die Fledermaus; it was again the characteristic grouping of grandiose and silly preferences. He listened to records only when nothing better offered, for they cheated him of the visual setting; with records, he limited himself to grand bravura scenes. After his visits to the opera he spoke exclusively on questions of stage technique or the character of the production, virtually never mentioning problems of musical interpretation.43 Music meant little more to him than an extremely effective acoustic means to heighten theatrical effects; as such, however, it was indispensable, for drama without music had not the slightest appeal to him. One of his secretaries has remarked that his library contained not a single literary classic, and even on his many visits to Weimar, with its theatrical tradition going back to Goethe, he never went to the theater but only to the opera. The supreme expression of opera to him was the finale of Götterdämmerung. In Bayreuth, whenever the citadel of the gods collapsed in flames amid musical uproar, he would reach out into the darkness of the box, take the hand of Frau Winifred Wagner, who was sitting behind him, and breathe a deeply moved Handkuss upon it.44

  This craving for theater touches at the core of his being. He had the feeling that he was always acting on a stage and needed resounding alarums, explosive effects with lightnings and fanfares. Obsessed with the actor’s immemorial fear of boring the audience, he thought in terms of catchy numbers, trying to surpass the preceding scene, whatever it was. The restiveness that marked his political activities and gave them that character of surprise which so confused his opponents was as much related to this fear of being boring as his fascination with catastrophes and universal conflagrations. Fundamentally he was a theatrical person, trusting dramatic effects more than ideological persuasion, and really himself only in those sham worlds that he opposed to reality. His lack of seriousness, the hypocritical, melodramatic and cheaply villainous quality that clung to him originated in the theatricality as much as in his contempt for the appearances of reality—an element of strength whenever it coincided with his peculiarly sharp perception of underlying real conditions.

  One of the conservatives who smoothed Hitler’s path to power commented that he never lost a sense of the disproportion between his lowly origins and the “successful leap to the heights.” As he had done in his youth, he continued to think in terms of social status. Occasionally he tried to divert attention from his embarrassing petty bourgeois origins by ostentatiously calling himself a “worker,” sometimes even a “proletarian.”45 But most of the time he strove to cover up his low status by a mythologizing aura. It is an ancient, tested recipe of political usurpation that the lowliest and the most inconspicuous are summoned to rule. In the introductory passages of his speeches he again and again evoked the “myth of the man from the people,” the days when he had been an “unknown frontline soldier in the First World War,” a “man without a name, without money, without influence, without a following,” but summoned by Providence. He liked to introduce himself as the “lonely wanderer out of nothingness.” Thus he liked to have resplendent uniforms around him, for they pointed up the simplicity of his own costume. His air of unassuming austerity and soberness, together with his unwedded state and his withdrawn life, could be splendidly fused in the public mind into the image of a great, solitary man bearing the burden of his election by destiny, marked by the mystery of self-sacrifice. When Frau von Dircksen once remarked to him that she often thought of his loneliness, he agreed: “Yes, I am very lonely, but children and music comfort me.”

  As such remarks reveal, he lacked cynicism in regard to his own person and role, and was rather inclined to consider himself in a deadly serious light. Looking out from the Berghof, he could see the blocklike massif of the Untersberg, where according to legend Charlemagne lay sleeping until the day when he would return to scatter Germany’s enemies. With a good deal of sentimental feeling Hitler considered the fact that his home was situated opposite this mountain a significant sign. “That is no accident. I recognize a summons in it.” More and more frequently he withdrew to his eyrie, especially when he wanted to escape the “corrosive” Berliners or the “crude” folk of Munich. He preferred the Rhineland temperament, and years later happily recalled how when he visited Cologne the crowd had begun to rock back and forth out of sheer enthusiasm. “The greatest ovation of my life.”46 The conviction that he was the instrument of some higher power prompted him regularly to apostrophize Providence whenever he was describing the nature of his historical mission:

  I am well aware of what a man can do and where his limits lie, but I hold to the conviction that men who have been created by God ought also to live in accordance with the will of the Almighty. God did not create the races of this earth in order for them to give themselves up, to bastardize and ruin themselves…. Ultimately the individual man is weak in all his nature and actions when he goes contrary to almighty Providence and its will, but he becomes immeasura
bly strong the moment he acts in harmony with this Providence! Then there pours down upon him that force which has distinguished all the great men of the world.47

  This conviction sustained his ideological notions and lent them the weight of a religious principle. It gave him hardness, resolution, and unmerciful drive. This conviction also kindled the cult surrounding his person, which amounted to pure idolatry. Robert Ley called him the only human being who never erred. Hans Frank declared that he was as solitary as the Lord God. And an SS group leader stated that he was even greater than that god who had had only twelve faithless disciples, whereas Hitler stood at the head of a great people vowed to loyalty to him. As long as Hitler coolly received such tributes and merely exploited the testimonials to his genius for psychological purposes, to increase his power, they were an important supplement to his energy. But when the sense of his historical mission was no longer held in check by Machiavellian calculations, when he himself succumbed to the notion that he was indeed superhuman, the descent began.

  His lack of social contact was only the reverse of this mythologizing view of himself. The higher he rose, the more the area of emptiness around him widened. Increasingly, he shrank from the Old Fighters, who continued to press their unbearable claims to close personal contact. He had scarcely any but staged relationships, within the framework of which everyone was either an extra or an instrument. People had never really roused his interest and his concern. He made it a maxim that “one could not do enough to cultivate ties with the common people”; but the very phraseology betrayed the artificiality of this thought. Significantly, even his passion for architecture was limited to the building of gigantic backdrops; he would listen with utter boredom to plans for residential areas.