On purely personal grounds I declare myself for the new State, because it is my Volk that is making its way now. Who am I to exclude myself; do I know anything better? No! Within the limits of my powers I can try to guide the Volk to where I would like to see it; but if I should not succeed, still it would remain my Volk. Volk is a great deal! My intellectual and economic existence, my language, my life, my human relationships, the entire sum of my brain, I owe primarily to this Volk. My ancestors came from it; my children return to it. And since I grew up in the country, and among farm animals, I also still remember what native grounds stand for. Big cities, industrialism, intellectualism—these are all shadows that the age has cast upon my thoughts, all powers of the century, which I have confronted in my writing. There are moments in which this whole tormented life falls away and nothing exists but the plains, expanses, seasons, soil, simple words: Volk.23
Such statements reveal how irrelevant it was to charge Nazism with ideological poverty. Compared with the ideational systems of the Left, it might seem to offer no more than collective warmth: crowds, heated faces, shouts of approval, marches, arms raised in salute. But that was precisely what made it attractive to a body of intellectuals who had long been in existential despair. They had emerged from the many theoretical disputes of the age with the one insight that one could “no longer approach things with ideas.” It was the very craving to escape from ideas, concepts, and systems into some uncomplicated sense of belonging that provided Nazism with so many deserters from other causes.
Nazism tried to satisfy this craving by inventing a multitude of new social arenas; one of Hitler’s fundamental insights, acquired in the loneliness of his youth, was that people wanted to belong. It would be a mistake to see nothing but coercion in the multitudinous organizations of the party, the politicized professional associations, the chambers, bureaus and leagues that proliferated throughout the country. Rather, the practice of taking every individual into the fold according to his age, his function, and even his preferences in leisure or entertainment, of leaving people nothing but sleep as their private domain, as Robert Ley remarked on occasion—this practice sprang from a widespread craving for social participation. Hitler was not exaggerating when he asserted, as he regularly did, that he had asked his followers for nothing but sacrifices. In fact he had rediscovered the old truism that most people have a need for fitting into an organized whole, that there is joy in fulfilling a function, and that for the majority of the German people, the demand for selfless service frequently had a far greater appeal than the intellectuals’ demand of freedom for the individual.
Hitler succeeded in converting all the diffuse impulses awakened during that first spring after his coming to power into purposeful social energies—that was one of his most remarkable achievements. Challenging the individual to total disinterested effort, he kindled enthusiasm in people nerve-wracked by unemployment, misery, and hunger. He was able to proclaim convincingly: “It is glorious to live in an age that confronts its people with great tasks.” He went to unprecedented lengths in travel and speechmaking. By an endless succession of cornerstone layings and ground-breaking ceremonies, he created a mood of general mobilization. In hundreds of let’s-get-to-work speeches he initiated labor campaigns which, in the military jargon of the regime, soon developed into labor battles and were triumphantly concluded by a series of victories or by breakthroughs on the agricultural front. The metaphor of warfare that made such formulas effective also sparked a readiness for sacrifice. And all sorts of slogans furthered the mood, though sometimes these slogans verged on the preposterous, as for example: “The German woman is knitting again!”
Like the festivals and parades, these stylistic devices aimed at making the regime popular by concretizing it. Hitler had a remarkable knack for translating into simple images the abstract character of modern political and social functional relationships. Of course, the masses had lost their political autonomy; their rights had been reduced or abolished. But those liberties of the past had hardly profited them—they remembered them with nothing but contempt—whereas Hitler’s unrelenting image projection, his eagerness for public display, engendered in the masses a clear feeling that they were participating in the operations of government. After years of gloom it seemed to many people that their work was once again becoming meaningful. The most menial jobs were being raised to praiseworthy importance. As Hitler put it, it was an honor “to clean the streets as a citizen of this Reich.” Remarkably enough, he seemed to succeed in generating this state of mind.
This capacity for awakening initiative and self-confidence was all the more amazing in view of the fact that Hitler had no specific program. At the cabinet meeting of March 15 he for the first time admitted his dilemma, saying that it was necessary to employ demonstrations, pomp, and a show of activity “to divert attention to the purely political affairs, because the economic decisions will have to be postponed for a while.” And as late as September at the groundbreaking ceremony for the first section of the Frankfurt-Heidelberg autobahn he let slip the revealing statement that it was now essential “by grand, monumental works to set the German economy in motion again at some point.” As Hermann Rauschning saw it, Hitler took power with virtually no other guideline than his total confidence in his own ability to deal with things on the primitive but effective maxim: give an order and it will get done, more or less roughly, perhaps, but for a while something will be moving, and meanwhile we’ll look around for the next step.
As things stood, however, this conception proved to be a kind of magic, since it overcame the prevailing feeling of discouragement. Although there was no visible improvement in material conditions until 1934, from almost the very first day Hitler’s approach generated an enormous “suggestion of consolidation.” At the same time, it assured Hitler considerable room for maneuvering, which enabled him to adjust his plans to changing requirements. The style of his rule has rightly been called “permanent improvisation.” Even while he insisted on the unalterability of the party program, he was filled with that lively instinct of the born tactician not to commit himself. Thus he forbade the press in the first few months to publish unauthorized quotations from Mein Kampf. Even republication of one of the twenty-five points of the party program was banned on the grounds that henceforth what mattered would not be programs but practical work. As a pamphlet of the period put it: “The new Chancellor has so far refused, quite understandably from his standpoint, to set forth a program in detail. (‘Party Comrade No. 1 did not answer,’ the Berlin joke has it.)” One of the early party functionaries believes that Hitler at no time had a clearly formulated goal, let alone a strategy for attaining his ends. And indeed it does seem as if he had only visions, and an unusual capacity for taking in at a glance changing situations, and rapidly and forcefully seizing the opportunities they offered. The grandiose phantasmagorias, floating in eschatological mists of cosmic dooms and racial twilights, were just as much his element as tenacious, cunning, cold-bloodedly staged rapid-fire events—he was a curious combination of visionary and tactician. But the realm in between, that of soundly planned, patiently practiced politics, the realm of human history, was and remained alien to him.