The Third Reich

Charisma and Community

Martin Kitchen

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317866350
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: World History

The twelve years of the Third Reich casts a dark shadow over history. Fierce debates still rage over many of the hows, whys and wherefores of this perplexing period.

Leading expert on German history, Martin Kitchen, provides a concise, accessible and provocative account of Nazi Germany. It takes into account the political, social, economic and cultural ramifications, and sets it within the context of the times, while pointing out those areas that still defy our understanding.

This lively account addresses major issues such as the reasons for Hitlers extraordinary popularity, his hold over the German people even when all seemed lost, the role of ideology, the cooption of the elites, and the descent into war for race and space, culminating in the horrors of the holocaust.

Chapter 1

Background

The intellectual debate

National Socialism was a uniquely German phenomenon and Germany alone is fully responsible for the appalling crimes committed in its name. But it was also in part a product of the times, conditioned by a profound malaise that festered within European society. This in no sense frees Germany from the heavy burden of accountability. The Third Reich was not an inevitable outcome of a world gone wrong, neither was it merely an aping of ‘Asiatic’ Stalinist terror, nor a desperate attempt to ward off the Communist threat. Other nations were affected by identical fears and influences, but no British prime minister bears responsibility for the murder of 6 million Jews and no French president blew his brains out in the basement of the Elysée after an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the world.

The Great War was an unmitigated horror that traumatized a generation and left the greatest minds perplexed. Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’¹ looked back in utter horror at the ruins of the past and was dragged screaming into the future. The British/German novelist Ford Madox Ford bewailed the fact that history once had seemed to hold all the answers, but was now devoid of any sense. The Austrian writer Egon Friedell announced that history did not exist, although that did not stop him writing numerous works on the subject, now long-forgotten. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset claimed that ‘history is being turned upside down and a new reality is being created’. The publicist and historian Oswald Spengler trumpeted the slogan: ‘optimism is cowardice’. All too many intellectuals plunged into a profound gloom and seemed hell-bent on the destruction of the intellect.

There was nothing new about such pessimism, but with the industrialized slaughter of millions in a war that seemed to make no sense it became singularly difficult to resist. The war appeared as a cruel vindication of the gloomy broodings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, of Burckhardt and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In this world without meaning where, as Siegfried Kracauer argued, reality was a mere construction, there was a strong temptation to aestheticize violence, thereby discovering a sense of transcendence in a world without God, so that the mindless violence of warfare might be infused with some semblance of meaning. Ernst Jünger, Ernst von Salomon, Emilio Marinetti and Gabriele D’Annunzio saw in violence a transcendental quality that existed well beyond the realms of morality, history or rationality. This was a society dominated by paramilitary groups such as the Freikorps, Fascists and Nazis, by Bolshevik thugs, nihilists and anarchists. Europeans were fascinated by bandits and criminals, by outsiders and gratuitous acts of violence. Mass politics became militarized, whether it was in black-shirted Italy, brown-shirted Germany, the Austria of the Heimwehr, or the ‘Comrade Mauser’² socialism of the Soviet Union. This sickness affected the vanquished powers and those that felt cheated by the peace settlement. The victorious powers were largely immune to this violence, but were left dangerously feeble in the face of strident calls for revision and revenge. The vast majority of the millions of French veterans were convinced pacifists. Britain mourned its dead and promised that such a tragedy should never again be allowed to happen. The United States withdrew from a Europe that had torn itself apart. The stage was empty upon which the dictators could strut.

The smug certainties of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism had begun to crumble long before the end of the century, as a fierce debate raged over the problems of modernity. Was it still possible to believe in progress after a war that proved so hard for memory to digest, or had society become so utterly decadent that it no longer welcomed the bracing effects of warfare? Did the war herald the beginning of a mass society in search of a sense of community and in need of unconditional obedience to unchallenged leadership? Wartime debates over civilization versus culture, the state and society, rights and obligations were hotly pursued and provided intoxicating material for radical ideologues. As the problems facing society became increasingly complex, the answers provided by the terribles simplificateurs seemed irresistibly attractive. Where reason was left perplexed or denied any legitimacy, faith could offer consolation. Faith – no matter in what, obedience – no matter to whom, self-sacrifice – regardless of the justice of one’s cause, became a magic remedy, as Mussolini was one of the first to realize. The politics of the Big Lie and the scapegoat provided simple solutions to immensely complicated problems. The need for a comforting illusion was so strong that some of the greatest minds of the day placed their extraordinary talents at the service of ignorance. As Gabriel Marcel argued, in a godless world without any other form of transcendence it was all too easy to fall for the ‘idolatry of class’ or the ‘idolatry of race’, and become an unquestioning devotee of a political religion.

The industrialized slaughter of the war gave new urgency to Nietzsche’s question as to whether mankind could make the ‘solidified intelligence’ of technology serve rational ends, or whether it would be destroyed by the power of its own invention. Such forebodings could easily be dismissed in the light of Henry Ford and Frederick W. Taylor’s vision of a brave new world subject to the logic of technology that was enthusiastically emulated not only in the capitalist West, but also in Lenin’s Russia. Society could be rationally planned and ordered, so as to be more efficient and to provide all that was necessary for the good life. Architects and planners attempted to design an environment that would be responsive to human needs. Eugenicists sought to improve the gene pool, by demanding the sterilization of all those deemed to be carriers of genetically determined diseases or undesirable behaviour. In short, the application of rational intelligence could solve all the problems, even those that beset a devastated Europe in a state of turmoil. There were precious few who warned of the dangers to an open society inherent in modernism. Prominent among them was the sociologist Karl Mannheim, who wrote: ‘the self-made sociological causes, which lead to the cultural disintegration of liberal society, pave the way for dictatorial forms. Unless a rational control of man, and of the self, keeps pace with technological evolution, our present social order is bound to collapse.’

Then came the Great Depression, the technocrats’ Titanic, and with it the reverse side of the modern in the shape of mass unemployment, alienation and anomie, political crisis and revolt. There had always been a sense of deep uneasiness at the heart of the modernist discourse. Walter Rathenau, the most admirable of the Weimar republicans, expressed his deep unease about the cold and rational technological world, which he as a leading industrialist had done so much to shape. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, transmitted via Kierkegaard’s morbid meditations on mass society and Nietzsche’s intoxicating denial of the concept of objective truth, provided devastating ammunition with which to attack the notion of progress. ‘Progress’ was no longer viewed as improvement but rather as a process of self-destruction. Human beings were reduced to anonymous cogs in a vast impersonal machine as represented in films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, René Clair’s A nous la liberté and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Spengler claimed that civilization was destroying humanity. Gottfried Benn saw modern man as an Icarus doomed by his own ingenuity. Civilization was reduced to T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. Some sought salvation in the dark and irrational forces of nature. Others struggled against existential ennui, and bitterly bemoaned their inconsolability as they searched for transcendence in a world without God, thus providing a model for Sartre, Camus and the post-war existentialists. The city was no longer the stimulating and exciting locus of the modern; it was now an ‘asphalt jungle’ and a ‘Moloch’, the brutal environment of Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. For many ‘America’, once the land of freedom and opportunity, stood for all that was reprehensible about the modern world.

Ferdinand Tönnies had wrestled with these ideas and in 1887 had made the clear distinction between ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) and ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft). Society was the cold, artificial, bloodless world of the city and the market place, community the organic, traditional, emotional and harmonious life of village and countryside. In Tönnies’ pessimistic vision society would eventually swallow up and destroy community, thus leaving people lost and helpless. The promise to a country that was torn apart to create a new sense of community was one of National Socialism’s trump cards.

In his immensely influential book The Revolt of the Masses (1930), the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset bemoaned the levelling down and standardization of thought, taste and material culture, of incomes, education, gender and sex that threatened the foundations of a civilization that was based on a clear distinction between an elite and the masses. For Ortega the masses were the intolerant and brutal advocates of direct action, as in Italian Fascism and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. At the root of the problem was the blind belief that the staggering achievements of technology and the extraordinary improvements in living standards were somehow natural, preordained and self-evident. The technologists, the engineers and doctors were among the worst offenders. They were the ‘sabio-ignorante’ (learned ignoramuses) who failed to realize that technology was turning people into barbarians. He rejected both the American and the Soviet models, and felt that Europe’s only hope lay in a rejection of the dictators and of the nation state, to be replaced by a united Europe with firmly entrenched and genuinely liberal principals in which the individual was respected and rescued from the instincts of the herd. He thus arrived at a position very close to that of the amiable Austrian pan-Europeanist, Count Richard Coudenhouve-Kalergi, who, although a passionate opponent of totalitarianism, felt that democracy was little more than a poor substitute for a genuine aristocracy.

There was widespread agreement among intellectuals, of whatever political colouring, with Ortega’s contention that civilization’s progress resulted in a cultural retreat, the atrophy of individualism and a loss of cultural vitality. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Georges Sorel, Sigmund Freud, Paul Valéry and Hermann Hesse joined the choir to sing a complex polyphonic lamentation over the ghastliness of the modern world. Their works were peppered with words like ‘anomie’, ‘transcendental homelessness’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘rootlessness’. Max Weber called for the ‘re-enchantment’ of the world; Georg Simmel asked what made society possible and insisted that the totality of human existence had to be rescued from the pitiless reality of the world, thus providing deliverance from the fragmentary with the restoration of integrality.

Karl Jaspers wrestled with these problems in ‘The Intellectual Problems of the Age’ (Die Geistige Probleme der Zeit, 1931), which, with The Revolt of the Masses, was among the most widely read and influential books in the inter-war period. For Jaspers this was a period not only of political, economic and social crisis, but first and foremost of a deep-rooted intellectual malaise. Mankind’s knowledge and ability had become so vast and was ever expanding, so that there were no longer any generally accepted and binding transcendental values, leaving control in the hands of anonymous experts and bureaucrats. Rationality was applied almost exclusively to practical problems, leaving ample room for the irrational, as in the racial hocus-pocus, the glorification of violence, and the restless vitality of National Socialism. The crisis was generally accepted as a destiny from which there was no escape, and mankind stood passive and helpless before the antinomies of the individual and the collective, body and soul, being and existence. This situation for Jaspers, far from being grounds for nihilism and pessimism, offered a wide freedom of choice. There were no easy answers, but the individual struggle for elucidation could lead to the solution of immediate problems. He sought thereby to preserve the philosophical tradition of the ancients and Judaeo-Christian values against the assault of the barbarians. His tragic-heroic stand against the forces of the irrational found considerable resonance, particularly among students, and his short book went through a number of editions.

Some, like the anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel and the Italian futurist Marinetti, swallowed a heavy dose of Nietzsche and managed to convince themselves that the war provided a purifying experience, an alternative to the non-committal essence of the modern, and an opportunity to restore order to the world. They turned their backs on the feeble and slavish morality of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and heralded the mystical experience of a tightly-knit community of supermen, whether of Ernst Jünger’s front-line soldiers, Sorel’s striking workers, D’Annuzio’s paramilitary thugs, the anti-Semitic, blood-and-soil regionalism of Maurice Barrès, or the close circle of precious young men around the poet Stefan George. The call was for ‘action’, ‘revolution’, ‘struggle’ or ‘deeds’. Carl Schmitt, with his characteristic bluntness, announced that this was a state of emergency for which the only solution was the ‘expulsion or destruction of the heterogeneous’. This cannot be dismissed as the vaguely ridiculous attitudinizing of an unworldly academic. It was symptomatic of a profound malaise that was to have truly frightful consequences.

Few thinkers reflected the problems and uncertainties of contemporary life more accurately and profoundly than Martin Heidegger who, in a remote hut in the Black Forest at Todtnauberg, pondered the gloomy predicament of modern man. In spite of its painfully convoluted and hermetic language, his major work of the period, Being and Time (1927), bears a remarkable resemblance to the novels of his contemporary, Franz Kafka, although Heidegger sadly lacked the latter’s often overlooked and mordant sense of humour. Heidegger had served on the Western Front in a meteorological unit charged with making calculations for the use of gas during the 1918 offensive in the Champagne. Although it was a relatively safe posting, he was profoundly affected by the experience, which he claimed stripped everything away down to the basic core of the personality. That the individual was now forced to rely entirely on the self, without any of the material and spiritual comforts of civilization, he regarded as a valuable opportunity.

Heidegger set about stripping philosophy down to the basic problem of being, a process that he described as ‘destruction’. He had been obliged to leave the Jesuit order because of health problems in 1909, and ceased to study for the priesthood in 1911. By 1919, after much heart-searching, he reluctantly came to agree with Nietzsche that God was indeed dead. Having ‘destroyed’ theology he set about the destruction of his mentor Husserl’s phenomenology. Finally he set to work on the Western tradition of philosophy and metaphysics, which he felt had trapped thinkers since Plato in a second-hand and shopworn set of abstractions that had become autonomous, and which provided little more than ‘useless’ knowledge of the essence of things. He called for a fundamental rethinking of philosophy starting with the pre-Socratics, above all Heraclitus, the ‘weeping philosopher’ and the ‘dark one’, whose profound pessimism and extreme obscurity he found particularly appealing and worthy of emulation.

The German crisis of the spirit, with which thinkers as different as the historian Oswald Spengler and the theologian Karl Barth wrestled, was reflected in an extreme fashion in Heidegger’s work. He agreed with ‘conservative revolutionaries’ like Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Niekisch that Western civilization had degenerated into an ‘exhausted pseudo-culture’ that was hopelessly depraved, moribund and beyond redemption. Man as a ‘rational animal’ was condemned to ‘wander through the desert of the earth’s desolation’. Thinking had been reduced to mere intelligence, to Max Weber’s dreary ‘instrumental rationality’. Heidegger insisted that what Weber described as ‘demystification’ was in fact mystification – a blind faith in technology. Europe was helplessly trapped between the Soviet Union and the United States, both of which were godless mass societies which denied the individual all ‘possibilities of being’, which were driven by a blind faith in unbounded technology, recklessly heading towards an ecological disaster, and hostile to the heroic individual who dared to think, to create and to act. Heidegger’s talk of the need for ‘decisiveness’ and ‘authenticity’ in a world from which the gods had fled and in which everyone is ‘other’ and where there is no self, accurately reflected the intellectual atmosphere of the age.

Whereas thinkers like Husserl and Weber insisted that the post-Socratic philosophical tradition offered the means of overcoming the present crisis, Heidegger violently disagreed. For Plato truth is something that is waiting for us to discover. Heidegger argued that it is not something that exists outside individual existence, and that each and everyone must discover truth on their own. But this was far from being a Promethean vision. Heidegger’s individual existence was overshadowed by the certainty of death and by permanent anxiety. The call for courage in the face of nothingness offered precious little consolation. Heidegger’s ‘draft of being’ left him dangerously susceptible to any promise of a new beginning, and hence to the lure of National Socialism. Here at last he saw an opportunity to make a critical decision and to play his part as ‘an entire people [Volk] accepts the desolateness of modern man amid the process of being’. Heidegger was strongly influenced by Hölderlin, the first great modern German poet, who wrote of the need ‘to assimilate to oneself all right and duties of the community, by law of nature and without any special individual liberties . . . to assimilate to oneself ineluctably and enduringly all friendships and enmities of the whole’. It was he who bemoaned the ‘disunity’ (Zerrissenheit) of Germany. For Heidegger, ‘being in the world’ (Dasein) also involved ‘being with others’ (Mitsein). If Dasein implied ‘openness’ (Erschlossenheit) this indeed was an opportunity ‘to expose oneself to a new manner and means of acquiring being’, the golden opportunity for the individual to be summoned out of ‘lostness’ into the ‘they’. Germany had reached a new beginning and was at a moment of destiny in ‘the encounter between global technology and modern man’, a counter-movement to the nihilism of the Western ‘will to techne’³. A German was no longer condemned to an isolated life as an act of autonomy in a world without gods, but became an active participant in the life of the Volk. Plato’s cave dwellers were now on the march, goose-stepping their way under Zarathustra’s empty skies. This was an astonishingly naive leap of faith by a desk-bound intellectual, but it was one that Heidegger refused ever to regret. He never apologized for his shameful behaviour in Nazi Germany. On the contrary, he felt that Hitler had failed to live up to his expectations and owed him an apology.

Heidegger’s exact contemporary, the Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel, pointed out the seductive dangers of a godless world without any other form of transcendence. Ernst Jünger, whom Heidegger greatly admired, came to a similar conclusion when he wrote that socialism and nationalism were the two millstones by means of which progress pulverizes what is left of the old world. Jünger was a highly decorated and frequently wounded soldier whose brutally realistic account of his wartime experiences in ‘Storm of Steel’ (In Stahlgewittern, 1920), ‘Copse 125’ (Das Wäldchen 125, 1925), and ‘Fire and Blood’ (Feuer und Blut, 1925) provides an unequalled li...