Hitler (99 page)

He also had a distinct preference for nocturnal backdrops. Torches pyres, or flaming wheels were continually being kindled. Though such rituals were supposed to be highly positive and inspirational, in fact they struck another note, stirring apocalyptic associations and awakening a fear of universal conflagrations or dooms, including each individual's own.

The ceremony of November 9, 1935, commemorating the dead of the march to the Feldherrnhalle twelve years before, was a model for many other such solemnities. The architect Ludwig Troost had designed two classicistic temples for Munich's Königsplatz; these were to receive the exhumed bones, now deposited in sixteen bronze sarcophagi, of the first “martyrs” of the Nazi movement. The night before, during the traditional Hitler speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, the coffins had been placed on biers in the Feldherrnhalle, which was decorated with brown drapes and flaming braziers for the occasion. Shortly before midnight Hitler, standing in an open car, drove through the Siegestor into Ludwigstrasse, lit by flares set on masts, and on to the Odeonsplatz. SA and SS units formed a lane, their torches making two moving lines of fire down the length of the broad avenue. The audience was massed behind these lines. The car crawled slowly to the Feldherrnhalle. With raised arm, Hitler ascended the red-carpeted stair. He paused before each of the coffins for a “mute dialogue.” Six thousand uniformed followers, carrying countless flags and all the standards of the party formations, then filed silently past the dead. On the following morning, in the subdued light of a November day, the memorial procession began. Hundreds of masts had been set up with dark red pennants bearing the names of the “fallen of the movement” inscribed in golden letters. Loudspeakers broadcast the Horst Wessel song, until the procession reached one of the offering bowls, at which the names of the dead were called out. Alongside Hitler at the head of the procession walked the former corps of leaders, in brown shirts or in the historic uniforms (gray windbreaker and “Model 23” ski cap, supplied by the “Bureau for November 8–9”). At the Feldherrnhalle, where the march had once ended before the blazing guns of the army, the representatives of the armed forces now joined the marchers—a piece of revisionist symbolism. Sixteen artillery salvos boomed over the city. Then solemn silence descended while Hitler laid a gigantic wreath at the memorial tablet. While “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” was played at a mournful tempo, all began to move toward Königsplatz down a lane of thousands upon thousands of flags dipped in salute to the dead. United in the “March of Victory,” the names of the fallen were read out in a “last roll call.” The crowd answered, “Present!” in their behalf. Thus the dead took their places in the “eternal guard.”

A tribute to the dead also took center stage at the Nuremberg party rally. But the reference to death was present in nearly every ceremonial and in the speeches and appeals throughout the several days of the annual party congress at Nuremberg. The Bodyguard Regiment stood saluting while Hitler drove, to the pealing of bells, into the flag-decked city. The regiment's black dress uniforms added an accent that was repeated in the ritual surrounding the “blood banner” and in the ceremonial in the Luitpoldhain: Hitler, with two leading paladins at a respectful distance behind him and to either side, walked up to the monument between more than 100,000 SA and SS men stationed in enormous squadrons along the broad ribbon of concrete, the “Street of the Führer.” While the flags dipped, he stood meditating for a long time, the manifest embodiment of the concept “leader”: in the midst of the mute soldiers of the party, but “surrounded by empty space, the insuperable gulf of Caesarian loneliness, which belongs to him alone and to the dead heroes who gave their lives because they believed in him and his mission.”
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For maximum impressiveness, many spectacles were shifted to the evening or night hours. At the party rally in 1937 Hitler arrived to address the lined-up political leaders toward eight o'clock in the evening. As soon as Robert Ley had reported to him the presence of these subleaders, “the enveloping darkness was suddenly illuminated with a flood of whiteness. Like meteors,” the official report read, “the beams of the one hundred and fifty giant searchlights shoot into the obscured, gray-black night sky. The tall columns of light join against the cloud ceiling to form a luminous halo. An overwhelming sight: caught by a faint breeze, the flags in the stands ringing the field quiver gently in the glittering light.... The grandstand is... bathed in dazzling brightness, crowned by the shining golden swastikas in the oak wreath. On the left and right terminal, pyres leap from great basins.”

With fanfares blaring, Hitler entered the high central section of the grandstand, and at a command a torrent of more than 30,000 flags poured from the stands opposite into the arena. The silver tips and fringes of the flags sparkled in the beams of the searchlights. As always, Hitler himself was the first victim of this orchestration of masses, light, symmetry, and the tragic sense of life. Especially in speeches to old followers, after the period of silence in memory of the dead, he frequently fell into a tone of total rapture; in strange phrases he held a kind of mystic communion until the searchlights were lowered to strike the middle of the arena and flags, uniforms, and band instruments flashed red, silver, and gold. “I have always felt,” he cried in 1937, “that man, as long as life is given to him, ought to yearn for those with whom he shaped his life. For what would my life be without all of you! That you found me long ago and that you believed in me has given your lives a new meaning, posed a new task. That I have found you is what has made my life and my struggle possible!”

A year before he had cried to the same assemblage:

At this hour do we not again feel the miracle that has brought us together! Long ago you heard the voice of a man, and it struck to your hearts, it awakened you, and you followed this voice. You followed it for years, without so much as having seen him whose voice it was; you heard only a voice, and you followed.

When we meet here we are all filled with the wondrousness of this coming together. Not every one of you can see me, and I cannot see every one of you. But I feel you and you feel me! It is faith in our nation that has made us small
people great,
that has made us poor people rich, that has made us vacillating, dispirited, anxious people brave and courageous; that has made us who had gone astray able to see, and that has joined us together.

In their pontifical displays of magnificence the party rallies were the public climax in the National Socialist calendar year. In addition, they were for Hitler personally the realization of his youth's monumental costume dreams. Members of his entourage have recorded the excitement that regularly gripped him during the week at Nuremberg. As might be expected, his displaced sexuality was released in an unquenchable torrent of speech. As a rule he delivered between fifteen and twenty speeches during those eight days, including the cultural speech devoted to basic principles, and the grand concluding address. In between he would speak as often as four times a day, speeches to the Hitler Youth, to the Women's Corps, to the Labor Service or the army, whatever the program of the party rally required.

Almost every year, moreover, he satisfied his passion for building by a series of new cornerstone layings for the temple city that was planned on an enormous scale. Then there were parades, drills, conferences, in a whirl of color. The Nuremberg party rallies also acquired importance as the occasion for political decisions: the Reich flag law or the Nuremberg racial laws were promulgated, though rather hastily improvised, within the framework of a party rally. It is even conceivable that the rally might eventually have evolved into a kind of general assembly of a totalitarian democracy. At the end hundreds of thousands would march, wave upon wave, for up to five hours, past Hitler in the medieval market place in front of the Frauenkirche. And Hitler stood as if frozen, arm held out horizontally, in the back of his open car. Around him a mood of romantic frenzy gripped the old city, “an almost mystical ecstasy, a kind of holy madness,” as a foreign observer noted. Many others lost their critical reserve during those days and were forced to confess, as did a French diplomat, that momentarily they themselves had become Nazis.
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The fixed calendar of festivals that filled the Nazi year began with January 30, the day of the seizure of power, and concluded with November 9, the anniversary of the Munich putsch.
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That year was an endless succession of dedications, roll calls, processions, and memorials. A special Bureau for the Organization of Festivals, Leisure, and Celebrations saw to the creation of “model programs for celebrations of the National Socialist Movement and for organizing the setting of National Socialist demonstrations on the basis of the organizational tradition evolved during the period of struggle.” This bureau published a magazine of its own.

Alongside the regular round there were many holidays prompted by special occasions. The outstanding one—which impressed on the world the deceptive picture of a Third Reich whose citizens enjoyed the austere felicity of a welfare state accompanied, regrettably, by a few drastic features—came with the Olympic games of 1936.

The games had already been scheduled for Berlin before Hitler's accession to power. The Nazis contrived to profit overwhelmingly by the opportunity of being hosts to the world. They did everything in their power to counter what they regarded as the distorted image of a hectically rearming Reich bent on war. Rather, they were determined to show the country in the most idyllic light. Weeks before the beginning of the games all ugly anti-Semitic tirades were stopped. No malicious caricatures were to be displayed. The district propaganda chiefs of the National Socialist Party were instructed to obliterate from building walls and fences any remaining traces of slogans hostile to the regime, even exhorted to make sure that “every home owner keep his front garden in irreproachable order.” To the solemn ringing of the Olympic bell, in the midst of royal highnesses, princes, cabinet ministers and many guests of honor, Hitler opened the games on August 1. And, while an earlier marathon winner, the Greek Spyridon Louis, handed him an olive branch as the “symbol of love and peace,” a chorus struck up the anthem composed by Richard Strauss, and swarms of doves of peace flew up. Hitler was offering a picture of a reconciled world. And, fittingly, some of the teams, including the French who had so recently been provoked, offered the Hitler salute as they marched past the grandstand. Later, in an impulse of tardy protest, they pretended that what they had given was the “Olympic salute.”
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All through the two weeks a series of brilliant spectacles kept the guests breathless and filled them with admiration. Goebbels invited a thousand persons to an Italian Night on Peacock Island. Ribbentrop hosted nearly as many in his garden villa in Dahlem. Göring gave a party in the Opera House, whose hall was draped in precious silk. And Hitler received the multitude of guests who had used the games as a pretext to see the man who seemed to hold in his hands the fate of Europe and perhaps of the world.

 

The purpose of all the ceremonies and mass celebrations was obviously to engage the popular imagination and rally the popular will into a unitary force. But beneath the surface it is possible to discern motives that throw light upon Hitler's personality and psychopathology. We are not referring only to his inability to endure routine, his naive craving for circuses, for the roll of drums, the blare of trumpets, the grand entrance, for dazzling illusions and the cheap brilliance of Bengal lights. The vault of light was not merely the fit symbol of Hitler's craving to substitute illusion for reality. Albert Speer has told us how he happened to invent this device, which had the practical purpose of disguising a most prosaic reality: by a combination of darkness and glaring light effects he wanted to distract attention from the paunches of the middle and minor party functionaries who had grown fat in their prebends.
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In addition, the resort to ceremonials also reveals a strenuous desire to stylize, to represent the triumph of order over a shifting existence forever threatened by chaos. We might call these efforts techniques of exorcism undertaken by a terrified mind. When certain contemporaries likened all the to-do with marching columns, forests of banners and blocks of humanity to the rites of primitive tribes, the comparison was not so artificial as it sounded. From the psychological point of view, what was operative here was the same urge to stylize that had dominated Hitler's life from a very early period. Thus he had sought orientation and support against the world in a succession of new roles: from the early role of the son of good family and idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves, through the various roles of leader, genius, and savior, to the imitation Wagnerian end, where his aim was to enact an operatic finale. In every case he practiced autosuggestion, presenting himself in disguises and borrowed forms of existence. And when after one of his successful foreign-policy coups he called himself, with naive boastfulness, “the greatest actor in Europe,” he was expressing a need of his nature as well as an ability.

It was, in turn, a need that emerged from the fundamental Hitlerian motif of insecurity and anxiety. He was good at portraying feelings; he took pains not to show them. He repressed all spontaneity. But certain small peculiarities betrayed him—especially his eyes, which never stood still. They roamed restlessly even in moments of statutelike rigidity. So fearful was he of a frank emotion that he held his hand before his face whenever he laughed. He hated being surprised while playing with one of his dogs, and as soon as he knew he was being observed, one of his secretaries has reported, he would “roughly chase the dog away.” He was constantly tormented by the fear of seeming ridiculous or of making a
faux pas
that would cause him to forfeit the respect of members of his entourage, down to his janitor. Before he ventured to appear in public in a new suit or a new hat, he would have himself photographed so that he could check the effect. He did not swim, never got into a rowboat (“After all, what business would I have in a rowboat!”), or mounted a horse, he said; altogether he was “not at all fond of show-off stunts. How easily they might go wrong; parades teach that time and again.”
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He regarded life as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience. Thus he occasionally would try to dissuade Göring from smoking by offering the highly characteristic argument that one could not be represented on a monument “with a cigar in one's mouth.” When Heinrich Hoffmann returned from Russia in the autumn of 1939 with photographs that showed Stalin holding a cigarette, Hitler forbade their publication; he was protecting a “colleague” in order not to detract from the constant dignity that should surround a dictator.