Heinrich Himmler : A Life (9 page)

As a perusal of the very detailed diary entries from his first semester in Munich makes abundantly clear, Heinrich Himmler had distinct problems in his personal relationships. Not only was he inexperienced and shy with girls, which was a function of his age, he was also uncertain in general about what he should and could expect of other people in his personal relations. He found it very difficult to judge the emotional attitudes of others and to respond to them appropriately. He simply did not know how to strike the right note in his behaviour with other people.

Psychologists would analyse this in terms of the consequences of an attachment disorder.
⁹⁶
People who suffer from this kind of dysfunction acquired in early childhood frequently tend, while growing up and as adults, to attach very high expectations to personal relationships, though they cannot define these expectations precisely, and as a result they cannot be fulfilled. The consequence is a sense of frustration and the desire for more signs of affection. People with this problem are prone to feeling constantly exploited. From time to time they unload their feelings in outbursts of rage that others find difficult to comprehend, and then develop strategies to help them approach others which are often perceived as ingratiating. Often, however, they learn to conceal their emotional immaturity by means of particular behavioural techniques, and up to a certain point to compensate for it in their dealings with others.

As the letters from Himmler’s period in the army have already made clear, he did in fact struggle with insatiable longings for affection and care—at first from his mother in particular and then in relation to his circle of friends. He tried to get close to others but always had the sense that he had not really succeeded. He made an effort always to be helpful and then was annoyed with himself because he feared he had made a fool of himself. He also had the experience of his behaviour towards others, though well intentioned, being seen by them as inappropriate and provoking mystified or defensive reactions.

It must be said that he made great efforts to compensate for these weaknesses. He was helped by a fundamental character trait, evident from his earliest childhood: his constant exercise of will-power and self-control. It became second nature to him to hold himself in check and avoid emotion as far as possible. In addition, he hoped that by rigorous self-discipline he would acquire that level of self-assurance that would allow him to disguise his emotional immaturity in dealing with personal relationships. This is the context in which the strict regime he applied to his contacts with people has to be seen: the enforced good behaviour, the routine visits, the conversational strategies, and finally the huge emphasis he placed on regular exchanges of letters and gifts. For his relations with others he needed a framework in which he could operate.

His habit of regarding and referring to himself as a ‘soldier’ can be interpreted as part of these strenuous efforts to gain control of himself and be recognized by others. As a member of the generation that grew to adulthood during the war, Himmler belonged to a cohort of middle-class young men who experienced the military defeat and revolution as the decisive events of their lives. For them the events of 1918/19 represented an existential challenge, demanding the response of a fundamentally new orientation geared to overcoming the defeat as an internal and external reality: this was to be achieved by a changed attitude to life and new way of living.

Thus, as Ulrich Herbert in particular has demonstrated, in those years a way of living emerged amongst those who became adults during the war that can be summed up in the words: sobriety, distance, severity, and rationality.
⁹⁷
Himmler’s determined struggle to conceal his relationship problems by means of strict observance of social formalities and rules for daily life, and to avoid and control emotion, was also matched, therefore, by a desire to live up to the demands of his contemporaries. This he could do much more easily as a Territorial soldier than in his everyday life as a student from a comfortable background. The world of the military, with its organization of every last detail, met his need for rules and control, and in view of the tendency in this masculine world to suppress emotion his difficulties in forming attachments must have appeared as a positive virtue. Herein lies the biographical key to his enthusiasm for the military and, after a career as an officer was denied him, for his later engagement in the paramilitary movement.

According to psychologists, the origins of attachment disorder go back to early childhood, to a lack of affection and mirroring on the part of the
mother. What the cause was in Himmler’s case can only be the subject of speculation. Possibly his brother’s frequent illnesses were a factor, and perhaps also competition developed between Himmler and his younger brother and he fell into the classic role of the middle child who feels neglected. Whatever the causes of his difficult interpersonal relations, they remained a problem for him throughout his life.

The emotional upheavals of his first semester from October 1919 to March 1920 also made an impact on his reading list. A total of fourteen titles are listed, but politics and popular philosophy appeared only peripherally; a book on the Freemasons seemed to him too uncritical,
⁹⁸
whereas he was gripped by Walter Flex’s ‘Poems and Thoughts from the Battlefield’, which appeared under the title
The Great Feast
, because the book ‘uses a poet’s imagination to reproduce very convincingly and well the thoughts one has as a soldier’.
⁹⁹

At this time his main reading was novels and stories chiefly concerned with love, erotic attraction, and the battle of the sexes. He thought Georges Rodenbach’s gloomy novel
Bruges-la-Morte
‘psychologically very good’. It tells of a man who continues to feel tied to his dead wife and murders his lover when she wants to take the wife’s place. This reading-matter apparently suited Himmler’s depressed mood in November.
¹⁰⁰
He finished Ludwig Finckh’s folksy novel
The Rose Doctor
(1906), putting it down with a feeling of ‘satisfaction such as I have not felt for a long time’. His view was that it was ‘a hymn of praise, and a justified one, to women’.
¹⁰¹
At the end of the winter semester he started on
Diary of a Lost Soul
, a bestseller about the fate of a girl who falls into prostitution. It was a book, as Himmler noted—clearly impressed—‘that offers insight into dreadful human tragedies and makes one look at many a whore with very different eyes.’
¹⁰²

He read Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
with great interest, and it challenged him to reach a conclusion about the causes of this marital tragedy: ‘It is her fault, for allowing herself to be turned into a doll’, adding ‘in part’ in modification of this verdict. He went on, however, to make a further point: ‘She can never require her husband to sacrifice his honour.’ Helmer, the husband, is to blame because, ‘in cowardly fashion, he abandons his wife when she is in need, and afterwards acts as if something had happened.’
¹⁰³
The fact that
Nora leads the life of a doll deprived of adult status is, according to Himmler, her own fault; the fact that her husband might have something to do with it is an idea that never even crossed his mind. The question of emancipation, the central problem of the play, which was after all already forty years old at the time, was clearly completely foreign to him. He did not know what to do with Nora, a woman breaking out of marital subservience; his still very adolescent concept of women—and this is shown by his responses to his reading—was instead dominated by the contrasting images of the ideal woman and the whore. Apart from that, the play strengthened him in the notion that a husband must above all protect his wife—though only as far as his ‘honour’ permitted it. He could hardly have provided a more telling example of his complete incomprehension of the debate about marriage as an equal partnership that was being conducted with increased intensity at the beginning of the Weimar Republic.

In the spring and summer of 1920 two anti-Semitic titles can be found on his list. It is clear that he was looking for an answer to the ‘Jewish question’, which as a result of the debate on duelling at the end of 1919 was a matter he too wanted to resolve. In April he read Artur Dinter’s extraordinarily successful novel
The Sin against Blood
, to which he reacted with both approval and scepticism: ‘A book that gives a startlingly clear introduction to the Jewish question and makes one approach this subject extremely warily but also investigate the sources on which the novel is based. For the middle way is probably the right one. The author is, I think, somewhat rabid in his hatred of the Jews.—The novel, with its anti-Semitic lectures, is written purely to push a particular line.’
¹⁰⁴
Friedrich Spielhagen’s
Ultimo
, by contrast, met with his complete approval.
¹⁰⁵
On the evidence of his reading-list, the ‘Jewish question’ did not loom large in his interests again until 1922. In 1920, however, he was clearly not yet prepared to subscribe unequivocally to a radically anti-Semitic viewpoint.

In May 1920 he chanced upon a book that helped him to transform his lack of sexual experience and success with girls into true virtue. The work in question was Hans Wegener’s sex-education book of 1906,
Young Men Like Us
, which focuses on the ‘sexual problem of educated young men before marriage’.
¹⁰⁶
Wegener warned about masturbation, prostitution, and sexual relations outside marriage, as well as preaching sexual abstinence in general before marriage. By contrast with many contemporary publications, however, he was not content to demand sexual abstinence on the grounds of possible health-risks, but rather he appealed first and foremost to the young
man’s honour and strength of will: chastity is here declared to be the essence of masculinity, correctly understood.

The central admonition is to maintain ‘chivalrous reverence for a pure woman’.
¹⁰⁷
Such a ‘responsible’ attitude, it is argued, permits friendly, platonic relationships with women:

Good, so let us trample our animal nature underfoot and with senses under control seek the friendship of such women. They will not withhold it and it will enrich our personal lives. It will restore to us in a purer form what we offered up, and if we were pure it will immerse us in greater purity. It will increase our strength in our battle with ourselves and we will be dubbed knights, pledged our whole lives to protect women. Until we have found the woman to whom we wish to belong for life, friendly relations with women are positively necessary.
¹⁰⁸

These words were balm to Himmler’s bruised soul. In positive euphoria he decided to make Wegener’s advice his own maxim. In his reading-list he drew the satisfied conclusion: ‘A book containing the highest ideals. Demanding, but achievable. And I have achieved them already.—Probably the finest book of its kind that I have read.’
¹⁰⁹

After the first two semesters in Munich Himmler had to carry out an agricultural work placement. Although we do not know much about Himmler’s second semester, as there are no diary notes for the summer semester of 1920, we may assume nevertheless that the compulsory period in the country provided him with a welcome escape from Munich, where circumstances had become difficult. Relatives of the Loritz family, the Rehrls from Fridolfing in Upper Bavaria, had offered him a placement on their estate, and he embarked on the year ahead with great expectations, as he wrote to his father: ‘a good diet’ and work on the land will strengthen him physically, will in fact ‘steel’ him. He hopes also that ‘his nerves and soul can find repose in nature and in the seriousness and jollity of the agricultural calling and way of life’.
¹¹⁰
By buying a motorbike he aimed to be mobile in his remote rural location.
¹¹¹

He arrived in Fridolfing on 7 September, and his letters to his parents show that he launched himself body and soul into the unaccustomed work.
¹¹²
His accommodation and food were good and he got to know the family. Right
away he formed a friendship with the owner of the estate, Alois Rehrl, ten years his senior, that was to last for decades.
¹¹³
The two went hunting together; Himmler visited agricultural shows and went on a variety of excursions and tours of the mountains,
¹¹⁴
became a member of the German Touring Club and the Alpine Society,
¹¹⁵
and also took a lively part in country organizations and traditional festivities.
¹¹⁶
He even joined the Residents’ Militia.
¹¹⁷
He attended church regularly,
¹¹⁸
and in his free time also enjoyed visiting acquaintances who lived nearby.
¹¹⁹
Throughout the placement he was in very close contact with his parents; his mother went on supplying him with numerous parcels,
¹²⁰
while he in turn produced minute calculations to account for how he had spent the pocket money they paid him.
¹²¹
‘I promise always to strive to be a good man and remain so’, he vowed to his father in a letter on the latter’s fifty-sixth birthday.
¹²²

Himmler’s reading at this time focused on further Ibsen plays, which he thought somewhat too ‘realistic’ but which made an ‘uncommonly true’ impression.
¹²³
In
Love’s Comedy
he saw ‘the mendacity and social mores of love’ pilloried.
¹²⁴
He also liked the fact that in
Pillars of Society
we see ‘the dishonesty and the deception on which society is built’; he was, however, above all impressed with ‘how the good in society emerges through individual characters and still wins through’.
¹²⁵
His motto that self-control and exercise of the will make it possible to master any situation is confirmed by Ibsen, whose drama about Pastor Brand, who destroys himself and others by his inflexibility, was for him, ‘as far as morality and discipline of the will are concerned one of the best and most perfect dramas I know. It is a book that deals with the will, morality and life without compromises.’
¹²⁶