In spite of all its revolutionary rhetoric, National Socialism could never conceal its basically defensive attitude, which contrasted perceptibly with the brash gladiatorial poses its advocates loved to adopt. Konrad Heiden called the Fascistic ideologies “boasts while in flight”; they were, he said, “fear of ascent, of new winds and unknown stars, a protest by the flesh, craving its rest, against the restless spirit.” And Hitler himself, soon after the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, remarked that he now understood how the Chinese had come to surround themselves with a wall. He, too, was tempted “to wish for a gigantic wall to shield the new East against the Central Asiatic masses. In spite of all history, which teaches that a people’s vigor slackens off in a bulwarked area.”
The success of Fascism in contrast to many of its rivals was in large part due to its perceiving the essence of the crisis, of which it was itself the symptom. All the other parties affirmed the process of industrialization and emancipation, whereas the Fascists, evidently sharing the universal anxiety, tried to deal with it by translating it into violent action and histrionics. They also managed to leaven boring, prosaic everyday life by romantic rituals: torchlight processions, standards, death’s heads, battle cries, and shouts of Heil, by the “new marriage of life with danger,” and the idea of “glorious death.” They presented men with modern tasks disguised in the costumery of the past. They deprecated material concerns and treated “politics as an area of self-denial and sacrifice of the individual for an idea.” In taking this line they were addressing themselves to deeper needs than those who promised the masses higher wages. Ahead of all their rivals, the Fascists appeared to have recognized that the Marxist or liberal conception of man as guided only by reason and material interests was a monstrous abstraction.
Thus Fascism served the craving of the period for a general upheaval more effectively than its antagonists. It alone seemed to be articulating the feeling thai everything had gone wrong, that the world had been led into an impasse. That Communism made fewer converts was not due solely to its stigma of being a class party and the agency of a foreign power. Rather, Communism suffered from a vague feeling that it represented part of the wrong turn the world had taken and part of the disease it pretended it could cure. Communism seemed not the negation of bourgeois materialism but merely its obverse, not the superseding of an unjust and inadequate system, but its mirror image turned upside down.
Hitler’s unshakable confidence, which often seemed sheer madness, was based on the conviction that he was the only real revolutionary, that he had broken free of the existing system by reinstating the rights of human instincts. In alliance with these interests, he believed, he was invincible, for the instincts always won out in the end “against economic motivation, against the pressure of public opinion, even against reason.” No doubt the appeal to instinct brought out a good deal of human baseness. No doubt what Fascism wanted to restore was often a grotesque parody of the tradition they purported to honor, and the order they hailed was a hollow sham. But when Trotsky contemptuously dismissed the adherents of Fascistic movements as “human dust,” he was only revealing the Left’s characteristic ineptness in dealing with people’s needs and impulses. That ineptness led to a multitude of clever errors of judgment by those who purported to understand the spirit of the age better than anyone else.
Fascism satisfied more than romantic needs. Sprung from the anxieties of the age, it was an elemental uprising in favor of authority, a revolt on behalf of order. Such paradox was its very essence. It was rebellion and subordination, a break with tradition and the sanctification of tradition, a “people’s community” and strictest hierarchy, private property and social justice. But whatever the slogans it appropriated, the imperious authority of a strong state was always implied. “More than ever the peoples today have a desire for authority, guidance and order,” Mussolini declared.
Mussolini spoke of the “more or less decayed corpse of the goddess Liberty.” He argued that liberalism was about to “close the portals of its temple, which the peoples have deserted” because “all the political experiences of the present are antiliberal.” And in fact throughout Europe, especially in the countries that had gone over to a liberal parliamentary system only after the end of the World War, there had been growing doubts of adequacy of the parliamentarism. These doubts became all the stronger the more these countries moved into the present age. There would be the feeling that the country lacked the means to meet the challenges of the transition: that the available leadership was not equal to the crisis. Witnessing the endless parliamentary disputes, the bitterness and bargaining of partisan politics, people began to long for earlier days, when rule was by decree and no one had to exercise a choice. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, the parliamentary system collapsed throughout the newly created nations of eastern and central Europe and in many of the countries of southern Europe: in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Austria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and finally in Germany. By 1939 there were only nine countries with parliamentary regimes. And many of the nine, like the French Third Republic, had stabilized in a drôle d’état, others in a monarchy. “A fascist Europe was already a possibility.”21
Thus it was not the case of a single aggrieved and aggressive nation trying to impose a totalitarian pattern on Europe. The liberal age was reaching its twilight in a widespread mood of disgust and the mood manifested itself under all kinds of auspices, reactionary and progressive, ambitious and altruistic. From 1921 on, Germany had lacked a Reichstag majority that professed faith in the parliamentary system with any conviction. The ideas of liberalism had scarcely any advocates but many potential adversaries; they needed only an impetus, the stirring slogans of a leader.
II. THE ROAD TO POLITICS
A Part of the German Future
I would have burst out laughing if anyone had predicted to me that this was the beginning of a new era in history.
No other city in Germany had been so shaken by the events and emotions of the revolution and the first postwar weeks as excitable Munich. On November 7, 1918—two days before anything happened in Berlin—the zeal of a few leftists had toppled the thousand-year-old Wittelsbach dynasty. To their own surprise the insurgents found themselves in power. Under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, a bearded bohemian and theater critic of the Münchener Post, they had tried—in all too complete faith in Woodrow Wilson’s statements—“to prepare Germany for the League of Nations” by a revolutionary change of conditions and “to obtain a peace which will save the country from the worst.”
But whatever chances Eisner may have had were nullified by the weakness and inconsistency of the American President and by the hatred of the rightists. Their vilification of the “foreign, racially alien vagabond” and “Schwabing Bolshevist” has lived on to this day.1 In fact neither he nor a single one of the other new leaders was Bavarian by birth; they were conspicuous types of the antibourgeois and often Jewish intellectual. And in racially conscious Bavaria that sealed the fate of the revolutionary government. Moreover, the barrage of naive spectacle with which Eisner treated the populace, the incessant demonstrations, public concerts, parades of flags, and inspiring speeches about the “realm of light, beauty and reason” did little to consolidate his position. The way he carried out his office evoked as much ridicule as bitterness. Eisner certainly did not win the affection he had hoped for from his “government by kindness.” His utopian promises expressed in broad philosophical terms, which seemed so good on paper, proved hollow at the first puff of reality.