Thinking Small (9 page)

Hitler: Our last hope.
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That’s the message of one earnest German poster from 1932, its drawings purposely dim, chalk-rendered, sorrowful: Half a dozen faces, the People, stare out in desperation,
their skin and bodies yellow, smudged, thin. How did so many Germans come to think of
Adolf Hitler as their last hope? And how did Adolf Hitler get so many people to believe in him?

Julius Caesar was apparently the first person to refer to the area of Europe beyond the Danube and the Rhine as Germania. Today the word
Germania
can have a distinctively Nazi flair—having been the name of Albert Speer’s architectural model of the projected “World Capital” of Berlin, as well as of an SS regiment during the Second World War—but in 1900, it was a reference to a time when indigenous German-speaking people lived
in small communities and had a strong connection to the land, an era that would become mythologized as the pure-blooded foundation of the German nation, though no “pure-blooded” foundation actually exists.

In large part, this idea had grown out of the writings of the Roman orator Tacitus: His work,
Germania,
was the first study of the natives of what is now Germany, and while it was brief and often used rather exalted terms to describe the characteristics of the native population, its overall conclusions would be passed down through the generations, still prevalent many hundreds of years later when German-speaking kingdoms finally did indeed become a legal nation
in 1871. In that year, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in a power move that blatantly excluded Austria, employed his “blood and iron” philosophy of politics and market unification to bring the formerly separate kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities (
freie städte
) together, establishing the German Empire under Emperor Wilhelm II. It was a time when many nations, or countries, as we now know them, were just struggling to form. In
response to Bismarck’s unification of so many German-speaking areas, for example, the dualism of “Austria-Hungary” was formed, a troubled vestige of the original Habsburg monarchy and an empire mixed with diverse peoples and languages that would themselves eventually form separate nation-states. Bismarck’s unification of Germany ushered in the creation of new national models, and that meant new models of trade and commerce.
Soon after
unification, the German industrial revolution began in full.

All of this was coming to pass around the time Ferdinand Porsche and Adolf Hitler were born, and in the years of their childhood, years moving up to the turn of the century, the German Empire became a place that garnered envy and respect. It was, in fact, second only to the United States in its economy and industry, even though the Empire’s entire area could have fit easily into just a few American states. It was during these crucial years that Germans began to
emerge as exceptionally innovative engineers with a deep concern for quality and precision. In fact, “German Quality Work,”
Deutsche Qualitätsarbeit,
²
is a term and a principle rooted deep in the German idea of labor, stemming from the times of the farmer and the artisan, the days of the tinsmiths, blacksmiths, tanners, weavers, and others who
worked directly with their hands.
³

Even though Bismarck had excluded them from the German Empire, it was not uncommon for German-speaking people born in Austria-Hungary to think of themselves as German. Thus Hitler, from a young age, rebelling against his father who was an Austrian civil servant, felt it was only the German side of his heritage he wished to adopt; it was a spirit easily accelerated by the Pan-German influences in his childhood town of Linz. And though it was the myths of Wagner’s
operas and romanticized ideas of Germanic heroes like Frederick the Great that quickened Hitler’s pulse, tied up in that was the widespread desire to be part of a continuous story, a
nation.
It was something many in Austria-Hungary were searching for at the time, and it was an easy intoxication for some German-speaking young men.

Whatever the reasons for Adolf Hitler’s identification with Germany, however, in the years leading up to the First World War, he was still alone, destitute, and wandering Vienna’s streets, with no easy way of getting to Germany. For money he offered to carry people’s bags for them at the train station, or drew and painted postcards and sold them wherever he could. Once his funds for rent ran out, he found himself sleeping in the
streets. Eventually, with lice in his hair and his clothes tattered, he got himself into a homeless shelter and off the streets. He would eventually step up to staying in a Men’s Home, something along the lines of a modern European youth hostel, a place where he had his own bed and locker and was in the company of men down on their luck or passing through town instead of the drug addicts and tramps of previous shelters. The Men’s Home had a library and a room where
“the intellectuals” often met. It was here Hitler spent most of the day, reading books, drawing his postcards, and giving impromptu speeches about his hatred for Vienna and the city’s liberal tendencies.

Vienna was a city rife with anti-Semitism in those years. Hitler had a friend who was Jewish at the time, and in selling his postcards he often did business with Jewish men, but somewhere inside his animosity was beginning to grow, even if his rants at the time were not against Jewish people but against Bolsheviks,
⁴
capitalists, and trade unions—words
that were jumbled together and misused in both the city and his head. He began to hate all things associated with the fin de siècle artistic vibe of men like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt (whose art he would later try to destroy), and he told the men in the home that he planned to go to Germany soon and study
real
art.

When Hitler turned twenty-four on April 20, 1913, the money that had been left for him in his father’s will finally became available and he was able to buy a train ticket to Munich, where he found a dingy apartment and continued making and selling postcards to pay the bills. Then, the unexpected happened. The archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, was shot, and the continent began to whip itself up into the violent frenzy of war.

Hitler snuck into the German army in the chaos, no one questioning his citizenship in the rush of recruitment then taking place. The First World War was a kind of miracle for Hitler. Not only did he get to serve for his “real country,” but he also got to experience all the qualities he associated with that place. Suddenly he had a uniform; he had orders; he had a purpose, a
place for all his manic energy to flow. Now there were rules,
and a clear goal. He had never been very patient or able to study or concentrate for long, and the immediate action of war, the lack of choice in circumstances, and the regimented lifestyle taught him how to control himself, even as it further romanticized Germany and Hitler’s idea of the classical German hero. Hitler gave his all during the war, working as a messenger, a dangerous job that meant he was often making his way to the front line. He was wounded and given a medal
for his deeds. The men in his division said what others had also said: He was a strange fellow with odd ideas and unexpected determination, a manic sense of loyalty, clearly intoxicated by war’s rush; he never got letters and rarely took leave; he often sat in a corner alone. But he was exceedingly loyal to his regiment, even deferring possible promotions just so he could stay with this new group he’d found. Stories would later be told of his close calls with
death—stepping out of a command post a moment before it was blown to pieces, or moving from a trench just before it was attacked—and true or not, these stories would stir and exemplify his sincere and eventually horrific belief that he had been selected by Providence to fulfill a great task on Germany’s behalf.

Those years of fighting were among the best he’d known. But then the very thing that Hitler feared most came to pass: Germany lost, and the war came to an end. All his grand ideas of Germania were defeated. Hitler was shocked. Germany’s defeat infuriated him and made him, literally, very sick. He later wrote that he had not cried since his mother’s death, but he cried when he heard the war had been lost. Lying in a hospital bed, temporarily blind
and recovering from wounds he’d suffered, he thought of killing himself as he absorbed the news.
⁵

Hitler was not the only person shocked by the defeat. At the time of surrender, German industry was still pumping along normally. The entire country was untouched; there was not a single occupying foreign force in its midst. Having not witnessed the fighting from the lines, it is understandable that some German people came out of the war feeling shocked and
betrayed, not knowing how many Germans had been killed in the past few months, having no
experience of how weakened the German forces actually were. Because the defeat was not obvious to ordinary Germans, it was easy for conspiracy theories to spread:
it was the fault of the Communists, it was the fault of those who wanted democracy, it was the fault of the Jews.
These feelings were only strengthened during the summit held to decide how to punish Germany at the end of the war. Precisely because Germany was so rich in industry, the Allies now wanted to cut that
potency down. There were grumblings that it had been German hubris that had started the war in the first place, and this perception only added to the punitive mood in 1919 as the Allies came together in Paris to work out the Treaty of Versailles.

Throughout the war, the rallying call of the United States under President Woodrow Wilson had been the mission to “make the world safe for democracy.” It was the main reason given to the American people for the eventual U.S. involvement in the war, and it was the cause that many young Americans had enlisted, fought, and died for. In that spirit, Wilson had proposed the Fourteen Points Program for the Peace of the World, and the Allies had eventually
embraced his plan.

Millions in Europe saw Wilson as a man who had come to save them with his plan for unification under the League of Nations. But while he sincerely believed in his ideals, they would prove hard to live up to once the war ended; at that point, the Allies were no longer united under one goal, and each leader had to look to the well-being of his own country. The United States was still young and unsure, and all that energy that had gone into “making the world safe
for democracy” suddenly felt less urgent when the war finished, especially to the American people, who were removed from the reality of Europe, and who did not truly understand what was at stake. Wilson was left in a difficult gray area where he had promises to keep but lacked the people’s support, and was all but abandoned by much of the U.S. Congress.

In the negotiations in Paris, Wilson found himself compromising much more than the people of Europe had expected he would, giving in to the demands of more determined men like France’s Clemenceau. By the end, penalty upon penalty had been heaped upon Germany; they were charged 269 billion gold marks (about $32 billion), an impossible sum at the time for them to pay. Land was taken away. Poland became a nation of its own. France got the German
colonies in Africa; Japan got the ones in the South Pacific. And in addition to claiming full moral and emotional responsibility for the war, the Germans were ordered to cut their army down to 100,000, give up their entire air force, and destroy all their tanks. In effect, Germany was psychologically and economically debilitated. But the Allies were not trying to be cruel; the war had been horrendous, violence on a scale unknown before, and every European country was now in dire need
of money and resources, scrambling and lost in a sense of lack and fear.

As economist John Maynard Keynes later said of the postwar conference,
“Paris was a nightmare, and everyone there was morbid.”
⁶
No one seemed able to think clearly. No one seemed ready to accept responsibility for what had taken place. And no one seemed to know how to marshal the ideals and slogans of democracy into a workable plan. In
response, the German delegation claimed their burgeoning postwar democracy was being annihilated “by the very persons who
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throughout the war never tired of maintaining that they sought to bring democracy to us.” But that too was unfair. The Germans had no alternative to offer, and no rationale for the trouble they’d caused. Nevertheless, Keynes would
warn the Allies that their economies were
“deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds,”
⁸
saying that the only way to avoid a worse situation in the future was to take the path of magnanimity now, for
“the perils of the future lay not in frontiers or sovereignties but in food,
coal, and transport.”
⁹
Keynes might have been right, but it was hard to get anyone to listen to such words at the time: In the heat of the moment, most nations
felt desperate to take as much as they could for themselves, unable to see that by hurting one another they might also be hurting themselves. Still, whatever mistakes may or may not have been made both
economically and politically, the aftermath of the First World War was a turning point: The old economic, social, and political world order had been deeply disrupted. It could not return to its prewar state; something new had to be developed now.

The First World War was a turning point for Ferdinand Porsche as well. Though he was the foremost automotive designer of Austria-Hungary, it was the war that brought him to the attention of the international community on a larger scale. In Austria, Porsche had been inundated with medals and awards. The University of Vienna, for instance, had given him an honorary doctorate, of which he was very proud, happy to finally have the weighty initials attached to his name,
letters that gave him equal footing with other engineers in his field. During the war, his designs for tanks were among the best any country produced, and he contributed solutions to problems such as how to make the first practical, four-wheel-drive vehicle. At the close of the war, one of the top English technical journals concluded that the aircraft motors that Porsche was designing at Austro-Daimler were heads above anything else coming from the central European powers at that
time.