Contempt for reality corresponded to an increasingly overt belittling of politics. Politics was reality in the bluntest, most obtrusive sense: the “rule of the inferior,” as the title of a celebrated book of the twenties put it.9 Aside from a thin minority that was forever being forced into isolation, the public in Germany did not know what to make of politics. The German world was oriented toward private concepts, aims, virtues. No social goals could match the rewards of the private world: family happiness, the emotions aroused by nature, the quiet passions of the study. Joys such as these made a whole world of intelligible satisfactions, and no one was going to abandon them, exchanging the mystery of the forest for the “din of the market place” and the freedom of dreams for constitutional rights.
This feeling also was driven to an extreme. “A political person is repulsive,” Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt. One of his admirers has remarked: “If Wagner was in any way an expression of his nation, if there was anything in which he was German, humanistically German and bourgeois German in the highest and purest sense of those words, he was so in his hatred for politics.”10 The antipolitical bias tended to be dressed up as defense of morality against power, of humanity against socialistic trends, of the intellect against public life. From these pairs of opposites, constantly elaborated by new profundities and polemical ponderings, the favorite themes of bourgeois self-examination developed. The supremely brilliant expression of the general attitude, in the form of a complex confession and profession of faith, was Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (“Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”), published in 1918. It was intended as a brief on the part of culture-proud Germany against the “enlightened,” Western “terrorism of politics.”
This attitude was also evident in the way the Germans responded when war and the postwar era confronted them squarely with politics. They reacted to the “dirty” revolution with passionate disdain and made a scramble for the traditional escape route that led into aesthetic or mythological realms. In their inability to make any sense of political facts, they spawned all the conspiracy theories that thickened the air during the Weimar years: the myth of the stab in the back, for example, or the theory of the dual menace by a Red (Communist) and a golden (capitalist) International. Anti-Semitism and the widespread anxiety complexes about Freemasons and Jesuits also sprang from the same source. In short, the Germans’ abhorrence of politics drove them into an imaginary world full of the romantic concepts of treason, loneliness, and deceived greatness.
What political thought there was was also marked by nonpolitical images. Ideologies were constructed out of “the war experience” and out of such notions as “young nations,” “total mobilization” or “barbaric Caesarism.” The vast flood of nationalistic and utopian schemes and catchword philosophies of the so-called Conservative Revolution aimed at dressing up the world in the costume of irrationalism. These ideologies pitted their radical slogans against the toilsome compromises of political reality. They passed judgment on everyday life in the name of grandiose myths. It is true that they exerted little direct influence. But by presenting confusing romantic alternatives they contributed to the process of intellectually starving out the republic. This was all the easier because reality had become so hateful that “disgust with politics” could be aroused far more effectively than ever before. While the advocates of Weimar often seemed like apologists for a corrupt system, the attackers of the Right seemed imaginative, overflowing with projects, as they constructed out of mythology, sentimentality, and concentrated bitterness an anti-image to the republic. Among their most contemptuous slurs aimed at the “system” was that it had nothing to offer to the nation but “domestic bliss,” consumption, and petty bourgeois epicureanism. Adventure, tragedy, doom—such words fascinated the age. Among Germany’s intellectuals, Carl von Ossietzky found many “altruistic lovers of every catastrophe, gourmets of world-political misfortunes.” Meanwhile, a French observer at the beginning of the thirties wondered whether Germany’s “present crisis is not too passionately and violently felt.”11 In fact, it was this tendency toward melodrama that gave the crisis its hopeless, desperate cast. This in turn made the craving to escape from reality a mass phenomenon and the idea of a heroic leap into the unknown the most familiar of all thoughts.
The phenomenon of Hitler must be seen against this ideological milieu. Sometimes he actually seems the artificial product of these attitudes and complexes: he illustrates so neatly the combination of mythological and rational thinking, the extreme radicality of the socially alienated intellectual. His speeches contain the stock in trade of antipolitical bias as he pours out his hatred for parties, for the compromises of the “system,” for the republic’s lack of “grandeur.” To him politics was a concept closely related to fate, incapable of producing anything of its own accord, needing to be liberated by the strong man, by art, or by a higher power called “Providence.” In one of the key speeches he made during the course of the seizure of power—the speech of March 21, that famous “day” of Potsdam—he dealt with the very question of the relationship between political impotence, surrogate reveries and redemption by art as follows:
The German, at odds with himself, with deep divisions in his mind, likewise in his will and therefore impotent in action, becomes powerless to direct his own life. He dreams of justice in the stars and loses his footing on earth…. In the end, then, only the inward road remained open for German men. As a nation of singers, poets and thinkers they dreamed of a world in which the others lived, and only when misery and wretchedness dealt them inhuman blows did there perhaps grow up out of art the longing for a new rising, for a new Reich, and therefore for new life.12
Once he had given up his dream of being an artist, he came to regard himself as the savior the nation awaited. He considered politics principally as a means to achieve greatness, allowing him to compensate for his inadequate artistic talent by entering upon another grandiloquent role. For all his bathos about art, “the humanities” left him indifferent. The documents that reveal him at his most spontaneous, his early speeches and the table talk at the Fuhrer’s headquarters, are convincing evidence of this. Probably few tributes gratified him so much as the remark of Houston Stewart Chamberlain in a letter of October, 1923, hailing him as “the opposite of a politician.” Chamberlain had added: “The ideal of politics would be to have none; but this non-politics would have to be frankly acknowledged and imposed upon the world.” In this sense Hitler actually had no politics; what he had, rather, was a large, portentous idea of destiny and the world. And with manic persistence he made it the goal of his life to attain that ideal.
Walter Benjamin called Fascism the “aestheticizing of politics.” The German conception of politics had always been infected with aesthetics, and Nazism gave a central place to this quality. One of the reasons for the Weimar Republic’s failure was that its representatives did not understand the German psychology and thought of politics solely as politics. It remained for Hitler to endow public affairs with the necessary eclat. This he did by his endless obfuscations, his theatrical scenarios, the storms of ecstasy and idolization. Those vaults created by massed searchlight beams were the fitting symbol for it alclass="underline" walls of magic and light erected against the dark menace of the outside world. And if the Germans did not share Hitler’s hunger for space, his anti-Semitism, his vulgar and brutal qualities, they applauded him and followed him because he had once more restored passion to politics, and overlaid it with a note of dire significance.