Hitler: A Short Biography. A. Wilson N.

Germany moved into the humiliations, poverty and chaos of its post-war life. It was to be some years before Germany woke up to the fact that its Lohengrin had arrived, though not by swan; that its Rienzi had arisen, though not from Rome. When he was discharged from hospital, with his sight fully recovered, and ordered to report to the replacement battalion of his old regiment, he was the reverse of ‘demob happy’, since it was by no means clear what possible avocation in civilian life this failed art student who had never done a job might follow. As for his little friend, Fuchsl, history does not relate what happened to him, but he presumably ended his war in Belgium.

       TWO ‘Our Leader’

      When Hitler left the army he had no prospects, no money, no professional skill, no social contacts. Yet within a mere fourteen years he would become Chancellor of the German Reich, a man before whom generals and admirals sycophantically cringed, before whom foreign heads of state bowed, a hero of the masses who had become not so much a popular hero as a divinity on the pattern of the old Roman emperors. We will come nowhere close to understanding this mystery if we attempt to endow Hitler with too many qualities, either of good or of evil. He rose fast because he had so little weight to carry. He had been an obedient soldier – though his commanding officers believed he possessed no leadership qualities, and history, broadly speaking, proved them right unless you believe that such qualities include the ability to lead vast masses to total disaster. He had a good ear and with the skill of a good conductor he could pick out the different instrument parts in an orchestra. But he was only an averagely good pianist. He had aspirations to be a great artist or architect but his drawings were pedestrian. He had no competence in foreign tongues. He made clever use of his reading but that reading was extremely limited. Indeed, it was the very fact of his limitations which gave him such strength. He had few abilities and it was these which carried him along.

      Chief and greatest of his gifts was the capacity to speak in public, a gift which had lain dormant throughout his tongue-tied youth. The gift first manifested itself when he was a young soldier, on the verge of demobilization in 1919, and was quickly seized on by his commanding officers and used to combat Communism among the troops. Germany had been declared a republic. The Kaiser, the grandson of Queen Victoria, had gone into exile in Holland – one of his first requests being for a ‘good strong cup of English tea’. The Social Democrat Republican Government in Berlin was left with the ignominious task of agreeing the peace on the victors’ terms. The German army had never been defeated in any major land battle throughout the war. In the end, the entry of the Americans into the European war at a very late stage, with their huge resources of men and weapons, simply exhausted the German leadership, and the generals, including General Erich Ludendorff (who would emerge as the natural political leader of the post-war German Right), agreed to the surrender. But the Right never acknowledged this messy circumstance. Immediately they invented the myth that the ‘November criminals’, the Social Democrats, egged on by Communists and Jews, had drawn Germany into a humiliation from which radical right-wing despotism could alone save it.

      In Berlin, the Republican government was perpetually threatened, on the one hand by the furious voices of the Right (who ranged from old royalists who were shocked by the emperor’s abdication, to those who would favour a military dictatorship) and, on the other hand, by the enormous power and influence of the Communists. In Bavaria, where the Wittelsbach Dynasty abandoned its crown, the Communists took over for a short while until they were replaced by a right-wing republic led by Gustav von Kahr. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been signed a few months before Germany capitulated to France, Britain and America. In this treaty, the Russians signed away large tracts of land which would the following year be given back to them by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The Communist government of Lenin had every reason to hope that the discontented soldiers of the German army and the hard-pressed German working classes, suffering enormous post-war hardship, would turn to Communism.

      It was this which the German officer class was determined to resist. Seventy miles to the west of Munich was the camp of Lechfeld where thousands of troops, returning prisoners of war and others, were assembled before being discharged into civilian life. The camp was ‘Bolshevistically and Spartacistically contaminated’ – according to the officer in charge. (Spartacist was another word for the Communist movement, named after the leader of the Roman slave rebels, Spartacus.) Hitler was among those soldiers enlisted into the ‘education detachment’, the Aufklärungskommando, to speak to these would-be Communists and persuade them of the dangers of the Red Peril. This was in July 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles, with all its unfairness, was a source of agony to all Germans. Hitler denounced the Treaty, he denounced the Communists and he denounced the international capitalist financiers and Jews whom he held responsible for having started the war in the first instance.

      There could be no doubt that Hitler had the gift of the gab. ‘Herr Hitler, if I may put it this way, is the born people’s orator’, wrote an approving member of this early audience, ‘and by his fanaticism and his crowd appeal he clearly compels the attention of his listeners, and makes them think his way.’¹

      Together with his actual ability to manipulate an audience, Hitler also showed an intuitive sense which amounted to genius that the spoken word was going to be of more significance than the written word in the coming years. Even the Communists, with their belief in harnessing the power of the often illiterate masses, clung to a belief in the written text which showed them to be the natural heirs of Gutenberg, Luther and Caxton. From the beginnings of Communism in the early nineteenth century to its crisis or unravelling in the 1970s, Communism remained, among other things, a doctrine, whose texts, like the Koran or the Talmud, could be endlessly re-perused by the Doctors of the Church, and interpreted in a literary way. They belonged to the vanishing world of the text; Hitler belonged to the oral future, the future which contained Walt Disney, television and cinema.

      ‘The greatest revolutions in this world have never been directed by a pen! [The irony appears heavier in German, because the word for pen is feather.] No, the only thing the pen has been able to do is to provide theoretical foundations. But the power which has always set rolling the greatest religious and political avalanches in history from time immemorial has been the magic power [die Zauberkraft] of the spoken word.’²

      Zauberkraft. From the beginning he saw himself as a magician. In fact, his sense of the power of the spoken word, the word blared through a loud-hailer, the word broadcast on radio and in film, was very far from being some ancient truth which had rolled down the ages from time immemorial. It was completely modern as in most respects he was. You can not imagine Hitler emerging as a dominant figure in any century before the twentieth. To this degree alone he is the supreme ‘eminent life’ of the twentieth century because in many respects he embodies it. He foreshadows Hollywood and television stars, and all the post-war politicians, of the free world as well as of the dictatorships, who depended for their success on their ability to present themselves on screen – a consideration which would have probably ditched the careers of most true political orators or administrative geniuses, from Pericles to Churchill (who was hopeless at TV). ‘The destiny of Peoples can only be changed by a storm of hot passion and only he who carries such passion within himself can arouse it in others. Such passion alone gives its Chosen One the words which like hammer blows can open the gates to the heart of a people. But the man whose passion fails and whose lips are sealed – he has not been chosen by heaven to proclaim its will. Therefore, let the writer remain by his ink-well …’³

      Hitler, together with Pathé, the pioneer of cinematic newsreels, and together with the Hollywood producers and the early pioneers of sound broadcasting, saw that the twentieth century was going to leave behind the printed word. Germany had invented printing. Under Hitler’s dictatorship, Germany would burn its books. Gutenberg’s printing press created a revolution in human consciousness. It created a freedom which no Inquisition or procurator could entirely suppress. With the widespread distribution of printed matter, anyone capable of reading could study, and re-read texts and make up their own minds.

      Hitler was the first and the