The Mass-Man: Hitler

by HANS KOHN

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LENINT’S world revolution, for which Russia was only an accidental starting point, has resolved itself under Stalin into a Russian revolution, reforming Russia from the depth of her historical roots and calling the masses of the vast empire to active participation. The outward appearance of a Westernized industrial civilization disguised for some time the vitalization of the Russian substance, which gained a cohesion far beyond that which the Russian Church in its Byzantine garb and the Russian monarchy with its Germanized apparatus could provide — both too remote from the people and their lives. Under Stalin, Russian nationalism entered into its own, more strictly secluded from the spiritual tradition of Western liberty than ever in the last two centuries, more alien to, and distrustful of, the West than the Slavophiles had been.

Marxism was an attempt to combine Western liberal ideals — the withering of the authority of the state and the emergence of the free individual — with an anti-Western method of revolutionary sociology. It never gained any hold over the AngloSaxon mind. It became decisive in Germany and Russia. The German Social Democrats accepted more and more the ideals and abandoned the method; the Russian Communists and the German nationalists rejected the ideal and perfected the method. Against Marx’s ideal, Stalin’s state has grown to an omnipotence which would have aroused the envy of Ivan IV and Peter I. Its strength rests primarily not on the ruthlessness and craftiness which Stalin shares with the great tsars, but on the devotion of the masses.

The elation shown by the Russians and the Germans under their dictators cannot be explained by terror alone. An unmistakable bond of striking depth and strength unites the leaders and their peoples. It is based on their fundamental affinity, not on any outstanding attractiveness in the leader. In his writings and speeches Stalin strikes us as dull. Lenin and Trotsky were brilliant personalities of marked individuality; Stalin in his curious anonymity is the Russian mass-man.

Hitler is the German mass-man. Many have been bewildered by his hold over the German masses. In physical appearance, in creative intelligence, in heroic achievements, he seems to lack everything that could explain his magic power over his fellow Germans. His most authoritative biographer, Konrad Heiden, calls him in his new book, Der Fuehrer, “one of those men without qualities, normal and colorless to the point of invisibility,” a perfect nobody. And yet “this miserable human nothing could feel the feeling of the mass, and when the nothing spoke with the people, it was as though the voice of the people were speaking.” Hitler — we are entitled to conclude — had no need to conquer the German masses or to make them his first, victims.

True, Hitlerites and Stalinists were at first a minority in their lands; but this minority assumed leadership because it gave form to the shapeless dreams of the peoples and voiced with almost frightening daring and simplifying clarity their confused and hardly conscious wishes. “One scarcely need ask,” Heiden says, but without qualifying that the masses in question were German masses, “with what arts Hitler conquered the masses; he did not conquer them, he portrayed and represented them. He does not dominate the minds of millions, his mind belongs to them. Like a piece of wood floating on the waves, he follows the shifting currents of public opinion. This is his true strength.”

Mr. Heiden’s extremely well written book is based on an expert knowledge of the biographical material and the political background of Hitler’s rise to power. The dramatic terseness and vividness of its narrative have lost nothing in the excellent translation. Its brilliant analysis of German and, curiously enough, also of Russian politics makes the book not only a journalistic masterpiece but an authentic work of historical scholarship.

Yet the crucial question of the essentially German nature of Hitlerism is not answered: Mr. Heiden seems to regard Hitler as representing the mind not only of the German masses but of the modern masses everywhere. Though he clearly perceives the deep tie binding Hitler to the German masses and them to him, he often writes as if Hitler had to conquer the German masses against their innermost will. Hitlerism then appears as an international movement which could have happened anywhere and which found in Germany only its accidental starting point. Such an opinion underrates the deep roots of Hitlerism and Stalinism in the intellectual soil and the social structure of Germany and Russia, and at the same time the intrinsic strength and the survival value of Western civilization.

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WESTERN civilization has been put to an unprecedented strain by three centuries of rapid progress in the liberty of man, the pursuit of happiness, and the unbinding of the masses. In the end this strain has weakened moral faith and social cohesion and raised doubts and fears everywhere, but in very different ways and degrees, according to the social structure and the intellectual climate of each country. National Socialism and Communism, which promised a new certitude to frightened men, a sense of fulfillment to distracted lives and perplexed minds, have by their very reaction to the crisis aggravated it. But Russians and Germans both take it for granted that Western civilization was as much undermined in the West as with them; thus they became convinced of their imminent triumph over the West, which both hated.

This ignorance and rejection of the West is nothing new in German and Russian history. For more than a century many German and Russian thinkers and dreamers, deeply conscious of, and endlessly meditating about, their difference from the West, have proclaimed its inferiority and predicted its decline. Stalinism and Hitlerism are only Russia’s and Germany’s latest answers to the challenge of Western ideals and the impact of Western forces.

These answers have gained a. terrifying strength and unrestrained ferociousness from the fact that this time they do not come from the ruling classes, but from the national masses, who for the first time represent their nations and national traditions. Certainly there are National Socialists outside Germany and Stalinists outside Russia. Yet only ha Germany and Russia did Hitlerism and Stalinism become true vital forces; elsewhere they fanatically possessed individuals and small groups, but never pulsated with the lifeblood of the masses. Hitler and Stalin are German and Russian massmen, nationalists in the deepest sense of the word, not the aristocratic and cosmopolitan supermen whom Nietzsche and Spengler expected.

Their superman was a solitary individual, high above the masses, unrelated to them, despising them and marshaling their emotions to the icy clarity of his rational will. Hitler is no Nietzschean superman, not a solitary individual opposed to the masses, but a demoniac intensification of their emotions, lusts, and vices — the mass-man without individuality, who has no real biography, no ancestry, no family, no progeny — one with the masses, fused with his nation. Spengler, who lived to see Hitler rise to power, rejected him, and Nietzsche would have loathed what seemed an absurd caricature of the superman. Nietzsche’s superman was Napoleon, not Hitler.

Hitler has often been compared to Napoleon, and Heiden calls him “the belated anachronistic German answer to Napoleon.” Yet between them stands not only the utter difference of the French and German ideas which they represent. Napoleon was the son of the enlightened eighteenth century, the sword of the generous, rational, and humanitarian message of the French Revolution. Hitler stands for ideas and forces diametrically opposed to the liberating message of the French Revolution.

But their dissimilarity goes deeper. Napoleon was not a Frenchman; he was an Italian, a Renaissance condottiere who espoused the cosmopolitan cause of the French Revolution. He remained alien to the French mind and tradition with their discipline of value and measure; his violent and inordinate ego violated them. He was a solitary individual, living far from the masses and never feeling their warmth; he was a human personality with unique traits, colorful and rich in his life’s connections, not an empty symptom and symbol like Hitler. Mussolini had something of a barnstorming Napoleon; Hitler is the very opposite of the Napoleonic superman — not the European individual, but the German mass-man.

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AT the start Mr. Heiden links Russia and Germany and shows that in National Socialism — though not in fascism — anti-Semitism is of fundamental importance. This ubiquitous minority problem became in Germany something unique and incomparable. Jewish emancipation was the work of Western liberal rationalism, of the Anglo-Saxon and French revolutions; in Germany anti-Semitism has long been a basic element in the struggle against Western universal civilization. Luther’s anti-Semitism has been hardly surpassed in violence. After Napoleon brought Jewish emancipation to Germany, anti-Semitism became the hallmark of German nationalism. The reader of Heine will be struck by the atmospheric affinity of Germany in 1835 and 1935.

Anti-Semitism became the official program of political parties first among Germans — in Protestant Berlin under Adolf Stocker, whom William II befriended, and in Catholic Vienna under Karl Lueger, from whom Hitler learned. Not an obscure scribbler, but the foremost historian of the Bismarckian Reich, implanted anti-Semitism firmly in the academic world. German use of anti-Semitism in the struggle against the West was perfected by the Russian forgery of the famous Protocols, the textbook of conspiracy for world domination. Hitler not only faithfully copied the methods therein ascribed to the Jews, but anti-Semitism was to make German world domination palatable to nonGermans: Hitler as savior from the Jew ish menace.

Germany, strategically Europe’s center, is spiritually a borderland between East and West; east of the Elbe, in Slavic lands colonized only in the thirteenth century by the Germans, it merges into the shapeless Sarmatian plains. There Prussia rose with its Spartan spirit, its army the ideal way of existence and its authoritarian state the regulating principle of all life. The Prussianization of Germany by Bismarck, Hindenburg, and Hitler is an oftentold, woeful tale, but this is only part of the story. Even Western Germany never developed a powerful middle class like the West. In the West the Renaissance transformed society and political ideas by the rise to power of the urban middle class. The German Renaissance remained an intellectual movement, spending itself in the fantastic vagaries of its humanists who discovered the nobility of the barbaric destroyers of the Roman Empire, while the German cities sank into sleepy insignificance.

Western Calvinism was primarily an urban middle-class movement inspiring the struggle for a free society; German Lutheranism supported the absolute authority of the princes and encouraged abject submissiveness. The Lutheran opposition of an inwardly free and ethical Christian life and an outward obedience to established authority in an ethically indifferent world produced the Innerlichkeit of German intellectual life — its non-political and socially irresponsible aloofness. To the liberals of Germany’s classical period, daring giants in the realm of the mind, it seemed unthinkable to try to change society and government, which were the undisputed realm of the competent authority — Obrigkeit. The ideal of the great German classicists, the free individuality, was never realized in political and social life. In vain they warned

The Germans did not heed the warning. They abandoned the ideal of the free individual and turned to that of national unity and power. Nineteenth-century intellectual Germany protested against Western rational and optimistic liberalism. Romanticism, which as artistic expression enriched the West, became in Germany a fateful philosophy of society. German thought, saturated with the relativism of all values, despised common sense, and brooding over the tragic character of life glorified the inevitable “destiny” of crisis and catastrophe. In this German soil National Socialism struck deep roots.

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GERMANY also had democratic trends. The Reichstag of 1912 had a democratic majority; the Social Democrats alone supplied one third of its membership. Yet the “revolution” of 1918 was not the work of democrats or socialists, whom Hitler later tried to burden with the guilt of having overthrown the monarchy; it was staged, as Mr. Heiden points out, by the army in order to preserve itself and to prepare for the next war. “Thus the generals first brought democracy to Germany and overthrew their emperor.” The word “democracy” is not used ironically; to many German democrats democracy meant, above all, national unity and selfdetermination and the will of the majority expressed in parliamentary form. It did not mean individual self-determination, established and protected against the national authority, or the safeguard of human rights and the universality of law and reason, which were the great ideals of the German classicists, from Lessing to Schiller, who were not concerned with national unity.

“The Weimar Republic,” as Helmut Kuhn says in his brilliant Freedom, Forgotten and Remembered, “was a democracy without democrats. We may credit its leading statesmen with the sincere desire to make the German parliamentary system a going concern, but none of them was the legitimate heir to the democratic legacy. None of them partook of a philosophy which might have taught him to view his toil as part, and parcel of a creative effort in the service of humanity.” For the German democrats, says Konrad Heiden, “freedom meant the right to be governed by men of their own language, and democracy meant the right of national self-determination.” From this point of view even Hitler could claim to represent democracy; in any case, Bismarck’s unification of Germany could be defended and Hindenburg’s election in 1932 called a victory for democracy.

Bismarck, who broke incipient German political liberalism, was at first hated by many Germans. As soon as he united Germany by subjecting it to Prussia, he became the idol of the German people. The same spectacle occurred seventy years later. In the last elections in Germany 43 per cent of the people, an immense group who knew what they wanted, while the rest were without leaders and aims, voted for Hitler. Many did not vote for him because they did not believe that he could succeed. Mr. Heiden shows in some brilliant pages the “fanaticism and servility” with which the German masses accepted enthusiastically t he new regime as soon as it was firmly established and as soon as it “strengthened national unity” and power. The German masses were not coerced into submission; “in the long run, only those can be coerced who really want to be.” In the years from 1938 to 1940, when Hitler seemed to achieve German dreams at astonishingly little cost to the Germans, the German masses proudly idolized him.

Hitlerism is neither an “accident” nor a universal phenomenon, as Mr. Heiden seems to suggest. “Accidents” like the German defeat of 1918, the world economic crisis of 1930, and the British and American policy of undermining the settlement of Versailles certainly contributed to its rise. Movements akin to Hitlerism can be found everywhere in the rich variety of political and intellectual underbrush, but nowhere — outside Japan, which shows many affinities with Germany — as a dominant system. In its essence and strength Hitlerism is rooted in the historical conditions of German society and thought. It will not disappear with Hitler — who is less an individual than the German massman in demoniac dimensions — but only with a profound change in the social structure and in the dominant ideas and ideals of Germany. That will demand time and an exacting vigilance on the part of the West and of a revived German liberalism which will have to undo Bismarck’s fateful triumph.

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