Hitler (28 page)

 

In fact, from that day on Hitler had the floor in Munich in a much broader sense. According to his own statement, the streets henceforth belonged to the NSDAP, and with the beginning of the following year the SA carried its successes deeper and deeper into the rest of Bavaria. On weekends it undertook propaganda drives through the countryside. It organized noisy marches, at first marked only by the armband, then in gray windbreakers, carrying knobby walking sticks, parading through villages and booming out the SA's special songs. According to one of Hitler's early followers, they deliberately made themselves look “as savage and martial as possible.” They pasted slogans on the walls of houses and factories, brawled with their opponents, tore down black, red, and gold flags, or organized commando strikes against black marketeers or capitalist profiteers. Their songs and slogans had a bloodthirsty ring. At a meeting in the Biirgerbrau they passed around a collection box marked: “Donate for the massacres of Jews.” As so-called peacemakers, they broke up meetings or concerts that displeased them. “We're brawling our way to greatness,” was the SA's whimsical slogan. And it became apparent that the unspeakably rowdy conduct of the storm troopers was no hindrance to the growth of the party—just as Hitler had thought. Violence did not undercut the attractiveness of the movement even among the solid, honest petty bourgeoisie. The breakdown of standards caused by war and revolution is not the only explanation for this phenomenon. Hitler's party could also count on a certain characteristically Bavarian coarseness; it became the political embodiment of that coarseness. The meeting-hall battles with their flailing chair legs and whirling beer mugs, the “massacres,” the murderous songs, the large-scale brawls—it was all a
Gaudi
(great fun). Significantly, it was just at this period that the term “Nazi” came into being. Although actually an abbreviation of National Socialist, in Bavarian ears it sounded like the nickname for Ignaz; thus it had a homey, familiar quality and showed that the party had won a place for itself in the public mind.

 

The generation of soldiers who had fought in the war and had formed the initial core of the SA was soon followed by younger groups. The combination of promised violence, elitist association of men, and conspiratorial ideology always exerted a strong allure. “There are two things that can unite men,” Hitler declared in a public speech at this time: “common ideals, common scoundrelism.”
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The SA offered both, inextricably entwined. In the course of 1922 the SA, organized in groups of 100 men, grew by such leaps and bounds that by autumn the eleventh group, consisting entirely of students, was set up under the leadership of Rudolf Hess. That same year a group from the former Rossbach Free Corps, under Lieutenant Edmund Heines, joined the SA as a separate unit. With all these special formations, the storm troop took on an increasingly military aspect. Rossbach himself set up a bicyclists' section. There was an intelligence unit, a motorized squad, an artillery section, and a cavalry corps.

Except for a generalized nationalistic belligerence, the SA did not develop any distinctive ideology (contrary to what many participants have said in their reminiscences). When it paraded through the streets under waving banners, it was certainly not marching toward a new social order. It had no utopian ideas, merely an enormous restiveness; no goal but dynamic energy, which often ran out of control. Strictly speaking, most of those who joined its columns were not even political soldiers. Rather, their temper was that of mercenaries, and the high-sounding political phrases were only a cloak for their nihilism, their restlessness, and their craving for something to which they could subordinate themselves. Their ideology was action at all costs. In keeping with the spirit of male comradeship and homosexuality that permeated the SA, the average storm trooper gave his allegiance not to a program, but to an individual, “a leader personality.” Hitler, in fact, wanted it so. In a proclamation he had stipulated: “Let only those apply who wish to be obedient to the leaders and are prepared, if need be, to meet death.”

Nevertheless, this indifference toward ideology made the SA into a hard conspiratorial core free from any factionalism and ready for any order or commitment whatsoever. Here was a source of strength that the traditional bourgeois parties lacked, and which gave a monolithic cast to the party as a whole. The party could thus take in a wide variety of elements actuated by many disparate resentments and complexes. The more disciplined and reliable the storm trooper core was, the more Hitler could broaden his appeals to virtually all groups in the population.

This factor accounts in large part for the curiously heterogeneous sociological basis of the NSDAP. It appeared to have no real class character. Certainly the petty bourgeois groups gave the party many of its characteristic features, and in spite of the name “Workers' Party,” several points in Hitler's original program formulated the anxieties and panic of the lower middle class, its fears of being overwhelmed economically by large concerns and department stores, and the little man's resentment of easily acquired wealth, of profiteers and the owners of capital. The party's strident propaganda was also pointedly aimed at the lower middle class. Alfred Rosenberg, for example, hailed this class as the only group that “still opposed the world-wide betrayal.” Hitler had not forgotten the lessons he had learned in Vienna from Karl Lueger. Lueger, as Hitler wrote, had mobilized the “middle class menaced with destruction, and thereby assured himself a following that was difficult to shake, whose spirit of sacrifice was as great as its fighting power.”
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But the various membership lists of that early period in the party's history reveal a rather different picture. Government officials or white-collar workers made up about 30 per cent of the membership. There was an almost equal percentage of skilled and unskilled workers, 16 per cent tradesmen, a good many of them proprietors of small and middle-sized independent businesses, who hoped the NSDAP would shield them from the pressure of the unions. The remainder consisted of soldiers, students, and professionals. The leadership consisted largely of representatives of urban bohemianism. A party directive of 1922 required every local group to reflect the sociological distribution of its region, and the local leadership was to contain no more than one third academics.

The significant fact is that the party attracted people of every origin, every sociological coloration, and developed its dynamism as a movement unifying antagonistic groups, interests, and feelings. In August, 1921, the National Socialists of the German-language area held an international meeting in Linz, Austria, at which they described themselves as a “class party.” But this was done in Hitler's absence. He had always regarded the NSDAP as strictly opposed to class conflict; his point was that racial conflict was to replace class antinomies. “Along with members of the middle class and the bourgeoisie, very many workers have also followed the National Socialist banner,” a police report of December, 1922, stated. “The old socialist parties view the NSDAP as a grave danger to their continued existence.” What provided a common denominator for the many contradictions and antagonisms within the party was its embittered defensiveness toward the proletariat and toward the bourgeoisie, toward capitalism as well as Marxism. “For a class-conscious worker there is no room in the NSDAP, any more than there is for a status-conscious bourgeois,” Hitler declared.

On the whole, it was a mentality rather than a class which marked the convert to National Socialism in those early days: it was an ostensibly nonpolitical but actually proauthoritarian and leadership-hungry state of mind, and one which could be found in all classes and subgroups. Under the changed conditions of the republic people of this sort found themselves in a sad plight. Their anxiety complexes were reinforced because the new political form established no authority that could claim their attachment and future loyalty. These people had always owed part of their sense of personal value to identification with the political order. But this present state meant nothing to them. Their stern ideal of order and respect, which they had doggedly preserved through all the chaos of the times, seemed to them challenged by the very constitution of the republic, by democracy and freedom of the press, the clash of opinions and the horse trading among parties. The world had become incomprehensible to them. In their dismay they hit on the National Socialist Party, which was in fact the political incarnation of their own perplexities tricked out with an air of resolution. It was, of course, a paradox that they should have felt their craving for order, morality, and faith best answered by the spokesmen of the Hitler party, so many of whom came from obscure and irregular backgrounds. Yet Hitler understood them. One summary of an early Hitler speech runs: “He compared prewar Germany, in which order, cleanliness and rectitude prevailed, with the present-day Germany of the revolution.'' The nation had a deeply rooted instinct for rules and discipline; it wanted the world orderly or it did not want the world at all. To this instinct the rising demagogue appealed, and he met with growing approval when he called the republic a negation of German history and the German character. This republic, he said, was the business, the career, the cause of a minority; the majority wanted “peace but no pigsty.”

The inflation gave Hitler endless material for slogans. Devaluation of the mark had not yet reached the grotesque extremes of the summer of 1923, but it had already led to the virtual expropriation of a large part of the middle class. As early as the beginning of 1920, the mark had fallen to a tenth of its prewar value; two years later it was worth only a hundredth of that value and was referred to as the “pfennig mark.” In this way the state, which since the war had accumulated debts of 150 billion marks and saw new tolls approaching in the still pending reparations negotiations, escaped its obligations. So did all other debtors. Borrowers, tradesmen, and industrialists, above all, the virtually tax-free firms producing for export and paying extremely low wages profited from the inflation. They had a stake in a continuing decline in the value of the currency, and at the very least did nothing to check it. Borrowing cheap money, which with the advancing devaluation they could pay back even more cheaply, they speculated brazenly against their own currency. Clever speculators made fortunes within a few months. Almost out of nothing they created vast economic empires. The sight of such expansion was all the more outrageous because these successes went hand in hand with the impoverishment and proletarianization of whole social groups, the holders of debt certificates, pensioners, and small savers.

The dimly sensed connection between the fantastic careers of some capitalists and the mass impoverishment sowed a feeling among the victims of having been mocked by society. That feeling turned into lasting bitterness. Just as lasting was the belief that the state had ceased to be an unselfish, just, and honest institution. That had been the traditional picture of the state; but now it was seen to have gone into fraudulent bankruptcy by means of the inflation, thus cheating its citizens. Among the little people with a firm faith in the ethics of orderliness, this realization was perhaps even more devastating than the loss of their modest savings. Under the succession of blows, the world in which they had lived austerely, contentedly, and soberly vanished irrevocably. The protracted crisis sent them in search of a figure in whom they could again believe and a will they could obey. The republic could not satisfy this need: that was in fact its problem. Hitler's success as an agitator was due only partly to his oratorical skill. More important was his attunement to the moods of neurotically agitated philistines and his sense of what they wanted from him. He himself regarded this faculty as the true secret of the great orator: “He will always let himself be borne along by the great masses in such a way that instinctively the very words come to his lips that he needs to speak to the hearts of his audience.”
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What the nation at the moment was experiencing for the first time—the succession of disenchantment, decline, and declassing, together with the search for scapegoats on whom to heap the blame—Hitler had long ago gone through. Ever since he had been turned down at the Academy he had known the anguish of a reality that ran counter to his longings and his expectations. Now he could translate his own complexes and discontents to a superindividual plane. Were it not for this congruence between the personal and the social-pathological situation, Hitler could never have wielded such hypnotic power over his fellow citizens. But he had long ago memorized all their reasons and pretexts; he knew the formulas, had long ago discovered the villain. No wonder his hearers were electrified by his words. What captivated them was not the logic of his arguments nor the pithiness of his slogans and images, but the sense of shared experiences, shared sufferings and hopes. The failed bourgeois Adolf Hitler could communicate with them on the level of a common distress. Their aggressions brought them together. To a great extent his special charisma, a mixture of obsessiveness, passionate banality, and vulgarity derived from his sharing. He proved the truth of Jacob Burckhardt's saying that history sometimes loves to concentrate itself in a single human being, whom the world thereupon obeys; time and the man enter into a great, mysterious covenant.

 

The “mysteriousness” that Hitler cultivated was, however—like all his alleged instinctual reactions—amply supplemented by rational factors. Though he early discovered his mediumistic powers, he continued to improve his techniques. A series of photos show him posing in the stagey style of the period. Ludicrous though the pictures are, they nevertheless reveal how much of his demagogic magic he acquired by careful practice.

Thus he early began to develop a special style for his public appearances. From start to finish he stressed the theatrical element. Blaring sound trucks and screaming posters would announce a “great public giant demonstration.” Elements of spectacle borrowed from circus and grand opera were cleverly combined with edifying ceremonial reminiscent of church ritual. Parades of banners, march music, welcoming slogans, communal singing, and repeated cries of
“Heil”
formed the framework for the Führer's speech. All these histrionic elements built up the suspense and made the speech seem a kind of annunciation. The party guidelines for meetings were constantly improved and handed down in courses for speakers and written directives until no detail was left to chance. Hitler himself would check the acoustics of all the important meeting halls in Munich, to determine whether the Hackerbrau, say, called for a louder voice than the Hofbräuhaus or the Kindl-Keller. He noted the atmosphere, the ventilation, and the tactical arrangement of the rooms. The official guidelines mentioned that a hall should always be too small and that at least a third of the audience should consist of the party's own followers. To ward off the impression of being a petty bourgeois movement and to win the trust of the workers, Hitler occasionally waged a “struggle against the trousers crease” among his followers, and sent them to the demonstrations without ties and collars. Some party members were ordered to attend his opponents' training courses and learn what the enemy was up to.
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