by Thomas Weber
How much Hitler’s trial transformed his public image and national profile can be traced in Goebbels’s diary. Whereas Goebbels had referred only to Ludendorff when chronicling the putsch in his diary in November and had eulogized Lenin on his death, he mentioned “Hitler and the National Socialist movement” for the first time in his diary only on March 13, 1924, noting that he was taken by the combination of “Socialism and Christ” in National Socialism, its rejection of “materialism,” as well as by its “ethical foundations.”50 For the next nine days, as Hitler’s trial continued, every single one of his diary entries mentioned Hitler, as Goebbels attempted to learn as much as possible about Hitler during that period.51
On March 20, 1924, toward the end of the fourth week of Hitler’s trial and just one week after mentioning him in his diary for the first time, Goebbels defined Hitler as a messiah in words similar to those that he would use more or less consistently for the next twenty-one years. He celebrated Hitler as “an idealist who is full of enthusiasm,” as someone “who would give the German people new hope,” and whose “will” would find a way to succeed. On March 22, 1924, Goebbels recorded that he could not help but think about Hitler. For him, there was no one like Hitler in Germany. He was for Goebbels “the most fervent [glühendster] German.”52
The story of Hitler’s coup is one of recklessness, megalomania, and spectacular failure. His strategy to boost his national profile was a clever one; but then things had gone off the rails. His attempt to head a Bavarian revolution that would be carried on to Berlin had failed from start to finish. He had thought of killing himself, even if he had not followed through with it. However, in defeat, he had managed to accomplish what he had failed to do when be believed he was in the ascendancy. His photo campaign and his book, published under Koerber’s name, had come too late to give him a national profile in time for the coup. Yet his trial managed to accomplish exactly that. It catapulted him to national fame. On day one of the trial, he had been a defendant in the Ludendorff trial, which by the time of his conviction had been transformed into the “Hitler trial.” But from Hitler’s perspective, his triumph was bittersweet, as he was about to be locked up for quite some time.
On April 1, 1924, he was sentenced to a five-year term in Landsberg fortress, where he would be out of sight and earshot of the public eye and ear. Every expectation was that the trial had given Hitler his fifteen minutes of fame, which would fade over time as other prominent political figures emerged on the populist right.
CHAPTER 14
Lebensraum
(Spring 1924 to 1926)
While he was incarcerated, Hitler’s star, against all expectation, did not fade. Soon he became the stuff of legends and of admiration. People started to view him as a people’s tribune incarcerated behind the thick walls of Landsberg fortress. It was then that Munich’s upper-class society began to take an interest in him. For instance, Elsa Bruckmann, who had never met Hitler prior to the putsch, now bombarded him with letters, books, and parcels full of food and treats, as did many others. By mid-May, Rudolf Heß, who was incarcerated along with him, reported that Hitler no longer appeared emaciated. According to Heß, Hitler looked really good due not only to all the sleep and exercise he was getting while incarcerated, but also to the almost constant arrival of packages full of sweet cakes, mixed pickles, sausages, and canned food.1 As Kurt Lüdecke, one of Hitler’s most ardent supporters in the early 1920s recalled of his visit to Landsberg, in captivity Hitler had been thriving: “He was wearing leather shorts and a Tyrolean jacket, his shirt open at the throat. His cheeks glowed with healthy red, and his eyes shone; the fire-eater had not been quenched by his time-serving. On the contrary, he looked better physically, and seemed happier than I had ever seen him. Landsberg had done him a world of good!”2
Elsa Bruckmann also paid Hitler two visits. She would subsequently recall of the first that, en route to Landsberg, her heart had been “pounding at the thought of thanking face to face the man who had awakened me and so many others, and shown us once more the light in the darkness and the path that would lead to light.” At the fortress, Hitler greeted her “in Bavarian costume and with a yellow linen jacket.” She was smitten by the man in lederhosen. He was for her “simple, natural, a cavalier, with a clear gaze!” In the few short minutes that she and Hitler spent together, she passed on greetings from students who had participated in the failed putsch as well as from Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Before leaving, she told Hitler that “deep loyalty awaited him upon his release—loyalty to the last breath.”
During the eight minutes that Elsa Bruckmann had with Hitler at Landsberg, the seed of a fateful relationship that would last two decades was sown. Following his early release on probation on December 20, 1924, she would invite him regularly to her salon and open the doors to Munich’s upper class that hitherto had remained closed to the leader of the National Socialists.3
Bruckmann was just one of many visitors who ensured that Hitler would not be forgotten while locked away in the Bavarian countryside. He almost held court at Landsberg, as his trial and conviction had turned him into a mysterious political celebrity. In total, 330 visitors spent a total of 158 hours and 27 minutes with him between the time of his conviction and his release. Of course, some of the visits were by his lawyers, but most were not: many were by Helene and Edwin Bechstein, Hitler’s most ardent supporters from Berlin, who spent almost eighteen and a half hours with him. Hermine Hoffmann, the widow from a suburb of Munich whom Hitler labeled his “Mutterl,” came to see him a total of seven times; even his beloved dog came to visit him, as his landlord, Maria Reichert, brought the German shepherd along on her. Other visitors included his political associates; and another was one of his former regimental commanders. But Ernst Schmidt stopped by only once—not exactly a high number of visits for someone who had been so very close to Hitler during the war and its aftermath. Significantly, many visits were by newly won admirers.
Even Hitler’s half sister Angela visited him once, to celebrate his name day on June 17, the day of St. Adolf. The manager of the Jewish student cafeteria in Vienna, Angela initially had refused to be in touch with her brother following his arrest. As Otto Leybold, the warden of Landsberg fortress, recorded in his private notes in late 1923, Hitler’s two sisters “do not want to receive news from the prison because they have no sympathy for the anti-Semitic conduct of their brother, ‘the greatest German anti-Semitic leader.’” However, even now, Hitler kept his distance from Pan-German notables who had once been close to the Thule Society and Karl Harrer’s vision for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Despite the fairly frequent visits to their son-in-law, Friedrich Weber, who was incarcerated along with Hitler, Julius Friedrich and Melanie Lehmann did not meet with Hitler.4
On their own, of course, his visitors would have been unable to keep Hitler in the public limelight. His rising fame resulted from two other factors: first, the astonishing failure of other populist right-wing leaders to fill Hitler’s shoes. As a result of the constant infighting and bickering between its senior figures, no new serious contender to unite the radical right emerged. And second, Hitler wrote another book at Landsberg fortress, and this time he did not hide behind another author.
Hitler’s time at Landsberg was indeed most important for the fact that he started working there on Mein Kampf, which was to be published in two volumes in July 1925 and in late 1926, respectively. Initially, he had planned to bring out the book out under the title 4 ½ Jahre Kampf gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit: Eine Abrechnung (4 ½ Years of Struggle Against Lies, Idiocy, and Cowardice: A Settling of Scores)—a reference both to his time in the DAP/NSDAP and to his service in the war—but he eventually shortened the title to Mein Kampf. Hitler also decided against venting his frustration at those who had not supported him or who, in his mind, had betrayed him in the run-up to the putsch. In fact, the one thing Mein Kampf did not cover was the failed coup, almost certainly because he was depending on the g
oodwill of those with whom he wanted to settle scores—in other words, the political and social elite of Bavaria—to gain him early release from Landsberg fortress. Once released, Hitler would likely not have wanted to risk being put back behind bars, as he was still on probation, or being deported from Germany, as he still held no German citizenship. The Bavarian cabinet indeed had discussed inconclusively as early as April 1924 whether Hitler should be deported to Austria.5
The first volume of Mein Kampf, which is more than four hundred pages long, constituted an autobiographical semifictional Bildungsroman of Hitler’s life from his birth in 1889 to the time of the issuance of the German Workers’ Party (DAP) program in 1920. In it, he describes how the experiences of his childhood, adolescence, and the First World War revealed to him how, behind the scenes, the world was held together. In doing so, he implicitly presented himself as a genius who came from below with extraordinary innate qualities to understand the hidden architecture of the world. He did not use his autobiography to chronicle past life experiences, as autobiographies normally do; rather, he used it as a manifesto of what he intended to do. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was meant as a book of revelation. In it, Hitler explained how he translated his revelations into prescriptions for how Germany and the world at large would have to be reformed. He presented himself as a kind of male Cinderella or Strong Hans (the character of one of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm), as the boy from Braunau who was to save Germany by finding answers to the questions of how November 9, 1918—the date signifying both Germany’s loss of the First World War and the outbreak of revolution—could have happened, and of what political lessons should be drawn from the collapse of Germany in November 1918.6
Even though self-dramatization is the essence of politics,7 the degree to which Hitler lied about his own life in Mein Kampf is quite astonishing. His account is at times almost fictional in character. Yet his constant lying makes perfect sense, as his goal was to tell a version of his life that would allow him to draw from it political lessons that supported his political beliefs in 1924. Hitler thus ruthlessly reinvented his own past so as to tell politically expedient tales. For instance, he presented himself as a typical product of his First World War regiment to reinforce the political message that the war had “made” him and had produced National Socialism. Were he to have admitted that even though he was a conscientious soldier the men in the trenches had perceived him as an Etappenschwein (rear-echelon pig), the story of his First World War experiences would have been worse than useless politically.8
The second volume, by contrast, was a more traditional programmatic political manifesto. In it, Hitler essentially presented the same ideas he had already developed in volume 1. However, they were laid out in a more detailed fashion and took the form of political proclamations, a more conventional genre. There was also more of a focus on foreign affairs, as Hitler wrote volume 2 of Mein Kampf in September and October 1926, well after his release from Landsberg.9 He went to the mountains close to Berchtesgaden to work on the book, and composed it in a hut adjacent to the inn where he had visited his mentor Dietrich Eckart two years earlier.
Eckart had died of a heart attack on Boxing Day (December 26) 1923. While writing the second volume of Mein Kampf, Hitler felt intellectually and emotionally so close to his paternal mentor, who now lay buried in a nearby valley, that he dedicated the volume to Eckart.10 And yet, Eckart does not feature in Mein Kampf. As Eckart was dead, Hitler could also ignore his mentor’s insistence that Jews were not really a biological race and that human existence depended on the antithesis between Aryans and Jews. The one, Eckart believed, could not exist without the other. As he had written in Auf gut Deutsch in 1919, “the end of all times” would come “if the Jewish people perished.”11
There was an even more important reason for Hitler’s failure to mention Eckart in Mein Kampf. The fact that his mentor had explained the world to Hitler in the years following the First World War would have contradicted the story Hitler was trying to tell; that is, the story of a young soldier who by virtue of his innate genius and of his own experiences between 1889 and 1918, had experienced an epiphany at war’s end at Pasewalk military hospital and thus decided to go into politics and save Germany.
It is no coincidence that both volumes of Mein Kampf often use biblical references and themes. While he could not refer to himself as a “messiah” as blatantly as he did in the book published under Koerber’s name, he did so in a more subtle way in Mein Kampf.12
Just as he had done ever since the moment of his politicization and radicalization in the summer of 1919, while writing Mein Kampf he did not strive merely to find policy solutions to the challenges of the day. Rather, his goal was to define how Germany could be made safe for all times. In fact, he repeatedly used the phrase “for all time” in Mein Kampf. For instance, in volume 2, he discussed how “someday [… ] a people of State citizens [can arise], bound to one another and forged together by a common love and a common pride, unshakable and invincible for all time.”13
Hitler’s book was not unreadable. It was, however, extremely long-winded, essentially a series of speech scripts. Hitler was really an orator, not a writer, even though for the previous few years he had stated he was a writer every time he was asked to provide his profession. In other words, he clearly had aspirations to be a writer, but his talents were those of an orator. Without his performative act and the support of the power of his voice, many of his chapters came over as dry. Even readers supportive of Hitler did not exactly devour the book. For instance, Joseph Goebbels started reading Mein Kampf on August 10, 1925. That day, he wrote in his diary: “I am reading Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf’ and I am shaken by this political confession.” Nevertheless, it would take Hitler’s future propaganda minister a little more than two months to finish the book.14
Even though in Mein Kampf Hitler generally did not disclose the sources upon which his ideas in the book were based, he was not trying to pretend that all were truly original and never would.15 For instance, on the night of July 21/22, 1941, he would state at his military HQ that “every human is the product of his own ideas and of the ideas of others.” He had not meant his book to be a doctoral dissertation, but a political proclamation or manifesto. It was hardly unusual for politicians and revolutionary leaders not to reference their writings. More important, Mein Kampf was not targeted at a general readership, but aimed to preach to the converted. He was not trying first and foremost to recruit new supporters. His primary goal was to address his followers at a time when, being imprisoned, he was both unable and forbidden to speak publicly to them, so as to avoid being pushed to the sidelines and replaced by somebody else.16 His readers were thus familiar with the general ideas from which Hitler had been drawing in defining and presenting his own political convictions. It would have been pointless and redundant for him to lay out in detail the sources upon which he based his own ideas.
For a different reason than keeping in touch with his admirers, the writing of Mein Kampf may have been of pivotal importance for Hitler: Researching and writing Mein Kampf while being incarcerated gave him time to think about and reconsider his political goals. On the night of February 3/4, 1942, he would state that it was only while writing his book that he fully thought through many of the things that he previously had propagated without much reflection. It was through constant thinking, he added, that he gained clarity about those things about which he hitherto had only had a hunch. This is why Hitler retrospectively referred to his time at Landsberg as a “university education paid for by the state.”17
While in Landsberg “university,” Hitler reevaluated his initial answers from 1919 and after to the question of how a new and sustainable Germany could be erected. In the process of doing so, his answers and thus his ideology changed radically. It is here where the real significance of Mein Kampf lies. As the first volume sold very slowly initially and the second volume hardly at all,18 Mein Kampf’s importance during the 1920s lay not in its impact
on its readership, but in the way the process of writing it fundamentally transformed Hitler’s ideas and sustained his political metamorphosis.
Much of what he expressed in Mein Kampf was, of course, well in line with what he had said in his many speeches between 1919 and 1923. The first volume also included a discussion of how political propaganda is to be conducted, which was based on the lessons that he drew from British and German wartime propaganda. Even though this discussion was well written and laid out Hitler’s own approach to the role of propaganda in politics, nothing in it would have been surprising for someone familiar with his speeches.
