Dominant among his motivations—and here he was borne along on the powerful current of his era—was an inescapable sense of being threatened—the fear of annihilation that had seized many political entities and nations in the course of centuries. But only now, at this crossroads in history, did this annihilation become a universal force threatening all mankind. One of the photos from the new chancellery shows Hitler’s-desk, on which lies a folio-sized book titled The Salvation of the World.3 And at various junctures in his life it became evident that he took his role of savior with the utmost seriousness. That was not only his mission and “cyclopean task,” but also—in this life dominated by histrionic concepts—the great exemplary part that he connected with memories of his early favorite opera, Lohengrin, and with the myths of a good many liberating heroes and white knights.
For him the idea of salvation was indissolubly linked with European pride. Aside from Europe no other continent counted, no other culture of significance existed. All other continents were only geography, areas for slaves and exploitation, unhistorical empty spaces: hie sunt leones. Thus Hitler’s attitude was also a last exaggerated expression of Europe’s claim to remain master of its own history, and thus of history in general. By the time he was done, Europe played the same part in his view of the world that Germanism had in his early years: it was the supreme value, but so threatened that it was already almost lost. He was extremely alert to the pressure of dissoluton to which the Continent was exposed on all sides, to the dangers to its nature that came both from outside and from inside, to the vastly multiplying “lesser breeds” of Asia, Africa, and America that were swarming over the globe and virtually suffocating it, and to the democratic ideologies within Europe itself that denied its history and its greatness.
He himself, it is true, was a figure of the democratic era, but he represented only its antiliberal variant, which flourished on rigged elections and the charisma of a leader. One of the things he learned from the November, 1918, revolution, and was never to forget, was an insight into the obscure connection between democracy and anarchy. He had seen, he thought, that chaotic conditions were the real, unfalsified expression of true popular rule and that the law of such rule was arbitrariness. Thus Hitler’s dictatorship may be regarded as a last desperate effort to hold old Europe to the conditions that had made for her onetime greatness, to defend the sense of style, order, and authority against the dawning era of democracy with its consultation of the masses, its egalitarian encouragement of everything plebeian, its emancipation, and its concomitant decline of national and racial identity. He saw the Continent subject to a mighty dual assault by two alien forces, devoured by “soulless” American capitalism, on the one hand, and by “inhuman” Russian Bolshevism on the other hand. Rightly, the nature of his commitment has been defined as a “death agony.”
Expand these ideas to a global plane, and we see the parallel to the state of mind of the early Fascist followings, those middle-class masses who saw themselves being slowly crushed by the unions on the one hand and the department stores on the other, by Communists and anonymous corporations—all this against a general background of panic. In these terms Hitler can also be understood as an effort to maintain a kind of third-force position between the two dominant powers of the times, between Left and Right, East and West. This may account for his appearance of dualism, so that none of the unequivocal definitions, none of the attempts to classify him as conservative, reactionary, capitalistic, or petty bourgeois, really comprehend him. By standing between all positions he shared in all of them and usurped crucial elements of them; but he combined them into his own unique, unmistakable phenomenon. His accession to power brought to an end the conflict that Wilson and Lenin had initiated over Germany after the First World War. The former had tried to win Germany over to parliamentary democracy and the idea of international peace, the latter to the cause of world revolution. Twelve years later, the struggle was renewed and settled in Solomonic fashion by the partition of the country.
The third position that Hitler sought to occupy was intended to embrace the entire continent, with Germany as its vital nucleus. He held that the contemporary mission of the Reich was to reinvigorate tired Europe and rouse her to a consciousness of her grandeur. He wanted to make up for the missed imperialistic phase in Germany’s development, and though coming late on the historical scene win the highest imaginable prize: hegemony over Europe secured by vast expansion of power in the East, and through Europe domination of the world. With some justification he assumed that under developing patterns of power, the chances for conquering an empire were growing slimmer, and since he always thought in sharp alternatives, he saw Germany condemned either to found an-empire or “to close her existence… as a second Holland and a second Switzerland,” if not worse, “to vanish from the earth or serve others as a slave nation.”4 That the country lacked the energies and resources to meet this aim did not much worry him. What really was at stake, he argued, was “to force the German people, who are hesitating to confront their destiny, to take the road to greatness.” When someone pointed out the risk of ruining Germany by setting her such goals, he merely answered that in that case everything would be “in a mess.”5
Hitler’s nationalism, consequently, was also not without its equivocations and rode roughshod over the interests of the nation. Still, it was vehement enough to be taken as a challenge and aroused widespread resistance. This must be said even though Hitler formulated the defensive emotions of an age and a continent, and even though his messianic slogans proved effective far beyond the borders of Germany, so that through him Germany was the object of respect and even envy.6 In spite of such “internationalism,” Hitler never managed to give his own defensive intentions more than a harsh and narrow nationalistic profile. In the bunker mediations of the spring of 1945 he referred to himself as “Europe’s last chance,” and in light of that idea tried to justify his application of force against the whole Continent: “It [the Continent] could not be conquered by charm and persuasiveness. I had to rape it in order to have it.”7 But Europe’s chance was precisely what Hitler was not, not even prospectively, not even as an illusion or a possible way. At no time was he able to convince people beyond his own borders that he offered them a viable political alternative. During the war, when the campaign against the Soviet Union could have been presented as a European crusade, he revealed himself as the sworn enemy of “imposed internationalism” that he had been from the start. He remained profoundly a European provincial with his gaze irretrievably fixated on the antagonisms of a vanished era.
We are thus once again compelled to confront Hitler’s oddly fractured position in time. Despite his fundamentally defensive posture, he was long regarded as the really progressive, modern figure of the age. To most of his contemporaries it was clear that he was striding toward the future. Yet to our present-day sensibility, what is most striking is the anachronistic quality he displays. During the twenties and thirties the mélange of elements that were regarded as modern and in keeping with the spirit of the age were technology and collectivist ideas, monumental proportions, bellicose attitudes, the pride of the mass man, and the aura of stardom. One of the reasons for Nazism’s success was that Hitler ingeniously appropriated all these elements. Another of these “modern” elements was the imperious manner of great individuals. Hitler’s rise and sovereignty took place within a pattern of Caesaristic tendencies stretching all the way from the totalitarian cult of personality in Stalin’s Soviet Union to the autocratic style of President Roosevelt. Against such a background Hitler, who blatantly proclaimed himself a ruler of this type, seemed the perfect representative of the new age. He himself also consistently stressed the optimistic, future-oriented character of Nazism. Its reactionary features, its pessimistic nostalgia with regard to civilization, were largely given voice by Himmler, Darre, and a sizable band of the SS leadership.