Now, in one sense, this is a perfectly fair version of events. The Nazis had indeed “destroyed the Left,” and “the Right” did remain. But ask yourself, how do we normally talk about such things? For example, the right in America was once defined by the so-called country-club Republicans. In the 1950s, starting with the founding of National Review, a new breed of self-described conservatives and libertarians slowly set about taking over the Republican Party. From one perspective one could say the conservative movement “destroyed” the Old Right in America. But a more accurate and typical way of describing these events would be to say that the New Right replaced the old one, incorporating many of its members in the process. Indeed, that is precisely why we refer to the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and early 1980s. Similarly, when a new generation of leftists asserted themselves in the 1960s via such organizations as the Students for a Democratic Society, we called these activists the New Left because they had edged aside the Old Left, who were their elders and in many cases their actual parents. In time the New Left and the New Right took over their respective parties—the Democrats in 1972, the Republicans in 1980—and today they are simply the left and the right. Likewise, the Nazis did indeed lake over—and not merely destroy—the German left.
Historians in recent years have revisited the once “settled” question of who supported the Nazis. Ideological biases once required that the “ruling classes” and the “’bourgeoisie” be cast as the villains while the lower classes—the “proletariat” and the unemployed—be seen as supporting the communists and/or the liberal Social Democrats. After all, if the left is the voice for the poor, the powerless, and the exploited, it would be terribly inconvenient for those segments of society to support fascists and right-wingers—particularly if Marxist theory requires that the downtrodden be left-wing in their orientation.
That’s pretty much gone out the window. While there’s a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements with support from every stratum of society. Meanwhile, the contention that industrialists and other fat cats were pulling Hitler’s strings from behind the scenes has also been banished to the province of aging Marxists, nostalgic for paradigms lost. It’s true that Hitler eventually received support from German industry, but it came late and generally tended to follow his successes rather than fund them. But the notion, grounded in Marxist gospel, that Fascism or Nazism was the fighting arm of capitalist reaction crashed with the Berlin Wall. (Indeed, the very notion that corporations are inherently right-wing is itself an ideological vestige of earlier times, as I discuss in a subsequent chapter on economics.)
In Germany the aristocracy and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis. But when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn’t going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. This may be reprehensible, but these decisions weren’t driven by anything like an ideological alliance between capitalism and Nazism. Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological.
The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and limes: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic—including environmentalism, health food, and exercise—and, most of all, the need to “transcend” notions of class.
For these reasons, Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left because first and foremost he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right the party of the status quo. On this score. Hitler was in no sense, way, shape, or form a man of the right. There are few things he believed more totally than that he was a revolutionary. And his followers agreed. Yet for more than a generation to call Hitler a revolutionary has been a form of heresy, particularly for Marxist and German historians, since for the left revolution is always good—the inevitable forward motion of the Hegelian wheel of history. Even if their bloody tactics are (sometimes) to be lamented, revolutionaries move history forward. (For conservatives, in contrast, revolutions are almost always bad—unless, as in the case of the United States, you are trying to conserve the victories and legacy of a previous revolution.)
You can see why the Marxist left would resist the idea that Hitler was a revolutionary. Because if he was, then either Hitler was a force for good or revolutions can be bad. And yet how can you argue that Hitler wasn’t a revolutionary in the leftist mold? Hitler despised the bourgeoisie, traditionalists, aristocrats, monarchists, and all believers in the established order. Early in his political career, he “had become repelled by the traditionalist values of the German bourgeoisie,” writes John Lukacs in The Hitler of History. The Nazi writer Hanns Johst’s play Der Konig centers on a heroic revolutionary who meets a tragic end because he’s betrayed by reactionaries and the bourgeoisie. The protagonist takes his own life rather than abandon his revolutionary principles. When Hitler met Johst (whom he later named poet laureate of the Third Reich) in 1923. he told him that he’d seen the play seventeen times and that he suspected his own life might end the same way.
As David Schoenbaum has noted. Hitler viewed the bourgeoisie in almost the exact same terms as Lenin did. “Let us not deceive ourselves,” Hitler declared. “Our bourgeoisie is already worthless for any noble human endeavor” Several years after he was firmly in power, he explained: “We did not defend Germany against Bolshevism back then because we were not intending to do anything like conserve a bourgeois world or go so far as to freshen it up. Had communism really intended nothing more than a certain purification by eliminating isolated rotten elements from among the ranks of our so-called ‘upper ten thousand’ or our equally worthless Philistines, one could have sat back quietly and looked on for a while.”
A related definition of the right is that it is not merely in favor of preserving the status quo but affirmatively reactionary, seeking to restore the old order. This perspective obviously leaves much to be desired since most libertarians are considered members of the right and few would call such activists reactionaries. As we shall see, there is a sense in which Hitler was a reactionary insofar as he was trying to overthrow the entire millennium-old Judeo-Christian order to restore the paganism of antiquity—a mission shared by some on the left but none on the right today.
“Reactionary” is one of those words smuggled in from Marxist talking points that we now accept uncritically. Reactionaries in Marxist and early-twentieth-century progressive parlance were those who wanted to return to either the monarchy or, say, the Manchester Liberalism of the nineteenth century. They wished to restore, variously, the authority of God. Crown, patriotism, or the market—not Wotan and Valhalla. It is for this reason that Hitler saw himself in an existential battle with the forces of reaction. “We had no wish to resurrect the dead from the old Reich which had been ruined through its own blunders, but to build a new State,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. And elsewhere: “Either the German youth will one day create a new State founded on the racial idea or they will be the last witnesses of the complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world.”
Such radicalism—succeed or destroy it all!—explains why Hitler, the anti-Bolshevik, often spoke with grudging admiration of Stalin and the communists—but never had anything but derision for “reactionaries” who wanted merely to “turn back the clock” to the nineteenth century. Indeed, he considered the German Social Democrats’ greatest achievement to be the destruction of the monarchy in 1918.
Consider the symbolism of Horst Wessel, the party’s most famous martyr whose story was transformed into the anth
em of the Nazi struggle, played along with “Deutschland uber Alles” at all official events. The lyrics of the “Horst Wessel Song” refer to Nazi “comrades” shot at by the “Red Front and reactionaries.”
If we put aside for a moment the question of whether Hitlerism was a phenomenon of the right, what is indisputable is that Hitler was in no way conservative—a point scholars careful with their words always underscore. Certainly, to suggest that Hitler was a conservative in any sense related to American conservatism is lunacy. American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution. American conservatism straddles these two distinct but overlapping libertarian and traditionalist strains, whereas Hitler despised both of them.
THE RISE OF A NATIONAL SOCIALIST
The perception of Hitler and Nazism as right-wing rests on more than a historiographical argument or Hitler’s animosity to traditionalists. The left has also used Hitler’s racism, his alleged status as a capitalist, and his hatred of Bolshevism to hang the conservative label not only on Hitler and Nazism but on generic fascism as well. We can best address the merits—or lack thereof—of these points by briefly revisiting the story of Hitler’s rise. Obviously. Hitler’s personal tale has been so thoroughly dissected by historians and Hollywood that it doesn’t make sense to repeat it all here. But some essential facts and themes deserve more attention than they usually get.
Hitler was born in Austria, just over the border from Bavaria. Like that of many early Nazis, his youth was marked by a certain amount of envy toward the “true” Germans just across the border. (Many of the first Nazis were men from humble backgrounds in the hinterlands determined to “prove” their “Germanness” by being more “German” than anyone else.) This attitude flowed easily into anti-Semitism. Who better to hate than the Jews, particularly the successfully assimilated Germanized ones? Who were they to pretend they were Germans? Still, exactly when and why Hitler became an anti-Semite is unknown. Hitler himself claimed that he didn’t hate Jews as a child; yet youthful contemporaries later recalled that he’d been an anti-Semite for as long as they could remember. The only reason Hitler might have been reluctant to admit he was a lifelong Jew hater would be that doing so would undermine his claims to have deduced the evilness of Jews from careful study and mature observation.
This introduces one of the most significant differences between Mussolini and Hitler. For most of his careen Mussolini considered anti-Semitism a silly distraction and, later, a necessary sop to his overbearing German patron. Jews could be good socialists or fascists if they thought and behaved like good socialists or fascists. Because Hitler thought explicitly in terms of what we would today call identity politics, Jews were irredeemably Jews, no matter how well they spoke German. His allegiance, like that of all practitioners of identity politics, was to the iron cage of immutable identity.
In Meifi Karnpf, Hitler declares that he is a nationalist but not a patriot, a distinction with profound implications. Patriots revere the ideas, institutions, and traditions of a particular country and its government. The watchwords for nationalists are “blood,” “soil,” “race,” “Volk,” and so forth. As a revolutionary nationalist, Hitler believed the entire bourgeois edifice of modern German culture was hollowed out by political or spiritual corruption. As a result, he believed Germany needed to rediscover its pre-Christian authenticity. This was the logical extension of identity politics—the idea that experience of a personal quest for meaning in racial conceptions of authenticity could be applied to the entire community.
It was this mind-set that made Pan-Germanism so attractive to a young Hitler. Pan-Germanism took many forms, but in Austria the basic animating passion was a decidedly un-conservative antipathy toward the liberal, multiethnic pluralism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which accepted Jews, Czechs, and the rest of the non-Teutonic rabble as equal citizens. Some Pan-German “nationalists” wanted to break out of the Empire entirely. Others simply believed that the Germans should be first among equals.
Of course, young Hitler’s nationalist inferiority complex had to compete with a host of other resentments swirling around in his psyche. Indeed, no psyche in human history has been so thoroughly mined for various explanatory pathologies, and few subjects have offered a richer lode. “The search for Hitler,” writes Ron Rosenbaum in Explaining Hitler, “has apprehended not one coherent, consensus image of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers, competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of competing visions.” Psychologists and historians have argued that Hitler’s personality stems from the fact(s) that he was abused by his father, had a history of incest in his family, was a sadomasochist, a coprophiliac, a homosexual, or was part Jewish (or feared that he was). These theories vary in plausibility. But what is certain is that Hitler’s megalomania was the product of a rich complex of psychological maladies and impulses. Taken as a whole, they point to a man who felt he had much to compensate for and whose egocentrism knew no bounds. “I have to attain immortality,” Hitler once confessed, “even if the whole German nation perishes in the process.”
Hitler suffered from an enormous intellectual inferiority complex. A lifelong underachieves he was eternally bitter about getting poor grades in school. More important, perhaps, he resented his father for any number of perceived offenses. Alois Hitler—born Alois Schicklgruber—worked for the Austrian civil service, which is to say for the Empire and against “German interests.” Alois wanted Adolf to be not an artist but a civil servant like himself. Alois may also have been partly Jewish, a possibility that kept Hitler’s own racial history a state secret when he became dictator.
Hitler defied his father, moving to Vienna in hopes of attending the Academy of Fine Arts, but his application was rejected. On his second try, his drawings were so bad he wasn’t even allowed to apply. Partly thanks to some money he inherited from an aunt. Hitler slowly clawed out a professional life as a tradesman-artist (he was never a housepainter, as his enemies claimed). He mostly copied older paintings and drawings and sold them to merchants as frame tillers, place holders, and postcards. Constantly reading—mostly German mythology and pseudo history—Hitler ignored Vienna’s cafe society, puritanically refusing to drink, smoke, or dance (women in his mind were little more than terrifying syphilis carriers). In one of his few moments of understatement, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “I believe that those who knew me in those days took me for an eccentric.”
It was in Vienna that Hitler was first introduced to National Socialism. Vienna at the turn of the century was the center of the universe for those eager to learn more about Aryan mumbo jumbo, the mystical powers of the Hindu swastika, and the intricacies of Cosmic Ice Theory. Hitler swam in these bohemian waters, often staying up nights writing plays about pagan Bavarians bravely fighting off invading Christian priests trying to impose foreign beliefs on Teutonic civilization. He also spent days wandering the poorer sections of the city, only to come home to work on grandiose city plans that included more progressive housing for the working class. Indeed, he would rail against the unearned wealth of the city’s aristocrats and the need for social justice.
Most of all. Hitler immersed himself in the burgeoning field of “scientific” anti-Semitism. “Once, when passing through the inner City,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, “I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously; but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?” Hitler the scholar continues: “As was always my habit with such experiences. I turned to books for help in removing my doubts. For the first time in my life I bought myself some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pence.”
After making a careful study of the subject, he concluded in Mein Kampf, “I could no longer doubt that there was not a question of Germans who happe
ned to be of a different religion but rather that there was question of an entirely different people. For as soon as I began to investigate the matter and observe the Jews, then Vienna appeared to me in a different light. Wherever I now went I saw Jews, and the more I saw of them the more strikingly and clearly they stood out as a different people from the other citizens.”
The leading intellectual in Vienna touting “Teutonomania”—the neo-Romantic “discovery” of German exceptionalism very similar to some forms of Afrocentrism today—was Georg Ritter von Schonerer, whom Hitler followed closely and whom he later called a “profound thinker.” A drunk and a brawler, as well as a perfectly loutish anti-Semite and anti-Catholic, von Schonerer was something of a product of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, insisting that Catholics convert to German Lutheranism and even suggesting that parents reject Christian names in favor of purely “Teutonic” ones and calling for a ban on interracial marriages in order to keep Slavs and Jews from spoiling the genetic stock. And if Germans couldn’t unify into a single, racially pure German fatherland, the very least that could be done was to adopt a policy of racial preferences and affirmative action for Germans.
But Hitler’s true hero in those days was the burgomaster of Vienna himself. Dr. Karl Lueger. The head of the Christian Social Party, Lueger was a master politician-demagogue, a Viennese Huey Long of sorts, who championed—usually in explosive, sweaty tirades—a mixture of “municipal socialism,” populism, and anti-Semitism. His infamous calls for anti-Jewish boycotts and his warnings to Vienna’s Jews to behave themselves or end up like their co-religionists in Russia were reported in newspapers around the world Indeed, the emperor had overruled Lueger’s election twice, recognizing that he could only mean headaches for those who favored the status quo.
LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING Page 8
