Hitler (29 page)

From 1922 on he began holding series of eight, ten, or twelve rallies on a single evening, at each of which he would appear as the principal speaker. This procedure suited his quantity complex as well as his passion for repetition. An eyewitness of one such serial demonstration at the Munich Lowenbrau has given the following description of it:

 

How many political meetings had I already attended in this hall. But neither during the war nor during the Revolution had I ever felt such a white-hot wave of mass excitement blast in my face the moment I entered. “Their own songs of struggle, their own flags, their own symbols, their own salute,” I noted. “Semimilitary monitors, a forest of glaring red banners with a black swastika on a white ground, the strangest mixture of soldierly and revolutionary, nationalist and socialist elements. In the audience too: mostly strata of the middle class on the skids—is this where it will find rebirth? For hours continual, booming march music; for hours short speeches by subordinates; when will he come? Has anything happened to hold him up? Impossible to describe the state of suspense, building up within this atmosphere. Suddenly movement at the entrance to the hall. Shouted commands. The speaker on the platform breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Everyone leaps to his feet shouting
Heil!
And right between the howling masses and the howling banners he comes with his retinue, he for whom all have been waiting. He strides rapidly to the platform, right hand raised rigidly. He passed quite close by me, and I saw that this was a different person from the man I had met now and then in private houses.
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The structure of his speeches scarcely varied. First came denunciations of the present period, intended to tune up the audience and establish initial contact with it. “Bitterness has become general; people are beginning to notice that what was promised in 1918 has not turned into anything of dignity and beauty.” Thus he opened a speech in September, 1922. There followed historical reviews, a spelling out of the party program, and attacks on Jews, November criminals, or lying politicians. The cheering of the audience or of an official claque would send him into a mounting state of excitement that would last until he reached those exultant appeals for unity with which he always ended. In between, he would tuck in whatever the heat of the moment, the applause, the vapors of beer, or the general atmosphere suggested. With each successive meeting he grasped more surely and translated more accurately the vibrations of that atmosphere: The fatherland's humiliation, the sins of imperialism, the envy of neighbors, the “communalization of the German woman,” the smearing of Germany's past, the shallow, commercialized, and debauched West from which had come the republic, the disgraceful dictated peace of Versailles, the Allied control commissions, nigger music, bobbed hair, and modern art, but neither work, security, nor bread. “Germany is starving on democracy!” he cried. For he could coin memorable phrases. In addition, his obscure metaphors, his great use of mythic allusion gave his rantings an air of profundity. Out of trifling local incidents he could construct dramas of universal import. Thus he could prophesy: “What is beginning today will be greater than the World War. It will be fought out on German soil for the entire world. There are only two possibilities: We will be the sacrificial lamb or victors!”

In the past sober Anton Drexler would have been there and would sometimes hear such rhapsodic outbursts and to Hitler's annoyance put in a final word to bring things into perspective. But now there was no longer anyone around to remonstrate when a wildly gesticulating Hitler vowed to tear the peace treaty to shreds if he took power, or let it be known that he would not shrink from another war with France, or conjured up the vision of a mighty German Reich stretching “from Königsberg to Strassburg and from Hamburg to Vienna.” His ever-larger audiences proved that what people wanted to hear was precisely such wild challenges. “The thing is not to renounce or to accept, but to venture what is seemingly impossible.” The general view of Hitler as an unprincipled opportunist does not do justice either to his daring or his originality. His courage in voicing “forbidden” opinions was extraordinary. Precisely that gave him the aura of manliness, fierceness, and sovereign contempt, which befitted the image of the Great Leader.

The role in which he soon cast himself was that of the outsider; in times of public discontent such a role had great potential. Once, when the
Münchener Post
termed him “the wiliest agitator making mischief in Munich today,” Hitler replied with: “Yes, we want to work people up, we're agitators all right!” In the beginning he may well have been pained by the plebeian, quarrelsome features of his public career. But once he realized that certain crudenesses made him more popular in the circus tent and more interesting in the salons, he identified with those qualities without apology. When he was criticized for the dubious company he kept, he replied that he would rather be a German tramp than a French count. “They say we're a bunch of anti-Semitic rowdies. So we are, we want to stir up a storm! We don't want people to sleep, but to know a thunderstorm is brewing. We won't let our Germany be crucified. Call us brutes if you want to. But if we save Germany, we'll have carried out the greatest deed in the world.”

The frequency of religious metaphors and motifs in his rhetoric reflects childhood emotions: recollections of his experience as acolyte in Lambach monastery, when he was stirred to the depths by images of suffering and despair against a background of triumphant belief in salvation. He admired the Catholic Church for its genius in devising such combinations, and he learned what he could from it. Without the least scruple or any consciousness of blasphemy he took over “my Lord and Saviour” for his anti-Semitic tirades: “As a Christian and a man I read, in boundless love, through the passage which relates how the Lord at last rallied his strength and reached for the whip to drive the usurers, the brood of adders and otters, out of the temple! Profoundly moved, today, after two thousand years, I recognize the tremendous import of his fight to save the world from the Jewish poison—I see it most powerfully shown by the fact that because of it he had to bleed to death on the cross.”

The narrow range of the emotions he played upon corresponded to the monotony of structure in his speeches. There is no saying how much of this was deliberate, how much due to personal fixation. When we read some of these addresses—although they have been considerably revised—we are struck by their repetitiveness. From the multitude of resentments that filled him he extracted always the same meanings, the same accusations, and vows of revenge. “There is only defiance and hate, hate and again hate!” he once cried out. The word was obsessive with him. He would, for instance, cry out for the enemy's hatred; he longed to have the enemy's hate fall upon him, he declared. Or: “To achieve freedom takes pride, will, defiance, hate and again hate!”

With his compulsion to magnify everything, he saw gigantic corruption at work in the most ordinary affairs, detected a comprehensive strategy of treason. Behind every Allied note, every speech in the French Chamber of Deputies, he saw the machinations of the enemy of mankind. Head thrown back, outstretched arm before him, index finger pointing at the ground and twitching up and down—in this characteristic pose Adolf Hitler, still no more than a local Bavarian curiosity, orated himself into a state of frenzy in which he pitted himself against the government, against conditions in Germany, and in fact against the condition of the entire world: “No, we forgive nothing; we demand revenge!”
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He had no sense of the ridiculous and despised ridicule's reputedly fatal effects. He had not yet adopted the imperious attitudes of later years; and since he felt that as an artist he was alienated from the masses, he often made deliberate efforts at popular behavior. At such times he would wave a beer mug at his audience or try to check the uproar he was kindling by a clumsy “Sh..., sh...” Apparently his large audiences were there more for the excitement than for political reasons; at any rate, in contrast to the tens of thousands who came to mass meetings, there were still only 6,000 registered members of the party at the beginning of 1922. But he was listened to. People sat motionless, eyes riveted upon him. After his first few words the thump of the beer mugs generally stopped. Often he spoke into a breathless silence, which from time to time was explosively shattered as if thousands of pebbles suddenly came rattling down on a drum, as one observer described it. Naively, with all the hunger for acclaim of the novice, Hitler enjoyed the stir he caused, enjoyed being the center of attention. “When you go through ten halls,” he admitted to his entourage, “and everywhere people shout their enthusiasm for you—it is an uplifting feeling, you know.” Quite often he would end his performance with an oath of loyalty that he would have the audience repeat after him, or with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling of the hall, his voice hoarse and breaking with emotion, he would cry, “Germany! Germany!”—repeating the word until the crowd fell in with it and the chanting moved on to one of the party's battle or pogrom songs. Often they would pour out of the hall to march singing through the nocturnal streets. Hitler admitted that after each of his speeches he himself would be “soaking wet and would have lost four to six pounds.” At every meeting his uniform “dyed his underwear blue.”
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According to his own testimony, it took him two years to learn to handle all the methods of propagandistic domination, so that he felt himself “master in this art.” It has been suggested that he was the first to apply the techniques of American advertising to political struggle. Perhaps the great Barnum was indeed one of his teachers, as
Die Weltbühne
later asserted. But the tone of amusement with which the magazine announced this discovery revealed its own blindness. Many supercilious contemporaries from left to right made the same mistake: confusing Hitler's techniques with his aims and concluding that the aims were laughable because the methods were. He himself never swerved in his determination to overthrow a world and put another in its place; to him there was no incongruity between the techniques of the circus barker and the universal conflagrations and apocalypses he had in mind.

 

The important figure in the background, the symbol of union throughout the
völkisch
camp, remained—in spite of Hitler's oratorical success—General von Ludendorff. With a respectful eye partly cocked toward the general, Hitler was still regarding himself as something of a forerunner preparing the way for someone greater than himself. He, Hitler, playing the role that John the Baptist played for Christ—“a very small sort of St. John,” he called himself—would create a racially united people and a sword for that greater one. But the masses seemed to realize sooner than he himself that he was the one they were waiting for. They streamed to him “as to a Saviour,” a contemporary account notes. There are stories in plenty of “awakenings” and conversions—totalitarian movements are often characterized by such pseudoreligious events. For example, Ernst Hanfstaengl first heard Hitler at this time. He had many objections; nevertheless, he felt that “a new period of life” was beginning for him. The businessman Kurt Luedecke, who for a time was counted among the leading members of Hitler's entourage and who later was imprisoned in the Oranienburg concentration camp, after his escape abroad described the spell cast on him and innumerable others by Hitler the orator:

 

Presently my critical faculty was swept away.... I do not know how to describe the emotions that swept over me as I heard this man. His words were like a scourge. When he spoke of the disgrace of Germany, I felt ready to spring on any enemy. His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther. I forgot everything but the man; then, glancing round, I saw that his magnetism was holding these thousands as one.

Of course I was ripe for this experience. I was a man of thirty-two, weary of disgust and disillusionment, a wanderer seeking a cause: a patriot without a channel for his patriotism, a yearner after the heroic without a hero. The intense will of the man, the passion of his sincerity seemed to flow from him into me. I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to religious conversion.
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From the spring of 1922 on the membership figures began climbing by leaps and bounds. By summer the party had some fifty local groups, and at the beginning of 1923 the Munich business office had to be closed temporarily because it was unable to cope with the mass of applications. Part of this increase was due to an order requiring every “party comrade” to bring in three new members and one subscriber to the
Völkische Beobachter
every three months. But much of it was surely due to Hitler's growing skill as an orator and organizer.

In order to meet the needs of disoriented people, the NSDAP tried to create close links between the party and the personal lives of the members. In this respect it was once more drawing on the tested practices of socialist parties. But the rite of the weekly evening talkfests, at which attendance was obligatory, the joint outings, concerts, or solstice festivals, the singing, the cookouts, and saluting, in addition to the various forms of bland sociability that developed in party headquarters and storm troop barracks—all this went far beyond the model and appealed more directly to the human craving for solidarity. The movement's greatest task, Hitler declared, was to provide “these seeking and erring masses” with the opportunity “at least somewhere once more to find a place where their hearts can rest.”

At first Hitler's policy had been to enlarge the party at all costs. But after a while he took another line, establishing new local groups only when a capable leader in whom he personally had confidence could be found, one who could satisfy the craving for authority so obviously crying out for fulfillment.