friedrich braun
08-27-2004, 08:10 PM
Hitler and the Third Reich
by Anthony M. Ludovici
[First appeared in "The English Review" 63, 1936, pp. 35-41, 147-153, 231-239.]
Part 1
The present temper of the German people, unlike that of their kinsmen before the Great War or under the Republic, is also unlike anything that Europe has witnessed probably since the Middle Ages.
The visitor to their country who fails to grasp this fact, like the stay-at-home Englishman whose Press does not enable him to appreciate it, misses the most fundamental feature in the whole of Nazi Germany.
For something akin to a new religious zeal has spread throughout the land, making the people wistful, but strangely light-hearted and confident in their earnestness. It is as if they had been not only raised from the dust, but also shown a star or ball of fire which will lead them to the fulfillment of their destiny.
It was to be expected that a great proud nation, broken and humiliated, would respond with turbulent gratitude to anyone who helped her to recover her self-esteem and face the world once more without shame. But those who are inclined to see only thankful exultation over rescued vanity in the present mood of the German people would sadly misunderstand and therefore underrate what has happened. For in Germany today there is none of the truculence of a greedily recovered self-confidence, none of the self-complacency of a people basking in a light which their sense of superiority claims. On the contrary, everything is reserved, serene, almost reticent, as if beneath the inexpressible joy that everyone feels there stirred the constantly sobering reflection that the defeat, the humiliation and Fuehrerthe shame of yesterday was a judgement, a penance for the mistakes of the older generation.
The Führer never loses an opportunity of reminding them of this. But it is a thought that must form spontaneously in most of their minds, because their behaviour, even towards strangers and foreigners, bears the stamp of it. They appear to have reached a level of self-respect from which they look down with anxious dread upon any impulse, word or action which might bear an asocial or negative interpretation. Petty deeds of mutual strife, hostility or exploitation are naturally scorned as infra dignitatem.
Again and again the visitor is impressed by the scrupulous honesty, consideration, patience and willingness of menials, public servants and the rank and file of government employees. I could mention scores of instances of this. The tone of the country seems to be set by the general consciousness that a great common good is being served, and that those who depart too conspicuously from the example of impersonal effort set by the Führer may wreck his prodigious scheme. Thus a mood prevails which makes certain things -- mean, ill-natured thoughts and actions -- appear unworthy of a great nation stirred and united by a lofty purpose.
'Not individual gain, but the common good!' This can be read on almost every hoarding. And it is no empty phrase. It genuinely inspires the mass of the people, and makes for a wholesome reluctance to indulge in ill-informed criticism and fault-finding while the gigantic work of reconstruction is in progress. Indeed, the Führer himself is the very last to claim infallibility in his function, and with a wisdom surely exceptional in history repeatedly takes the people into his confidence to remind them that, if he is to act with courage and a cheerful readiness to shoulder responsibilities, they must allow him occasionally to make mistakes.
The last great movement of anything like the same importance as National Socialism was the Reformation. With his teaching, the fire he put into it, and the music and song he used so skillfully to carry it into the hearts of the people, Luther swept the country. But he divided Germany and left it divided. Even the united Empire created by Bismarck, although it integrated a congeries of petty states whose rulers had often been dominated by mutual jealousies, left Germany in the grip of parties whose rivalries proved even more dangerous and disintegrating.
The Nazi movement, however, has united the country as no country has been united since the Renaissance. It has not merely destroyed the barriers between the states; it has obliterated the demarcations of factions. There are no parties today in Germany. Nor should there be in any so-called 'nation'.
If the people naturally look up to their leader more as a saviour than a statesman, more as a heaven-sent prophet than a politician; if, at the loudspeakers fixed to almost every pillar and post in the land, they hang on his words and his voice and are ready to accept and do his bidding; and if to us in strife-ridden England they appear to be standardized, 'conditioned' on a scale no free Briton would tolerate, let us in this country remember two important aspects of this state of affairs:
The first is that over here we cannot pretend to be able to fathom the depths of the humiliation they suffered after the Great War and therefore cannot appreciate the extent of their devotion to their rescuer.
The second is that we, too, in this country are standardized and 'conditioned' on a vast and alarming scale. But whereas in Germany the standardizing and conditioning powers are responsible and ready to answer for the effects they produce, over here these powers are wholly irresponsible and, as things are, could not by any conceivable means be made to answer for what their untrammeled use of publicity enables them to effect in the moulding of so-called 'public opinion'.
Herr von Ribbentrop assured me that if tomorrow the Führer were to ask the German people to do without sheets on the beds, they would cheerfully accede to his request and, to a family, give up this form of comfort.
There seems to me not the slightest doubt that this is true. But before we call such a request tyranny, and the hearty response to it slavery, let us be quite sure that we understand the amount of mutual confidence, affection and respect it implies.
When I was asked by a prominent member of the government, a man who, in his day, had ruled over one of the smaller nominally autonomous states of the Empire, to sum up in a line how the Germany of the Third Reich impressed me, I replied that I could think of nothing like it in recent history and could compare it only to what I imagined western Europe must have been when our great Gothic cathedrals were being built.
Nor is there anything factitious or perfunctory in the enthusiasm with which the people acclaim and welcome the enigmatical figure who has contrived to strike this deep religious note in their hearts. I witnessed two public appearances of the Führer. I saw him drive into a vast stadium at half-past eight in the morning to address 80,000 children of the Hitler Youth Movement and a few thousand adults; and, an hour or two later, I saw him arrive at the Lustgarten in the centre of Berlin to address a vast assembly of working men and specially invited guests of both sexes.
On both occasions something more than ordinary enthusiasm was displayed and no visitor required to understand the language in order to feel the magic of the moment.
Long before the actual appearance of the smart black touring car bearing the Leader, the ringing cheers of the populace could be heard in the distance drawing gradually nearer and nearer, until, when the car entered the arena, the whole gathering of thousands took up the cry and, standing with right arms raised, shook the May morning with their greetings.
'Sieg!' (Victory) he cried.
'Heil Hitler!' the throng roared in return.
'Sieg!' he cried again.
'Heil Hitler!' came the response once more.
'Sieg!' he cried for the third and last time.
'Heil Hitler!' was thundered back by 100,000 voices.
No sense of humour -- no! But we should be thankful that there are still occasions, even in modern England, when a sense of humour would be thought out of place. We still see no humour in the death of a beloved relative or in a broken heart, or a lost love. And is not possible for the degree of passion behind the love for a relative or a betrothed to be equaled by the love for a figure which stands for the salvation of a people's native land, their pride and their hopes?
I certainly saw no sign of a sense of humour in the reception given to the Führer on these two occasions. But I witnessed instead something bordering on the magic, something which, although beyond reason, was anything but madness.
I saw bent old men and women who must have known Bismarck, the Kaiser William I and the glorious early seventies of last century, and I saw crowds of educated and uneducated middle-aged people, young men and women and adolescents, thousands of whom could never have seen the days of the Empire. But one and all displayed the same passionate affection of children in the presence of the Führer, and to watch them was to learn what miracles can still be wrought with the ultra-civilized and often effete populations of modern Europe if only they are given a lofty purpose.
This is surely the secret of the perpetual hold religions have on men, and it explains Adolf Hitler's magic influence. To exhort men to commercial and industrial prosperity is not enough. To stimulate them to make good in individual enterprise, in profit-making, in self-help, ultimately leaves the best elements of the nation cold -- not merely cold, but fractious, restless, mutually negative and given to petty criticism and fault-finding. In fact, it creates the populace which is typical of modern democratic politics, and makes possible every kind of large-scale fraud, from a general election to the vast advertisement hoardings of a city like London.
The religious appeal, however, by giving men a higher, impersonal purpose, sets humanity at one stroke above the market-place, above considerations of merely individual gain, with all that these mean in internecine and suicidal struggle. And to have given his nation such a purpose, to have persuaded them that such a purpose can be worthwhile, is the secret of the Führer's magic. To my mind, this constitutes his chief importance to the German nation.
It is perhaps a pure coincidence that this man who, according to his own admission, moves and acts in state affairs with the somnambulistic certainty (nachtwandlerische Sicherheit) of a sleep-walker -- that is to say, whose most important decisions spring from the mysterious strata of the unconscious -- should have chosen for the badge of his party and his movement the ancient mystic sign known as the gammadion, fylfot or swastika.
But when we bear in mind that this very badge was once the symbol of a mysterious cult, and has for countless ages stood as the sign of a particularly instinctive and deep-seated form of worship, the choice of the symbol seems particularly apt. For the fact that Germany is today stirred by a purpose superpersonal and therefore religious is beyond question. Whether the conspicuous diminution in crime all over the country is to be ascribed to this religious mood, I cannot pretend to judge. If, however, I throw my mind back, as I like to do, to the days in western Europe when our great cathedrals were springing up in almost every large town, I imagine that they, too, must have been times of a low incidence of crime. For it is impossible to believe that all that anonymous, impersonal work, which must in millions of cases have offered no hope of being completed before those engaged upon it died, could have been performed in any mood which promoted the negativism of crime.
When, therefore, we learn from Liebermann von Sonnenberg, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the German government, that since 1932 crime in Germany has declined 50 per cent, and in some districts actually as much as 60 per cent, and that in all Prussian towns of over 50,000 inhabitants murders have declined 32 per cent, robberies by violence 63 per cent and burglaries 52 per cent, it ought not to surprise us.
To suppose that, in such a mood and with such impersonal strivings, the German nation can now entertain purely predatory and venal aims would be wholly to misunderstand the feat Adolf Hitler has performed, and the metamorphosis his magic has effected.
He has effected this transformation on a foundation of repentance, on the constant reminder that Germany's defeat and humiliation were a judgement and a penalty. Those who have been chastened by his appeal, and they represent over 90 per cent of the German nation, cannot therefore be insincere in their desire for a relationship of peace and friendship with their neighbours and particularly with England.
This is not to say, however, that peace and friendship do not impose certain duties of mutual consideration on the parties concerned. But it struck me that it is only to that feeling of duty, and not to ideals of force and violence, that modern Germans now look with hope for the redress of their wrongs and the relief of their domestic difficulties.
Thus the greatest of the Führer's reforms and most creative of his innovations, as I hope to show, have aimed at construction and development at home. And if, in this work, Hitler and his advisers have in the last three years performed miracles, about which we in this country hear little, and appear to care less, it is to the rigorous press-censorship now prevailing over here that we must ascribe both our ignorance and indifference.
...
http://www.vnnforum.com/main/index213.htm
by Anthony M. Ludovici
[First appeared in "The English Review" 63, 1936, pp. 35-41, 147-153, 231-239.]
Part 1
The present temper of the German people, unlike that of their kinsmen before the Great War or under the Republic, is also unlike anything that Europe has witnessed probably since the Middle Ages.
The visitor to their country who fails to grasp this fact, like the stay-at-home Englishman whose Press does not enable him to appreciate it, misses the most fundamental feature in the whole of Nazi Germany.
For something akin to a new religious zeal has spread throughout the land, making the people wistful, but strangely light-hearted and confident in their earnestness. It is as if they had been not only raised from the dust, but also shown a star or ball of fire which will lead them to the fulfillment of their destiny.
It was to be expected that a great proud nation, broken and humiliated, would respond with turbulent gratitude to anyone who helped her to recover her self-esteem and face the world once more without shame. But those who are inclined to see only thankful exultation over rescued vanity in the present mood of the German people would sadly misunderstand and therefore underrate what has happened. For in Germany today there is none of the truculence of a greedily recovered self-confidence, none of the self-complacency of a people basking in a light which their sense of superiority claims. On the contrary, everything is reserved, serene, almost reticent, as if beneath the inexpressible joy that everyone feels there stirred the constantly sobering reflection that the defeat, the humiliation and Fuehrerthe shame of yesterday was a judgement, a penance for the mistakes of the older generation.
The Führer never loses an opportunity of reminding them of this. But it is a thought that must form spontaneously in most of their minds, because their behaviour, even towards strangers and foreigners, bears the stamp of it. They appear to have reached a level of self-respect from which they look down with anxious dread upon any impulse, word or action which might bear an asocial or negative interpretation. Petty deeds of mutual strife, hostility or exploitation are naturally scorned as infra dignitatem.
Again and again the visitor is impressed by the scrupulous honesty, consideration, patience and willingness of menials, public servants and the rank and file of government employees. I could mention scores of instances of this. The tone of the country seems to be set by the general consciousness that a great common good is being served, and that those who depart too conspicuously from the example of impersonal effort set by the Führer may wreck his prodigious scheme. Thus a mood prevails which makes certain things -- mean, ill-natured thoughts and actions -- appear unworthy of a great nation stirred and united by a lofty purpose.
'Not individual gain, but the common good!' This can be read on almost every hoarding. And it is no empty phrase. It genuinely inspires the mass of the people, and makes for a wholesome reluctance to indulge in ill-informed criticism and fault-finding while the gigantic work of reconstruction is in progress. Indeed, the Führer himself is the very last to claim infallibility in his function, and with a wisdom surely exceptional in history repeatedly takes the people into his confidence to remind them that, if he is to act with courage and a cheerful readiness to shoulder responsibilities, they must allow him occasionally to make mistakes.
The last great movement of anything like the same importance as National Socialism was the Reformation. With his teaching, the fire he put into it, and the music and song he used so skillfully to carry it into the hearts of the people, Luther swept the country. But he divided Germany and left it divided. Even the united Empire created by Bismarck, although it integrated a congeries of petty states whose rulers had often been dominated by mutual jealousies, left Germany in the grip of parties whose rivalries proved even more dangerous and disintegrating.
The Nazi movement, however, has united the country as no country has been united since the Renaissance. It has not merely destroyed the barriers between the states; it has obliterated the demarcations of factions. There are no parties today in Germany. Nor should there be in any so-called 'nation'.
If the people naturally look up to their leader more as a saviour than a statesman, more as a heaven-sent prophet than a politician; if, at the loudspeakers fixed to almost every pillar and post in the land, they hang on his words and his voice and are ready to accept and do his bidding; and if to us in strife-ridden England they appear to be standardized, 'conditioned' on a scale no free Briton would tolerate, let us in this country remember two important aspects of this state of affairs:
The first is that over here we cannot pretend to be able to fathom the depths of the humiliation they suffered after the Great War and therefore cannot appreciate the extent of their devotion to their rescuer.
The second is that we, too, in this country are standardized and 'conditioned' on a vast and alarming scale. But whereas in Germany the standardizing and conditioning powers are responsible and ready to answer for the effects they produce, over here these powers are wholly irresponsible and, as things are, could not by any conceivable means be made to answer for what their untrammeled use of publicity enables them to effect in the moulding of so-called 'public opinion'.
Herr von Ribbentrop assured me that if tomorrow the Führer were to ask the German people to do without sheets on the beds, they would cheerfully accede to his request and, to a family, give up this form of comfort.
There seems to me not the slightest doubt that this is true. But before we call such a request tyranny, and the hearty response to it slavery, let us be quite sure that we understand the amount of mutual confidence, affection and respect it implies.
When I was asked by a prominent member of the government, a man who, in his day, had ruled over one of the smaller nominally autonomous states of the Empire, to sum up in a line how the Germany of the Third Reich impressed me, I replied that I could think of nothing like it in recent history and could compare it only to what I imagined western Europe must have been when our great Gothic cathedrals were being built.
Nor is there anything factitious or perfunctory in the enthusiasm with which the people acclaim and welcome the enigmatical figure who has contrived to strike this deep religious note in their hearts. I witnessed two public appearances of the Führer. I saw him drive into a vast stadium at half-past eight in the morning to address 80,000 children of the Hitler Youth Movement and a few thousand adults; and, an hour or two later, I saw him arrive at the Lustgarten in the centre of Berlin to address a vast assembly of working men and specially invited guests of both sexes.
On both occasions something more than ordinary enthusiasm was displayed and no visitor required to understand the language in order to feel the magic of the moment.
Long before the actual appearance of the smart black touring car bearing the Leader, the ringing cheers of the populace could be heard in the distance drawing gradually nearer and nearer, until, when the car entered the arena, the whole gathering of thousands took up the cry and, standing with right arms raised, shook the May morning with their greetings.
'Sieg!' (Victory) he cried.
'Heil Hitler!' the throng roared in return.
'Sieg!' he cried again.
'Heil Hitler!' came the response once more.
'Sieg!' he cried for the third and last time.
'Heil Hitler!' was thundered back by 100,000 voices.
No sense of humour -- no! But we should be thankful that there are still occasions, even in modern England, when a sense of humour would be thought out of place. We still see no humour in the death of a beloved relative or in a broken heart, or a lost love. And is not possible for the degree of passion behind the love for a relative or a betrothed to be equaled by the love for a figure which stands for the salvation of a people's native land, their pride and their hopes?
I certainly saw no sign of a sense of humour in the reception given to the Führer on these two occasions. But I witnessed instead something bordering on the magic, something which, although beyond reason, was anything but madness.
I saw bent old men and women who must have known Bismarck, the Kaiser William I and the glorious early seventies of last century, and I saw crowds of educated and uneducated middle-aged people, young men and women and adolescents, thousands of whom could never have seen the days of the Empire. But one and all displayed the same passionate affection of children in the presence of the Führer, and to watch them was to learn what miracles can still be wrought with the ultra-civilized and often effete populations of modern Europe if only they are given a lofty purpose.
This is surely the secret of the perpetual hold religions have on men, and it explains Adolf Hitler's magic influence. To exhort men to commercial and industrial prosperity is not enough. To stimulate them to make good in individual enterprise, in profit-making, in self-help, ultimately leaves the best elements of the nation cold -- not merely cold, but fractious, restless, mutually negative and given to petty criticism and fault-finding. In fact, it creates the populace which is typical of modern democratic politics, and makes possible every kind of large-scale fraud, from a general election to the vast advertisement hoardings of a city like London.
The religious appeal, however, by giving men a higher, impersonal purpose, sets humanity at one stroke above the market-place, above considerations of merely individual gain, with all that these mean in internecine and suicidal struggle. And to have given his nation such a purpose, to have persuaded them that such a purpose can be worthwhile, is the secret of the Führer's magic. To my mind, this constitutes his chief importance to the German nation.
It is perhaps a pure coincidence that this man who, according to his own admission, moves and acts in state affairs with the somnambulistic certainty (nachtwandlerische Sicherheit) of a sleep-walker -- that is to say, whose most important decisions spring from the mysterious strata of the unconscious -- should have chosen for the badge of his party and his movement the ancient mystic sign known as the gammadion, fylfot or swastika.
But when we bear in mind that this very badge was once the symbol of a mysterious cult, and has for countless ages stood as the sign of a particularly instinctive and deep-seated form of worship, the choice of the symbol seems particularly apt. For the fact that Germany is today stirred by a purpose superpersonal and therefore religious is beyond question. Whether the conspicuous diminution in crime all over the country is to be ascribed to this religious mood, I cannot pretend to judge. If, however, I throw my mind back, as I like to do, to the days in western Europe when our great cathedrals were springing up in almost every large town, I imagine that they, too, must have been times of a low incidence of crime. For it is impossible to believe that all that anonymous, impersonal work, which must in millions of cases have offered no hope of being completed before those engaged upon it died, could have been performed in any mood which promoted the negativism of crime.
When, therefore, we learn from Liebermann von Sonnenberg, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the German government, that since 1932 crime in Germany has declined 50 per cent, and in some districts actually as much as 60 per cent, and that in all Prussian towns of over 50,000 inhabitants murders have declined 32 per cent, robberies by violence 63 per cent and burglaries 52 per cent, it ought not to surprise us.
To suppose that, in such a mood and with such impersonal strivings, the German nation can now entertain purely predatory and venal aims would be wholly to misunderstand the feat Adolf Hitler has performed, and the metamorphosis his magic has effected.
He has effected this transformation on a foundation of repentance, on the constant reminder that Germany's defeat and humiliation were a judgement and a penalty. Those who have been chastened by his appeal, and they represent over 90 per cent of the German nation, cannot therefore be insincere in their desire for a relationship of peace and friendship with their neighbours and particularly with England.
This is not to say, however, that peace and friendship do not impose certain duties of mutual consideration on the parties concerned. But it struck me that it is only to that feeling of duty, and not to ideals of force and violence, that modern Germans now look with hope for the redress of their wrongs and the relief of their domestic difficulties.
Thus the greatest of the Führer's reforms and most creative of his innovations, as I hope to show, have aimed at construction and development at home. And if, in this work, Hitler and his advisers have in the last three years performed miracles, about which we in this country hear little, and appear to care less, it is to the rigorous press-censorship now prevailing over here that we must ascribe both our ignorance and indifference.
...
http://www.vnnforum.com/main/index213.htm