Divine Fury (47 page)

To be sure, the widespread assertion of Stalin’s genius—an assertion that flooded Soviet propaganda in the 1930s, and an assertion that Stalin himself sincerely believed—rested on the ruthlessness and repression of a man who did not shy from murdering millions of his own subjects. He who would create must destroy. Genius, clearly, was above all law. And yet, if Stalin used genius largely to consolidate a power already procured by force, we should not underestimate the extent of its acceptance. “After
all,” the Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev later recalled, “the Stalin ‘personality cult’ had essentially consisted in the myth that Stalin was a man of genius, the leader and follower of all the peoples. This myth had been instilled in people’s minds by an all-powerful propaganda machine with no alternative sources of information. The effectiveness of this propaganda, backed up by repression, the reality of a deeply rooted delusion bordering on mass psychosis—these were impressively confirmed by the feelings of shock that affected millions of people when Stalin died.” Millions had mistaken evil genius for something else. To Russia’s West, that same mistake was made on an equally horrendous scale. But there, in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the cult of genius did not simply sanction a tyranny already established by force. It helped put one in place.
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H
ITLER’S
M
EIN
K
AMPF
is many things: a confession, a programmatic statement of goals, a hate-filled and disturbing rant. It is also a series of revelations, and one in particular is of special interest to anyone who would attempt to fathom Hitler’s understanding of himself and his subsequent embrace by large segments of the German population. “In the monotony of everyday life,” Hitler explains, “even important people often seem unimportant and hardly stand out above the average.” But when called by some special circumstance, they reveal, to the astonishment of the world, that they are fundamentally different from the great mass of average men and have always been this way. True, “an inventor establishes his fame only on the day of his invention,” yet “one must not think that genius [
die Genialität
] entered the man only at this hour. The spark of genius [
der Funke des Genies
] will be present in the forehead of the truly creatively gifted man from the hour of his birth, although for many years in a smoldering condition and therefore invisible to the rest of the world.” For “true genius is always inborn and never acquired by education or, still less, by learning.” At some crucial moment, however, “through an external cause or impetus of some kind, the spark becomes fire, something that only then begins to stir the attention of other people.” And although there may be any number of such external causes, Hitler singled out war as the perfect catalyst needed “to call genius into action.” In his hour of trial, the beardless boy is revealed as a hero. And through a “hammer-stroke of Fate,” the outer shell of everyday life is broken, revealing to the eyes of an astonished world his true inner kernel and core. At first the people are incredulous, refusing to believe that a being who had seemed so much like them is in truth of another kind. But that is “a process which repeats itself with every eminent human being.”
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Although Hitler here mentions no names, there can be little doubt that he saw himself as a perfect illustration of what he describes. His revelation was the revelation of genius. A fledgling bohemian artist in Vienna from the early part of the century, Hitler was famously denied admission to both the academy of painting and the academy of architecture there, living down and out and even for a while spending time in a homeless shelter before a small inheritance allowed him to pursue
la bohème
on slightly more comfortable terms. He copied paintings from postcards to sell in the street, indulged his long-standing passion for Wagner, and whiled away mornings in the public library, reading without structure or aim, dreaming of himself as a future artistic genius. In 1913, in large part to avoid the Austro-Hungarian draft, he exchanged the cafés of Vienna for the beer halls of Munich. The Habsburg Empire was corrupt, he believed. He would fight for Germany. And so the beardless boy of twenty-five went away to war in 1914, unremarkable and unremarked, average only in a generous estimation. But war’s “hammer-stroke” revealed something beneath the shell, a “heroism” that prompted him to risk his life again and again. Wounded seriously on several occasions and highly decorated for his service, Hitler received the news of Germany’s capitulation in 1918 as a summons to politics and a call for redemption. His own interest in political affairs had long paled before his affections for art. But Germany had been denied and betrayed, and she must be redeemed. Throwing himself into the morass of Munich’s right-wing fringe, Hitler quickly discovered a skill for speechmaking in a virulent, anti-Semitic mode. He took a prominent role in the failed right-wing coup attempt of November 1923, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, that led to his incarceration in Bavaria. And it was there, in the Landsberg Prison in 1924, that he wrote
Mein Kampf
, the first part of which was published the following year.

These details are common knowledge. But what is less well known, and what professional historians themselves have only recently begun to appreciate, is how the before and after of Hitler’s life—that of the would-be artist in Vienna and Munich and the improbably successful politician on the world stage—fit together. It was long customary to treat the two apart, as if they were essentially unrelated. Hitler’s failures as an artist were read as confirmation of his own basic mediocrity, or the source, perhaps, of his festering resentment. But his early aesthetic interests were treated as little more than that. Recently, however, a number of scholars have begun to appreciate what Hitler himself tells us clearly in
Mein Kampf
: the man before and the man after were one and the same. Far from abandoning his interest in art, Hitler, via politics, pursued
aesthetics by other means. The evidence is considerable, ranging from his abiding interest in architecture to the lavish attention he devoted to collecting art and his intimate involvement in the staging of Nazi festivals, rallies, exhibitions, and processions. But the most direct link is his deep fascination with Wagner, a fascination that began in his youth and endured until the very end.
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One may debate whether “there was a good deal of ‘Hitler’ in Wagner,” as Thomas Mann later provocatively declared. But there was undoubtedly a good deal of Wagner in Hitler, a point that the latter, as Führer, emphasized again and again. He saw
Lohengrin
at thirteen, and
Rienzi
at fifteen. The story of the last Roman tribune, a populist who rallies the people,
Rienzi
was based on a novel by Bulwer Lytton that was dear to Benito Mussolini; Hitler was moved by the music. After seeing the opera for the first time at the Landestheater in Linz in 1905, he allegedly declared, “I want to become a tribune of the people.” He later spoke of the experience as life-changing, claiming, “In that hour it all began.” These were admittedly recollections, and likely projections. But the feeling of continuity is important all the same. There is a reason why the overture to
Rienzi
served from early on as a signature tune to the Hitler movement and an unofficial Nazi anthem: it connected Hitler emotively to the Wagnerian passions that stirred him in his youth and later moved him to dream of German redemption. That dream, so widely shared, was central to Wagner’s entire project, which sought, on the shoulders of Schopenhauer, to create a religion of art, conceiving shared aesthetic experience as a way to overcome modern disenchantment and transform the
Volk
through myth. Revealing the riches of Germany’s mythical creative past, Wagner’s music simultaneously opened up a future in which the German people might achieve a kind of salvation through art. In his “Wagnerian self-fashioning,” Hitler aimed for a similar effect, seeking to reproduce the same transports of feeling on the political stage that he himself experienced in Wagner’s music. Before the podium, Hitler became the heroic artist he couldn’t be before the easel. He was the people’s tribune, its savior, its redeemer—Rienzi, Parsifal, and Siegfried all in one. As he made clear in 1924, “the spiritual sword that we wield was forged in Bayreuth, first by the Master himself [Wagner], then by [Houston Stewart] Chamberlain.”
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Hitler’s invocation of the critic Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law (who had married Eva von Bülow, Wagner’s daughter with Cosima von Bülow), and Bayreuth, Wagner’s musical and spiritual home, in the context of a discussion of the values that fired the sword of national redemption hints at the indispensable quality of the man who would wield it:
genius. As early as 1920, in a speech delivered on April 27 of that year, Hitler began insisting that Germany needed a “dictator who is a genius.” He was, as of yet, unwilling to audition for the role, but he received a critical endorsement just two years later, when he traveled to visit the Chamberlains at their home in Bayreuth at the invitation of Winifred Wagner, who was married to Wagner’s son, Siegfried. Winifred would become one of Hitler’s closest admirers and friends, frequently hosting him in Wahnfried, Wagner’s home, sparking rumors of an affair. But in 1923, just weeks before the Beer Hall Putsch, the most meaningful support came from Chamberlain, who wrote to Hitler shortly after their meeting in glowing terms, describing him as a “true awakener” and a man with “immense achievements” ahead of him. Invoking Goethe’s distinction in
Faust
between
Gewalt und Gewalt
—chaotic violence and the ordering force that shapes the universe—Chamberlain observed in Hitler the latter. He was, in “a creative and universal sense” (
in solchem kosmosbildenden Sinne
), a constructive man. “That Germany in its hour of greatest need has given birth to a Hitler,” Chamberlain enthused, “was a testament to its vitality.”
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To receive this “blessing” from the greatest genius enthusiast in Germany, who was himself a living link to the man whom Hitler regarded as the archetypal German genius of the nineteenth century, was a major endorsement. In practical terms, it meant that Hitler could publicize his ties to Chamberlain and the Wagner family as proof of his status as heir to the Wagnerian
Kampf
. He wasted no time in having Chamberlain’s letter published in a party newspaper and did the same with subsequent correspondence. But, just as importantly, if less tangibly, the letter could only have confirmed Hitler’s intuitive sense that he himself possessed the precious spark. Doubts engendered by his earlier failures could be dispelled, and those “failures” themselves could be transformed by a curious Romantic/modernist logic as further confirmation of his special status. For the true genius was always ahead of his time—a man of the future whose creative energy and vision would be greeted initially with miscomprehension, if not outright denial. As Hitler maintained in
Mein Kampf
, this was the way of all great men. By a similar reasoning—one reinforced by the whole of nineteenth-century
Geniegedanke
(thought about genius) and the scientific study of eminent men—genius could be understood as an adaptive power and transferable “skill.” The same spark that had burned in the young artist could quite naturally take flame in the political man without a corresponding loss of heat.

The thinly veiled allusions in
Mein Kampf
indicate that Hitler was already applying this law of the conservation of genius to himself. Others
certainly were. The author Georg Schott’s
Das Volksbuch vom Hitler
, for example, the first biography of the young leader, published in Munich in 1924 and reprinted throughout the Nazi era, aimed to present Hitler to the people as he really was. That Hitler was a genius, Schott maintained, and to what extent, had recently been proclaimed by an “outstanding personality.” He called attention to the letters of Chamberlain as proof. To ask whether Hitler was a genius was to find the answer in the question. The subheadings of the book spoke for themselves. Hitler was the “prophetic man,” the “religious person,” the “man of will,” categories that were subsumed in the key chapter, “The Genius,” which left no doubt as to Hitler’s exalted status as a being apart. Hitler’s future minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, himself a frustrated man of letters despite a doctorate in literature from the University of Heidelberg, hailed Hitler not long after their first meeting as a “genius” and the “natural, creative instrument of divine fate.” Early disagreements did not alter the impression, with Goebbels bending to what he regarded as the “political genius” of the “greater one.” Few would show themselves more effective in sustaining Hitler’s view that, as Hitler himself explained in a speech in the mid-1920s, the people formed a pyramid with “the great man, the genius,” at its head.
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It was here that Hitler’s own delusions, wedded to a ruthless strategic acumen and a gift for impassioned oratory, merged with a current of millennial expectation that flowed through the religion of genius. In the uncertain climate of Weimar Germany, with its weak republic and economic malaise, Hitler’s call for a “dictator who is a genius” was echoed widely. Thus did the Tübingen historian Joseph Haller implore Germans, in his
Die Epochen der deutchen Geschichte
of 1922, to hope for the coming of the “right man at the right time,” who would restore Germany’s greatness and enable it to overcome its afflictions with the “miraculous powers of a genius.” The epigraph on the title page, a line from Homer’s
Iliad
, reaffirmed the point, declaring prophetically, “The Day Shall Come.” The sentiment enjoyed surprising currency among intellectuals and university elites, where political messianism and the cult of heroic genius found important bases of support. As the historian Karl Alexander von Müller declared in a speech in Munich in 1924, “the hour will come in which the lightning of the genius shall flash through the dark clouds of our confusion and burn out the mountains of our shame.” Of course, it was impossible to know what form the rescuing genius would take. As the literary scholar and acting vice chancellor of the University of Berlin, Gustav Roethe, mused rhetorically as early as 1919, who can say whether he would be a “king, military commander,
statesman, poet, or an economist? We do not see him, nor is he far away. But he will come as the great individual. The true birth of German yearning and singularity.”
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