The purpose of all the ceremonies and mass celebrations was obviously to engage the popular imagination and rally the popular will into a unitary force. But beneath the surface it is possible to discern motives that throw light upon Hitler’s personality and psychopathology. We are not referring only to his inability to endure routine, his naive craving for circuses, for the roll of drums, the blare of trumpets, the grand entrance, for dazzling illusions and the cheap brilliance of Bengal lights. The vault of light was not merely the fit symbol of Hitler’s craving to substitute illusion for reality. Albert Speer has told us how he happened to invent this device, which had the practical purpose of disguising a most prosaic reality: by a combination of darkness and glaring light effects he wanted to distract attention from the paunches of the middle and minor party functionaries who had grown fat in their prebends.39
In addition, the resort to ceremonials also reveals a strenuous desire to stylize, to represent the triumph of order over a shifting existence forever threatened by chaos. We might call these efforts techniques of exorcism undertaken by a terrified mind. When certain contemporaries likened all the to-do with marching columns, forests of banners and blocks of humanity to the rites of primitive tribes, the comparison was not so artificial as it sounded. From the psychological point of view, what was operative here was the same urge to stylize that had dominated Hitler’s life from a very early period. Thus he had sought orientation and support against the world in a succession of new roles: from the early role of the son of good family and idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves, through the various roles of leader, genius, and savior, to the imitation Wagnerian end, where his aim was to enact an operatic finale. In every case he practiced autosuggestion, presenting himself in disguises and borrowed forms of existence. And when after one of his successful foreign-policy coups he called himself, with naive boastfulness, “the greatest actor in Europe,” he was expressing a need of his nature as well as an ability.
It was, in turn, a need that emerged from the fundamental Hitlerian motif of insecurity and anxiety. He was good at portraying feelings; he took pains not to show them. He repressed all spontaneity. But certain small peculiarities betrayed him—especially his eyes, which never stood still. They roamed restlessly even in moments of statutelike rigidity. So fearful was he of a frank emotion that he held his hand before his face whenever he laughed. He hated being surprised while playing with one of his dogs, and as soon as he knew he was being observed, one of his secretaries has reported, he would “roughly chase the dog away.” He was constantly tormented by the fear of seeming ridiculous or of making a faux pas that would cause him to forfeit the respect of members of his entourage, down to his janitor. Before he ventured to appear in public in a new suit or a new hat, he would have himself photographed so that he could check the effect. He did not swim, never got into a rowboat (“After all, what business would I have in a rowboat!”), or mounted a horse, he said; altogether he was “not at all fond of show-off stunts. How easily they might go wrong; parades teach that time and again.”40 He regarded life as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience. Thus he occasionally would try to dissuade Göring from smoking by offering the highly characteristic argument that one could not be represented on a monument “with a cigar in one’s mouth.” When Heinrich Hoffmann returned from Russia in the autumn of 1939 with photographs that showed Stalin holding a cigarette, Hitler forbade their publication; he was protecting a “colleague” in order not to detract from the constant dignity that should surround a dictator.
For similar reasons he was tormented by fears that his private life would be exposed. Significantly, not a single personal letter of his exists. Even Eva Braun received only terse, sober notes; yet he was so wary that he never entrusted even these to the mails. The comedy of aloofness from her, which he played out to the last with the less intimate members of his wider entourage, likewise testifies to his inability to lead a life without posing. The most personal letter he left is paradoxically a letter to authorities: that petition to the magistracy of the city of Linz which he wrote at the age of twenty-four in explanation of his draft evasion. On one occasion he remarked that it was “especially important” and “an old experience in the life of a political leader: One should never write down anything that one can discuss, never!” And elsewhere he stated: “Far too much is written; this begins with love letters and ends with political letters. There is always something incriminating about doing so.” He constantly observed himself and literally never spoke an unconsidered word, as Hjalmar Schacht commented. His desires were secret, his feelings hidden, and the widespread notion of an emotionally ungoverned, wildly gesticulating Hitler actually reverses the proportion of rule and exception. In fact his was the most concentrated life imaginable, disciplined to the point of unnatural rigidity.
Even Hitler’s famous outbursts of rage were apparently quite often deliberate instances of play-acting. One of the early gauleiters has described how Hitler raged so in the course of one of these fits that spittle literally ran out of the corners of his mouth and down his chin, so helplessly infuriated did he appear to be—but his consistent, intellectually controlled argumentation, which never ceased throughout the outburst, belied appearances. It would be too much to say that he deliberately tried to engender something like a “shudder of awe” at pathological frenzy. But we can assume that in such situations he did not lose control and that he was exploiting his own emotions just as purposefully as he did those of others. He usually had a reason for making such scenes and unleashed his temperament according to circumstances. He could be just as engaging and charming as he was brutal or ruthless. He was capable of shedding tears, pleading, or working himself up into one of his famous rages, which to the very end aroused the horror of all his interlocutors and often broke their resistance. He possessed “the most terrifying persuasiveness.” Along with this he had the power of exerting a hypnotic effect upon his interlocutor. The leadership of the party, the gauleiters and Old Fighters who had shoved their way to the top alongside him, undoubtedly were “a band of eccentrics and egotists all going in different directions,” and certainly were not servile in the traditional sense. The same is true for at least a part of the officers’ corps. Nevertheless, Hitler imposed his will on them as he pleased. And he did so not only at the height of his power but equally well before, when he was a marginal figure on the political Right, and at the end, when he was only the burned-out husk of a once mighty man. Several diplomats, particularly those of Germany’s allies, fell so completely under his spell that eventually they seemed to be rather his familiars than representatives of their governments.