Authors: Joachim C. Fest
Hitler
Challenging the Powers that Be
From Provincial to National Politics
On the Way to the Führer State
The “Greatest German in History”
Copyright © 1973 by Verlag Ullstein
English translation copyright © 1974 by Harcourt, Inc.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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Quotations throughout the book are from
Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Copyright 1943 and © renewed 1971 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
All rights reserved.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Fest, Joachim C. 1926â
Hitler.
“A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.”
1. Hitler, Adolf, 1889â1945.
DD247.H5F4713 943.086'092'4 [B] 73-18154
ISBN
978-0-15-141650-9
ISBN
978-0-15-602754-0 (pb.)
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e
ISBN
978-0-544-19554-7
v1.0313
Hitler and Historical Greatness
Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments. They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them. But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength. He who overcomes himself is divine. Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.
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Leopold von Ranke
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History records no phenomenon like him. Ought we to call him “great”? No one evoked so much rejoicing, hysteria, and expectation of salvation as he; no one so much hate. No one else produced, in a solitary course lasting only a few years, such incredible accelerations in the pace of history. No one else so changed the state of the world and left behind such a wake of ruins as he did. It took a coalition of almost all the world powers to wipe him from the face of the earth in a war lasting nearly six years, to kill himâto quote an army officer of the German resistanceâ“like a mad dog.”
Hitler's peculiar greatness is essentially linked to the quality of excess. It was a tremendous eruption of energy that shattered all existing standards. Granted, gigantic scale is not necessarily equivalent to historic greatness; there is power in triviality also. But he was not only gigantic and not only trivial. The eruption he unleashed was stamped throughout almost every one of its stages, down to the weeks of final collapse, by his guiding will. In many speeches, he recalled, with a distinctly rapturous note, the period of his beginnings, when he had “nothing at all to back (him), nothing, no name, no fortune, no press, nothing at all, nothing whatsoever,” and how, entirely by his own efforts, he had risen from “poor devil” to rule over Germany and soon over part of the world as well. “That has been almost miraculous!”
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In fact, to a virtually unprecedented degree, he created everything out of himself and was himself everything at once: his own teacher, organizer of a party and author of its ideology, tactician and demagogic savior, leader, statesman, and for a decade the “axis” of the world. He refuted the dictum that all revolutions devour their children; for he was, as has been said, “the Rousseau, the Mirabeau, the Robespierre and the Napoleon of his revolution; he was its Marx, its Lenin, its Trotsky and its Stalin. By character and nature he may have been far inferior to most of these, but he nevertheless managed to achieve what all of them could not: he dominated his revolution in every phase, even in the moment of defeat. That argues a considerable understanding of the forces he evoked.”
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He also had an amazing instinct for what forces could be mobilized at all and did not allow prevailing trends to deceive him. The period of his entry into politics was wholly dominated by the liberal bourgeois system. But he grasped the latent oppositions to it and by bold and wayward combinations seized upon these factors and incorporated them into his program. His conduct seemed foolish to political minds, and for years the arrogant
Zeitgeist
did not take him seriously. The mockery he earned was justified by his appearance, his rhetorical flights, and the theatrical atmosphere he deliberately created. Yet in a manner difficult to describe he always stood above his banal and dull-witted aspects. One particular source of his strength lay in his ability to build castles in the air with an intrepid and acute rationality.
In 1925, Hitler had been sitting in a furnished room in Munich, a failed Bavarian local politician, drawing his sketches of imaginary arches of triumph and domed halls. In spite of the collapse of all his hopes after the attempted putsch of November, 1923, he did not take back a single one of his words, did not mute his battle cry, and refused to modify any of his plans for domination of the world. In those days, he later remarked, everyone had branded him a visionary. “They always said I was crazy.” But only a few years later everything he had wanted was reality, or at any rate a realizable project, and those institutions that had recently seemed to be permanent and unchallenged were on their way out: democracy and political-party government, unions, international workers' solidarity, the European system of alliances, and the League of Nations. “Who was right?” Hitler triumphantly demanded. “The visionary or the others?âI was right.”
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In this ability to uncover the deeper spirit and tendencies of the age, and to represent those tendencies, there certainly is an element of historic greatness. “It appears to be the destiny of greatness,” Jacob Burckhardt wrote in his famous essay on historical greatness, in
Reflections on History,
“that it executes a will going beyond individual desires.” Burckhardt speaks of “the mysterious coincidence between the egoism of the individual and the communal will.” In general terms and at times in specific details, Hitler's career seems like a classic illustration of this tenet. The following chapters contain a wealth of evidence of that. The same is true for the other elements that in Burckhardt's view constitute historical greatness. Irreplaceability is one; “he leads a people from one stage of cultivation to another.” He “stands not only for the program and the fury of a party, but for a more general aim.” He manifests the ability “to jump boldly across the abyss”; he has the capacity of simplification, the gift of distinguishing between real and illusory powers, and finally the exceptional will power that creates an atmosphere of fascination. “Contest at close quarters becomes utterly impossible. Anyone desiring to oppose him must live outside of the reach of the man, with his enemies, and can meet him only on the battlefield.”
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And yet we hesitate to call Hitler “great.” Perhaps what gives us pause is not so much the criminal features in this man's psychopathic face. For world history is not played out in the area that is “the true site of morality,” and Burckhardt has also spoken of the “strange exemption from the ordinary moral code” which we tend to grant in our minds to great individuals.
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We may surely ask whether the absolute crime of mass extermination planned and committed by Hitler is not of an utterly different nature, overstepping the bounds of the moral context recognized by both Hegel and Burckhardt. Our doubts of Hitler's historic greatness also spring from another factor. The phenomenon of the great man is primarily aesthetic, very rarely moral in nature; and even if we were prepared to make allowances in the latter realm, in the former we could not. An ancient tenet of aesthetics holds that one who for all his remarkable traits is a repulsive human being, is unfit to be a hero. It may beâand evidence will be offeredâthat this description fits Hitler very well. His many opaque, instinctual traits, his intolerance and vindictiveness, his lack of generosity, his banal and naked materialismâpower was the only motive he would recognize, and he repeatedly forced his table companions to join him in his scorn of anything else as “bosh”âand in general his unmistakably vulgar characteristics give his image a cast of repugnant ordinariness that simply will not square with the traditional concept of greatness. “Impressiveness in this world,” wrote Bismarck in a letter, “is always akin to the fallen angel who is beautiful but without peace, great in his plans and efforts, but without success, proud and sad.” If this is true greatness, Hitler's distance from it is immeasurable.
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It may be that the concept of greatness has become problematical. In one of the pessimistically toned political essays Thomas Mann wrote in exile, he used the terms “greatness” and “genius” in regard to a then triumphant Hitler, but he spoke of “botched greatness” and of a debased stage of genius.
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In such contradictions a concept takes leave of itself. Perhaps this idea of greatness also springs from the historical consciousness of a past era, which placed almost all its weight on the actors and ideas of the historical process and almost none on the extensive network of forces.
Today this tendency is reversed, and we ascribe little importance to personality compared with the interests, relationships, and material conflicts within the society. This approach has also been applied to Hitler. Thus he has been portrayed as the “hireling” or “sword arm” of capitalism, who organized the class struggle from above and in 1933 subjugated the masses, who had been pressing for political and social self-determination. Later, by unleashing the war, he carried out the expansionist aims of his employers. In this story, which has been presented in a great many variants, Hitler appears as totally interchangeable, “the most vulgar of tin soldiers,” as one of the leftist analysts of Fascism wrote as early as 1929. For the proponents of this theory he was, at any rate, merely one factor among others, not a determining cause.
Fundamentally, the argument is directed at the very possibility of arriving at historical knowledge by way of a biographical study. No single person, it runs, can ever make manifest the historical process in all its complexities and contradictions, upon all its many, forever shifting areas of tension. Strictly speaking, the argument continues, the biographical approach merely continues the old tradition of court and adulatory writing, and after 1945 went right along employing basically the same methodology, with merely a change of sign: Hitler remained the all-moving, irresistible force and “merely changed his quality; the savior became the diabolic seducer.”
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Ultimately, the argument continues, every biographical account willy-nilly serves the needs for justification felt by the millions of onetime followers who can easily see themselves as the victims of so much “greatness” or who at any rate can place all responsibility for what happened upon the pathological whims of a diabolic and imperious leader. In short, biography amounts to a surreptitious maneuver in the course of a broad campaign of exculpation.
