When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  It helped that revolutionary France was indeed subject to threats, internal and external. There were counter-revolutionaries plotting the restoration of the monarchy who had the support of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and then his successor Francis II. The Girondists had eagerly embraced war because they thought it would force the opponents of the revolution out into the open. Robespierre opposed the Girondists because he feared precisely the outcome they wished for. The disastrous military defeats suffered by the French fuelled the fears about a military coup d’état led by the Marquis de Lafayette, the aristocrat who fought in the American Revolutionary War, who counted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as close friends.

  What is the remedy for all these evils? We know no other than the development of that general motive force of the Republic – virtue. Democracy perishes by two kinds of excess: either the aristocracy of those who govern, or else the popular scorn for the authorities whom the people themselves have established, scorn which makes each clique, each individual take unto himself the public power and bring the people through excessive disorders, to annihilation or to the power of one man. The double task of the moderates and the false revolutionaries is to toss us back and forth perpetually between these two perils. But the people’s representatives can avoid them both, because government is always the master at being just and wise; and, when it has that character, it is sure of the confidence of the people. It is indeed true that the goal of all our enemies is to dissolve the Convention. It is true that the tyrant of Great Britain and his allies promise their parliament and subjects that they will deprive you of your energy and of the public confidence which you have merited; that is the first instruction for all their agents …We are beginning a solemn debate upon all the objects of its [the Convention’s] anxiety, and everything that can influence the progress of the revolution. We adjure it not to permit any particular hidden interest to usurp ascendancy here over the general will of the assembly and the indestructible power of reason.

  Robespierre ends, with symphonic technique, back at the beginning. He is a perfect case of why we need to be vigilant with language because his governing idea – virtue – is exactly that of Cicero. The trouble with Robespierre’s use of the term is not, though, his rhetorical fraudulence. It is his terrible, sea-green incorruptible sincerity. Robespierre really believed that if you could imagine a better society you could create it and no methods were too brutal. During the revolution he scribbled in his notebook that a single will was needed: ‘il faut une volonté une’. It was either the republic or the monarchy, and it was a fight to the death. Coleridge put it well: ‘Robespierre … possessed a glowing ardour that still remembered the end, and a cool ferocity that never either overlooked or scrupled the means’.

  These words foretell his own ending. Not all members of the Convention were as maniacally certain as Robespierre was that the ends justified any means. In a fatal error, Robespierre demanded a purge of suspect deputies who, he alleged, were plotting against him. But when he failed to give their names most of the Convention assumed that Robespierre meant them, and arrested him. The end was grisly. Robespierre tried to kill himself with a pistol but managed only to shatter his lower jaw. After a night’s vigil in excruciating pain, he was taken to the cell in which Marie Antoinette had been held, and on 28 July 1794 was guillotined without trial.

  At some level, Robespierre may have known that he was fooling himself. In his last speech to the Convention, he said: ‘My reason, not my heart, is beginning to doubt this republic of virtue which I have set myself to establish’. It was a rare lapse from conviction and it was too late by then. It is always a dreadful thing when a leader displays the courage of his convictions, and in this speech Robespierre presents the face of a true believer. The republic of virtue led him straight towards vice.

  Robespierre is not among the vaunted today. France is fond of memorialising its heroes, but not Robespierre, who has only a few streets in provincial France and a shabby metro station in Montreuil, a poor suburb of Paris, to his name. There is, though, a statue of Robespierre in Saint Petersburg and another, commissioned by Lenin, who described him as ‘a Bolshevik avant la lettre’, in Moscow.

  When Churchill wrote his short manual about public speaking called The Scaffolding of Rhetoric the fate of Robespierre wasn’t what he meant, but it is a reminder of what can happen when a captivating speaker gets hold of an idea that leaps out of his control. Words have to be handled with care and Robespierre did not respect his talent enough to keep it disciplined. More than 2,500 people went to the scaffold in Paris and more than 40,000 in France as a whole. It is precisely because of the gruesome philosophy set out in this speech that Robespierre was one of them. His tragedy was not that he betrayed the ideals of the revolution. It was that he carried them out.

  ADOLF HITLER

  My Patience Is Now at an End

  Berlin Sportpalast

  26 September 1938

  Adolf Hitler is the man who tests, to destruction, the idea that even the malignant think they are doing the right thing. Given the magnitude of the crimes committed with his connivance, under his instruction and in his name, it seems wrong to associate Hitler with ordinary concepts such as ‘revolution’ or ‘rhetoric’. But Hitler thought of himself as a revolutionary who was ridding the world of error, and his use of the performative act of the speech to create the effect was more developed than in any of his contemporaries. There is no sense with Hitler, as there may be with Robespierre and Castro, that the revolution has somehow gone wrong. His revolution was pernicious from the start. But he didn’t think so, and one of the ways we can be alert to the tragedy is to work out exactly what he did, and how he did it.

  Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria. His childhood in Austria was marked by a constant struggle with his father over the young Adolf’s desire to be an artist. In 1905 Hitler moved to Vienna, where he repeatedly failed to get into the Academy of Fine Arts and lived a bohemian life of no great repute or promise. The Vienna of the first decade of the twentieth century was rife with prejudice, especially anti-Semitism, which became part of the brew of resentment that Hitler was slowly preparing. In Mein Kampf Hitler says that it was in Vienna he first became an anti-Semite, although it is probable that his full conviction did not emerge until after Germany’s defeat in the First World War. He then become a full-bore advocate of the theory of the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab in the back. The obvious perpetrators, in his fevered mind, were the international Jews.

  Hitler moved to Munich in 1913 and enlisted in the Bavarian army. He served as a dispatch runner on the Western Front in Belgium and France, was present at the battles of Ypres, Arras and Passchendaele and was wounded at the Somme. He was decorated for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross, First Class, in 1918. In October 1918, he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack and while he was in hospital in Pasewalk he received the news that Germany had been defeated in the war. By his own account the terrible news induced a second attack of blindness. The Treaty of Versailles pinned responsibility for the war on Germany and imposed severe reparations. Hitler felt it as a keen humiliation.

  Back in Munich after the war Hitler became the army’s point man with the German Workers’ Party (DAP). Its founder, Anton Drexler, was impressed by Hitler’s skill as an orator and, as the DAP became the National Socialist Party (NSDAP), Hitler joined up. Even in these early days his polemical invective against the Versailles Treaty, Marxists and Jews was notorious in Munich. It was there, in 1923, that Hitler staged his ill-fated putsch in the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall. Its failure landed him in jail, and it was while in prison that he dictated the first volume of Mein Kampf, the manifesto in which his vain mixture of incoherence and viciousness would speak for itself if only he could organise a sentence to point in the right direction. Mein Kampf is a depressing testament to Hitler’s paranoia about the perceived humiliation at Versailles and the various conspiracies supposedly practised by internat
ional Jewry, capitalism and communism. One of the puzzles of Hitler’s rhetoric is how someone whose thinking was so disordered, in every sense of that term, could be so effective on the stage.

  It was a tragedy that Hitler was always underestimated. The elders of the Weimar Republic believed that by embracing him they could contain him. The NSDAP became the second-largest party after the 1930 election, and when elections in 1932 produced no decisive result, President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor. In 1933, the Communist Party was blamed for the Reichstag fire and proscribed, and the NSDAP’s share of the vote rose to almost 44 per cent, making it the largest single party. Bursting free of the weak shackles imposed on him, Hitler passed an Enabling Act in 1933, which gave him the power to pass laws without the consent of the Reichstag for four years. The official title of the Enabling Act shows the NSDAP gift for sinister euphemism: Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich – the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and State. On 14 July 1933 the NSDAP was declared the only legal political party in Germany. When Hindenburg died in August 1934 Hitler merged the role of president with that of chancellor and formally named himself Führer und Reichskanzler, leader and chancellor.

  Hitler proceeded to make himself the most notorious leader of modern times. His domestic programme was marked by antipathy to the Jews and vast infrastructure expenditure, including rearmament, which helped unemployment to fall from 6 million in 1932 to 1 million in 1936. The rearmament was in the service of a vaulting imperial ambition. In March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the demilitarised zone in violation of the Versailles Treaty. At all points in the process he protested his peaceful intentions and at all points he could not be trusted. The following speech is a classic of Hitler’s fictitious reassurance. Hitler had convinced Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, that his claim on Czechoslovakia was both legitimate and the summit of his ambition. Determined to avoid conflict, Chamberlain consented. We know now that he was catastrophically wrong to have done so.

  On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which drew a declaration of war from Britain and France. The cost of the war that followed was savage. The Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of others designated by Hitler as Untermenschen, subhumans. The herding of human beings into cattle trucks for transportation to concentration camps where they faced almost certain execution is the most abhorrent episode in modern history, perhaps in all history.

  Hitler’s gruesome end befits that history. On the Wilhelmstraße in Berlin the last scenes of the European war played out. Hitler cowered in the damp Führerbunker, below the water table in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, waiting for the end, sitting under his large portrait of Frederick the Great, listening to radio broadcasts from the BBC. Overhead, the air droned with the sound of bombers. On 16 April the Red Army began the battle of Berlin; three days later they had encircled the city. By the evening of the 21st, Russian tanks had reached the outskirts of Berlin. At his afternoon conference the following day, Hitler fell into a tearful rage when he realised, for the first time, that the war was lost. He declared that he would remain in Berlin until the enemy arrived, whereupon he would shoot himself. At midnight, 29 April 1945, Hitler married his mistress Eva Braun. He then dictated his last will and testament to his secretary Traudl Junge. In the Führerbunker on 30 April, 1945 Hitler shot himself. His wife took cyanide. In accordance with Hitler’s instructions their bodies were burnt in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.

  The new head of government was one of the only other occupants of the Führerbunker, Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister of propaganda. The appalling grotesquerie of the Nazi regime is beyond ordinary symbolism, but if any wretched story approximates to the horror of the times it is the fate of Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig and Heidrun, the children of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. Loyal to the end, Goebbels was Hitler’s closest adjutant. Committed to dying in the bunker rather than seeking to flee, he condemned his children to the same fate. In the late afternoon of 1 May 1945, he and Magda murdered their six children by arranging for an SS dentist to inject them with morphine. When the children lost consciousness, Magda crushed ampoules of cyanide in their mouths. After performing this dreadful benediction, Magda committed suicide with her husband. On 2 May the Soviet forces entered the bunker complex.

  The line that led here can be traced back to the fateful speech that Hitler delivered in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 26 September 1938. The man who introduced him to the crowd on that day was his loyal propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.

  Today I step before you to speak directly to the people for the first time just as in the days of our great struggles, and you know well what that means! The world may no longer have any doubts: it is not one Führer or one man who speaks at this point, rather it is the German people that speaks! As I now speak for this German people, I know that this people of millions joins in the chorus of my words, reaffirms them, and makes them a holy oath in its own right. Some of the other statesmen might do well to consider if this is the case with their people as well. The question which has moved us so profoundly within the last few months and weeks is an old one. It reads not so much ‘Czechoslovakia’, but rather ‘Herr Benes’. This name unites all that moves millions of people today and which lets them either despair or instils in them a zealous determination …

  This is Hitler’s rhetorical and political method perfectly defined. He simply asserts himself as the representative individual of Germanic experience. He is the nation and the nation is him. The German historian Friedrich Meinecke, himself an anti-Semite, called Hitler ‘one of the great examples of the singular and most incalculable power of personality in historical life’.

  At the NSDAP congress in Nuremberg two weeks before this speech, Hitler had preached about the German Reich to an already converted crowd. ‘The German Reich has long been dormant,’ he said. ‘Now the German Volk has awakened and once more bears its crown of a thousand years high on its head’. The novelty in his rhetoric was to create a bound community, a Volksgemeinschaft, just by talking it into life. No speaker has ever used public performance as much, or to such effect.

  One of the closest studies of Hitler’s rhetorical skill was conducted by Goebbels, who published an essay called ‘The Führer as a Speaker’ in 1936. ‘The Führer is the first person in Germany’, says Goebbels, ‘to use speech to make history.’ He goes on, for once not exaggerating: ‘it is also a classic proof for the outstanding rhetorical brilliance of the Führer that his word alone was enough to transform an entire period, to defeat an apparently strong state and to bring in a new era.’ In German history, says Goebbels, only Fichte’s addresses to the German nation and Bismarck’s political speeches were of world-historical standard. Hitler ‘has the amazing gift’, said Goebbels, ‘of sensing what is in the air’. He didn’t mention that what you sense in the air is more likely to be in the air if the police are on hand to enforce it.

  The 15,000 people in the Sportpalast hung on Hitler’s every word. It is an unedifying but instructive practice to watch the Führer speak. The theatrical spectacle is obvious. Hitler always liked to speak at twilight, in the fading light of the Götterdämmerung. The language too is aggressive. George Steiner said that Hitler drew on a rhetorical power that might be peculiar to German, or at least enhanced in German. It is a mixture of abstract concepts and political violence. Hitler’s coiled energy seems to manifest his meaning. He is a speaker who can easily be understood with the sound turned down. The setting and the demeanour say so much, even before the language intervenes. But when the language does come it is soon clear that the script has been written by the devil.

  I have really in these years pursued a practical peace policy. I have approached all apparently impossible problems with the firm resolve to solve them peacefully even when there was the danger of making more or less serious renunciations on Germany’s part. I myself am a front-line soldier and I know how grave a thing war is. I wanted t
o spare the German people such an evil. Problem after problem I have tackled with the set purpose to make every effort to render possible a peaceful solution. The most difficult problem that faced me was the relation between Germany and Poland. There was the danger that the conception of a ‘hereditary enmity’ might take possession of our people and of the Polish people. That I wanted to prevent. I know quite well that I should not have succeeded if Poland at that time had had a democratic constitution. For these democracies which are overflowing with phrases about peace are the most bloodthirsty instigators of war. But Poland at that time was governed by no democracy but by a man. In the course of barely a year it was possible to conclude an agreement which, in the first instance for a period of ten years, on principle removed the danger of a conflict. We are all convinced that this agreement will bring with it a permanent pacification. We realise that here are two peoples which must live side by side and that neither of them can destroy the other. A state with a population of thirty-three millions will always strive for an access to the sea. A way to an understanding had therefore to be found. And we did arrive at a settlement which is constantly being improved upon. What is decisive in this instance is that both governments and all reasoned and rational people in both countries have the firm will to increasingly improve relations. This deed was truly in the service of peace, worth substantially more than the idle talk in the League of Nations’ Palace in Geneva.

  The lying is breathtaking. The accusation that a speaker is lying should be levelled sparingly. It is more often the case that a speaker is deluded or foolish than that they are saying things with the conscious desire to deceive. There is no other word for this passage. Hitler has not been pursuing peace. The only circumstances in which his ambitions are compatible with peace are if his opponents simply allow him the Lebensraum, living space, that he demands. He has already claimed, just before this passage, that he does not want war with France and that his intuition that the people of Austria wanted to be reunited with the larger German nation had been vindicated in a plebiscite. In fact in March of 1938 Hitler had invaded Austria in the power-grab he called the Anschluss.