As predicted, Hindenburg had no difficulty winning the requisite absolute majority, with nearly 20 million votes, 53 per cent of the total. Nevertheless, Hitler chalked up a larger increase in votes than the President; the 13.5 million voters who cast their ballots for him represented a percentage of 36.7. Duesterberg had not run in the second campaign; the Communist Thälmann received little more than 10 per cent of the total.
On the very day of the election, in a mood that mingled exhaustion, feverish excitement, and the intoxication of success, Hitler issued instructions for the elections to the state legislatures in Prussia, Anhalt, Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hamburg, which once more involved the entire country, four-fifths of the population. Goebbels recorded Hitler’s orders: “We will not rest for a moment and are already making decisions.” Once more Hitler set out on an airplane flight over Germany, speaking in twenty-five cities in eight days. His entourage boasted of a “world record” in personal encounters. But that was precisely what did not happen. Rather, Hitler’s individuality seemed to disappear behind the ceaseless activity, as if nothing but a dynamic principle were at work: “Our whole life is now a frantic chase after success and after power.”
For long stretches of his life, therefore, the personality of this man, elusive in any case, evaporates, slips from the biographer’s grasp. Hitler’s entourage tried in vain to give color, individuality, and a human aura to the phenomenon. Even the masters of propaganda, who could command almost any effect, found themselves at a loss here. The diaries and accounts of Goebbels or Otto Dietrich are prime examples of that failure. The anecdotes his publicists endlessly circulated about Hitler the lover of children, the navigator with an infallible sense of direction in the lost airplane, the “dead shot” with a pistol, the hero with remarkable presence of mind in the midst of the “Red rabble”—all these tales sounded strained and added to the impression they were trying to dispeclass="underline" remoteness from real life. Only the props he had gradually acquired gave him a certain individual outline: the raincoat, the felt hat or leather cap, the snapping whip, the intensely black mustache, and the way his hair was brushed down over his forehead. But because these items always remained the same, they, too, depersonalized him.
Goebbels has vividly described the restiveness that gripped the leading members of the party at this time:
This endless traveling begins again. Work must be taken care of standing, walking, driving and flying. You hold your most important conversations on stairs, in hallways, at the door, or on the drive to the railroad station. You scarcely have time to think. By train, car and plane you’re carried back and forth across Germany. You turn up in a city a half hour before your speech is scheduled, sometimes with even less time to spare; you climb to the speaker’s platform and speak…. By the time you’re done you’re in a state as if you’d just been pulled out of a hot bath fully dressed. Then you get into the car and drive another two hours….27
Only a few times during this year and a half of nonstop electioneering did circumstances jolt Hitler out of his impersonality and for brief moments offer a glimpse of his real character.
On September 18, 1931, just as the frantic chase across Germany was beginning and while he was setting out on an election campaign visit to Hamburg, word reached him that his niece Geli Raubal had committed suicide in the apartment they shared on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich. According to the accounts, Hitler, stunned and horrified, abruptly turned about; and unless all the indications are deceptive, no other event in his personal life affected him as strongly as did this one. For weeks he seemed close to a nervous breakdown and repeatedly swore to give up politics. In his fits of gloom he spoke of suicide; this was, once again, the mood of total capitulation into which he recurrently fell when misfortune struck. This melancholia testified to the highly charged quality of his life, demanding constant effort of will in order to be the person he wanted to seem to be. The energy that emanated from him was not the exuberance of a vigorous man but the forced product of neurosis. In keeping with his belief that the great man must have no feelings, he hid away for several days in a house on the Tegernsee, in southern Bavaria. According to his intimates, tears would come to his eyes whenever he spoke of his niece in later years; it was an unwritten rule that no one but he might mention her name. Her memory was surrounded with a kind of cult. Her room at the Berghof was kept just as she had left it; a bust of her was set up in the room at Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, where her body had been found. There, year after year, on the anniversary of her death, Hitler would lock himself in for a meditation that might last for hours.28
There was a strangely exaggerated, idolizing quality about all of Hitler’s reactions to his niece’s death—in strong contrast to his usual coldness and inability to relate to others. We have reason to think that he was not putting on a performance, that in fact the incident was one of the key events in his personal life. It seems to have fixed forever his relationship to the opposite sex, which was curious enough in any case.
If our evidence is to be believed, for some time after his mother’s death, women had played only the most peripheral part in his life. The men’s home, chance acquaintanceships in Munich beer halls, the dugout, the barracks, the male circles of politics and the party—these had been his world. The realm that complemented them tended to be the brothel, which, however, he found despicable, or light, casual relationships—but these were not easy for him to form, with his stiff unyielding nature. The shy inhibited attitude he had toward women was early expressed in his youthful crush on Stefanie. His fellow soldiers in the field considered him a “woman hater.” Though later on he was always involved in close social relationships, always surrounded by a host of people, his biography is eerily empty of other human beings. His fear of all undignified attitudes included, according to a remark by a member of his entourage, constant anxiety about “having his name linked with a woman.”
His complexes seemed to loosen up only after Geli Raubal appeared with her sentimental and at first, evidently, half-childish fondness for “Uncle Alf.” It may be that he could be more relaxed with someone of his own blood. In fact, his feelings for Geli may have sprung from this very incestuous factor. There is a precedent in his own immediate family. His father had taken a niece into his house when she was sixteen and made her his mistress. Among the many women who crossed Hitler’s path—from Jenny Haug, the sister of his first chauffeur, to Helena Hanfstaengl, the first wife of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Leni Riefenstahl, and all those he addressed or referred to in the Austrian intimate style as “Mein Prinzesschen,” “Meine kleine Gräfin,” “Tschapperl,” or “Flietscherl,” and up to Eva Braun—none meant as much to him as Geli Raubal. She was, oddly inappropriate though the phrase sounds, his great love, a tabooed love of Tristan moods and tragic sentimentality.