DER FUEHRER, HITLER’S RISE TO POWER—Konrad Heiden—Haughton, Mifflin ($3).
On Aug. 1, 1914, a great crowd gathered in Munich to hear the reading of Germany’s declaration of war. Years later, a face was discovered in a photograph of this occasion. Among the hundreds of faces was one which, “despite the conspicuous ordinariness of [its] features, seemed illumined by an emotion unusual even in this crowd. It was a haggard, sickly face; the broad, bushy mustache gave it an artificially wild look; the protruding, hyperthyroid eyes sent forth an exaggerated gleam. . . . The man to whom this face belongs stands apparently alone in the crowd. . . .”
It was the face of Adolf Hitler. It was also, according to Konrad Heiden, refugee journalist-specialist in Hitlerism, the face of a “new social type,” a face which may vary from country to country but which, in Europe, “is always topped by a soldier’s cap.” The day of “religious man” and of “economic man” is dead, says Heiden; it is “intellectual man who is becoming the new ruler of our age.”
“Will It Work?” Author Heiden, son of a German trade-union official, has studied this face for 23 years — following Hitler, says Dorothy Thompson, “like a Javert tracking down his man.”
He heard Hitler’s first ravings in the Munich beer halls. When the Brownshirts began to parade the streets, Heiden led Munich University students in protest against the paraders. In 1923 he joined the staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung, with the special assignment of covering the National Socialist movement in Munich. He is credited with coining the word “Nazi” — as a term of contempt, because in Bavaria “nazi” was a slang term for a country bumpkin. He “marched” surreptitiously with the Nazis in their beer-hall Putsch, later saw the doors of Landsberg Prison clang behind Hitler. He wrote two of the basic works on Hitlerism: the History of National Socialism and Hitler (TIME, May 25, 1936). Driven under ground by the Gestapo in 1933, he escaped to France in 1935, fought Naziism in books and magazines, fled to Manhattan after the fall of France.
Heiden’s new book is the Book-of-the-Month-Club’s choice for February. It is a scrambled, 774-page history of Naziism and its principal characters from the earliest beginnings to the Purge of 1934, a biography of the Führer, a study of Germany since 1918 and a discourse on Germanic thought from Hegel to Hitler. The theme that binds it all together, if any thing does, may not seem to some readers like thoughtfully balanced sociology. Yet few readers will deny that Heiden has made an ingenious, readable, shocking case for his “pragmatical and mechanistically minded modern man, product of mass education, whose sole criterion is: Will it work?”
“Sign from Heaven.” The seed of Nazi ideology, says Heiden, was planted in 1864 by a French lawyer who wrote a satire on the dictatorship of Napoleon III. This book was rewritten by the anti-Semitic Russian secret police so that it appeared to be an outline of the methods by which the Jews hoped to conquer the world. Entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it eventually fell into the hands of a youthful, anti-Semitic “intellectual” named Alfred Rosenberg. He called it “a sign from heaven” and took it to Germany in 1918. Its program of “how to establish dictatorship with the help—and abuse—of democratic methods” later became, Heiden says, the basis of the 25-point program of the National Socialist Party.
The Protocols reached Germany when thousands of youthful, ex-Army officers were streaming back from defeat to poverty and unemployment in the Weimar Republic. They were “armed intellectuals,” war-hardened products of Germany’s prewar universities. They became an “army of the armed bohemians, of heroes and murderers by conviction . . . too strong and influential to be extinguished by force.” They had lost prestige, social position, ideals—”tossed this way and that way,” wrote one of them, “just for the sake of our daily bread; gathering men about us and playing soldiers with them; brawling and drinking, roaring and smashing windows—destroying and shattering . . . ruthless and inexorably hard.”
They drew to them “the flotsam, the stragglers living on the fringe of their class . . . the unemployed . . . the declassed of all classes.” In all ages, says Heiden, “this has been the way of counterrevolution: an upper layer that has lost its hold in society seeks the people and finds the rabble. The officers were out to find a demagogue, of whom it could be said that he was a worker. . . . They found their leader in the lowest mass of their subordinates. The spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter figure.”
“Raving Dervish.” Hitler’s closest companions found “the homeless derelict from the Viennese melting pot” a normally absurd figure. Many were repelled by “this face that looked like an advertisement for a shaving lotion; this emptiness with the avid, frightened eyes; this sometimes slinking, sometimes hopping, never naturally moving form with its narrow shoulders [and] ridiculously correct suit”; this man who exhorted them “with all the semi-education of his age,” using “miserable German . . . defective logic . . . tasteless humor . . . false pathos,”and subjected them to “alternate whining and brutality.”
“How did the armed intellectuals come to submit to the leadership of this raving dervish?” Some of them, says Heiden, did not submit; many of them openly and disrespectfully opposed him. But Hitler, like Roehm, Hess and Göring, was a “betrayed” soldier (and a brave one, Heiden insists); like Rosenberg and Goebbels, he was a frustrated man of questionable intellect. Few, if any, of his fellow “intellectuals” could so absorb themselves in the life of the Party, so readily sacrifice to this chosen duty the pleasures and comforts of life. Above all, none could so meticulously appraise the exact temper of an audience, and then bend it to his will.
Hitler did not, as is commonly supposed, “hammer the same simple statement into the minds of millions; on the contrary, he played with the masses and titillated them with the most contradictory assertions.” Heiden believes that “it is this art of contradiction which makes him the greatest . . . propagandist of his time. . . . He follows the shifting currents of public opinion,” knowing always that “the weakness of this intellectual age” is its search for “the man who can master it. … One scarcely need ask with what arts he conquered the masses; he did not conquer them, he portrayed and represented them.”
Chief Engineer. Hitler deliberately fostered chaos, deliberately postponed his own rise to power until chaos made him Der Führer. When he finally did reach for power, it was as the herald of a “mass drama that was breaking over the nation.” Heiden believes that few chose to deny the drama’s “grandeur,” whatever its brutality. “No political conviction could banish from the world the eternal march rhythm of the Horst Wessel song.” And the money poured in when success seemed likely—”the power of accomplished facts called forth reluctant admiration. …”
The “intellectual” world of the 20th Century, reasons Heiden, is the first to believe in “the open sesame of technology,” to see the ideal national state as “a state for mechanics.” So when Hitler called for the coordination of all national activities, few feared in this icy, calculating phrase the machine-tooled mind that regarded people as the mass-tools of a chief engineer. Those who belonged to the “intellectual” age approved; those who did not were misled. “No trade-union leader called for determined resistance [because] the education of the working masses in the ideals of the economic age was now making itself felt. The worker, taught for decades that the only thing he had to fight for was his material interests, was bound to ask himself whether these interests would be better served by resistance to the new order or by participation in it.” He chose Hitler.
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