The “mysteriousness” that Hitler cultivated was, however—like all his alleged instinctual reactions—amply supplemented by rational factors. Though he early discovered his mediumistic powers, he continued to improve his techniques. A series of photos show him posing in the stagey style of the period. Ludicrous though the pictures are, they nevertheless reveal how much of his demagogic magic he acquired by careful practice.
Thus he early began to develop a special style for his public appearances. From start to finish he stressed the theatrical element. Blaring sound trucks and screaming posters would announce a “great public giant demonstration.” Elements of spectacle borrowed from circus and grand opera were cleverly combined with edifying ceremonial reminiscent of church ritual. Parades of banners, march music, welcoming slogans, communal singing, and repeated cries of “Heil” formed the framework for the Führer’s speech. All these histrionic elements built up the suspense and made the speech seem a kind of annunciation. The party guidelines for meetings were constantly improved and handed down in courses for speakers and written directives until no detail was left to chance. Hitler himself would check the acoustics of all the important meeting halls in Munich, to determine whether the Hackerbrau, say, called for a louder voice than the Hofbräuhaus or the Kindl-Keller. He noted the atmosphere, the ventilation, and the tactical arrangement of the rooms. The official guidelines mentioned that a hall should always be too small and that at least a third of the audience should consist of the party’s own followers. To ward off the impression of being a petty bourgeois movement and to win the trust of the workers, Hitler occasionally waged a “struggle against the trousers crease” among his followers, and sent them to the demonstrations without ties and collars. Some party members were ordered to attend his opponents’ training courses and learn what the enemy was up to.30
From 1922 on he began holding series of eight, ten, or twelve rallies on a single evening, at each of which he would appear as the principal speaker. This procedure suited his quantity complex as well as his passion for repetition. An eyewitness of one such serial demonstration at the Munich Lowenbrau has given the following description of it:
How many political meetings had I already attended in this hall. But neither during the war nor during the Revolution had I ever felt such a white-hot wave of mass excitement blast in my face the moment I entered. “Their own songs of struggle, their own flags, their own symbols, their own salute,” I noted. “Semimilitary monitors, a forest of glaring red banners with a black swastika on a white ground, the strangest mixture of soldierly and revolutionary, nationalist and socialist elements. In the audience too: mostly strata of the middle class on the skids—is this where it will find rebirth? For hours continual, booming march music; for hours short speeches by subordinates; when will he come? Has anything happened to hold him up? Impossible to describe the state of suspense, building up within this atmosphere. Suddenly movement at the entrance to the hall. Shouted commands. The speaker on the platform breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Everyone leaps to his feet shouting Heil! And right between the howling masses and the howling banners he comes with his retinue, he for whom all have been waiting. He strides rapidly to the platform, right hand raised rigidly. He passed quite close by me, and I saw that this was a different person from the man I had met now and then in private houses.31
The structure of his speeches scarcely varied. First came denunciations of the present period, intended to tune up the audience and establish initial contact with it. “Bitterness has become general; people are beginning to notice that what was promised in 1918 has not turned into anything of dignity and beauty.” Thus he opened a speech in September, 1922. There followed historical reviews, a spelling out of the party program, and attacks on Jews, November criminals, or lying politicians. The cheering of the audience or of an official claque would send him into a mounting state of excitement that would last until he reached those exultant appeals for unity with which he always ended. In between, he would tuck in whatever the heat of the moment, the applause, the vapors of beer, or the general atmosphere suggested. With each successive meeting he grasped more surely and translated more accurately the vibrations of that atmosphere: The fatherland’s humiliation, the sins of imperialism, the envy of neighbors, the “communalization of the German woman,” the smearing of Germany’s past, the shallow, commercialized, and debauched West from which had come the republic, the disgraceful dictated peace of Versailles, the Allied control commissions, nigger music, bobbed hair, and modern art, but neither work, security, nor bread. “Germany is starving on democracy!” he cried. For he could coin memorable phrases. In addition, his obscure metaphors, his great use of mythic allusion gave his rantings an air of profundity. Out of trifling local incidents he could construct dramas of universal import. Thus he could prophesy: “What is beginning today will be greater than the World War. It will be fought out on German soil for the entire world. There are only two possibilities: We will be the sacrificial lamb or victors!”
In the past sober Anton Drexler would have been there and would sometimes hear such rhapsodic outbursts and to Hitler’s annoyance put in a final word to bring things into perspective. But now there was no longer anyone around to remonstrate when a wildly gesticulating Hitler vowed to tear the peace treaty to shreds if he took power, or let it be known that he would not shrink from another war with France, or conjured up the vision of a mighty German Reich stretching “from Königsberg to Strassburg and from Hamburg to Vienna.” His ever-larger audiences proved that what people wanted to hear was precisely such wild challenges. “The thing is not to renounce or to accept, but to venture what is seemingly impossible.” The general view of Hitler as an unprincipled opportunist does not do justice either to his daring or his originality. His courage in voicing “forbidden” opinions was extraordinary. Precisely that gave him the aura of manliness, fierceness, and sovereign contempt, which befitted the image of the Great Leader.
The role in which he soon cast himself was that of the outsider; in times of public discontent such a role had great potential. Once, when the Münchener Post termed him “the wiliest agitator making mischief in Munich today,” Hitler replied with: “Yes, we want to work people up, we’re agitators all right!” In the beginning he may well have been pained by the plebeian, quarrelsome features of his public career. But once he realized that certain crudenesses made him more popular in the circus tent and more interesting in the salons, he identified with those qualities without apology. When he was criticized for the dubious company he kept, he replied that he would rather be a German tramp than a French count. “They say we’re a bunch of anti-Semitic rowdies. So we are, we want to stir up a storm! We don’t want people to sleep, but to know a thunderstorm is brewing. We won’t let our Germany be crucified. Call us brutes if you want to. But if we save Germany, we’ll have carried out the greatest deed in the world.”