Ominous Parallels (28 page)

Did the concerned citizen hear Hauptmann and Rathenau denounce the evils of machine civilization? Did he hear Max Weber deplore the “loss of magic” inherent in secular, industrial society? He heard the Nazis demand a return to the “purity” of rural communes and to the magic of “blood and soil.”

Did the parent hear the new educators say that everything is relative and that feeling or fantasizing supersedes thought? He heard the Nazis say that there is no truth but “myth” and no absolute but the Führer.

Did the art-lover hear all the Kandinskys and Klees curse objectivity and insist that the artist’s inspiration is not logic, but the mythological and the occult? It is our inspiration, too, said the Nazi leaders, as they worked to resurrect Wotan, and consulted their astrologers for practical guidance.

Did the theatergoer discover that communication requires delirious raving in “liberated” language? Listen to Hitler, said the Nazis.

Is it good to wipe out the bourgeois world, as the Expressionists said? It is precisely at the task of wiping out that the Nazis promised to be efficient.

Is it daring to turn life into madness, as the Dadaists said? They were village jokers compared to the Nazis.

Is it profound to “keep faith with death in [one’s] heart,” as Thomas Mann said? It is a faith the Nazis knew how to keep.

The left-moderns miscalculated; if nihilism was the standard, as they made it, then Nazism was unbeatable, because Nazism is the final extreme of nihilism, in a form that was tailored to attract all the major groups in Germany.

Hitler denounced some avant-garde details, he raved against “cultural Bolshevism,” but—as he did with Marxism —he unfailingly preached its essence. He differed from the intellectuals only in one (tactical) respect. He stripped the modernist ideas of their world-weary pessimism and made nihilism the basis of a fantasy projection, promising a new order in which men would rise to unprecedented heights, by means of illogic, self-immolation, worldwide destruction, and strict obedience to the Führer.

The intellectuals were spreading the doctrines which, directly or indirectly, produced helplessness, demoralization, despair on a mass scale. Once it was done, it was easy for the right kind of killer to kick the spreaders aside. He had only to announce that
he
was not helpless and would tell men what to do.

In later years, the creators of “Weimar culture,” the ones who survived, cursed the German people for not having listened to them.

The tragedy is that the people
had
listened.

11

The Killers Take Over

The Great Depression merely forced the issue, which had been implicit all along in the Germans’ philosophy. Economic catastrophe in Germany was an effect, the last link in a long chain of ideas and events—and a catalyst, which gave Hitler a real opportunity for the final cashing in. The catalyst worked because the nation was already ripe for Hitler’s kind of cashing in.

If a man long addicted to a toxic drug suffers sudden convulsions and then dies from them, one might validly say that the convulsions were the cause of the death, so long as one remembers the cause of the cause. The same is true of a country addicted to a toxic ideology.

For several years after the inflationary debacle, the Republic had seemed to return to normal, enjoying its so-called “period of prosperity.” It was a shaky, foredoomed prosperity built on credit and quicksands.

In essence, Germany’s recovery was the result of a massive inflow of foreign—primarily American—capital, in the form of huge loans along with large purchases of German securities. America was experiencing the artificial boom of the twenties, a pyramid of highly speculative investments and wild spending made possible by a variety of governmental actions—most notably, the action of the Federal Reserve Board in generating a cheap-money policy in the banks. The influx of this capital into Germany, which also lacked the free-market restraints on inordinate speculation and spending, helped to fuel a similar artificial boom.

In particular, the various levels of government in Germany, which had learned nothing and forgotten everything from the inflationary crisis, were once again pouring out money and piling up debts; they were endowing lavish public works, starting a program of unemployment benefits, enlarging the bureaucracy, raising its salaries, and the like. This time, however, the governments were not counting on the printing press to finance their activities, but on the Americans. “I must ask you always to remember,” said Gustav Stresemann to his countrymen, “that during the past years we have been living on borrowed money. If a crisis were to arise and the Americans were to call in their short-term loans we should be faced with bankruptcy.” He said it to deaf ears, in 1928.
¹

When the New York stock-market crash signaled the collapse of the American boom, the collapse of Germany followed immediately, as a matter of course. For the second time in less than a decade a protracted agony struck the country, this time involving plummeting investment, the crash of famous financial houses, cascading bankruptcies, soaring unemployment, tobogganing farm prices, and widespread destitution.

The mania of the inflation years had been succeeded by a wave of giddy, unreal prosperity. Now the unreal stood revealed as unreal. Giddiness gave way to panic and to black despair.

The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas. In times of crisis, these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.

When Hans Fallada in his popular novel of the time asked
Little Man, What Now?
the little men in Germany (and the other kinds, too) knew the answer, which seemed to them self-evident. They turned to the group—to their economic class or trade association—as their only security; each group blamed the others for the crisis; each party demanded action, the kind of action it understood, government action. Le, more controls.

Man is rotten, the omnipresent chorus of “Weimar culture” was crying, the individual is helpless, freedom has failed.

The Social Democrats, however, playing out to the end their founding contradiction, were unable to act. One union leader at a party convention indicated the reason eloquently. He asked whether the party at this juncture should strive to preserve the “capitalist” Weimar system or to topple it. Should socialists stand “at the sick-bed of capitalism” as “the doctor who seeks to cure,” he wondered, or as “joyous heirs, who can hardly wait for the end and would even like to help it along with poison?” His answer was that the party is “condemned” to play both roles at once, which in fact is what it did, by switching back and forth at random between them.
²

In the early months of 1930, with the nation desperate for leadership, the party stumbled into its “proletarian” stance: it decided to bring down a coalition government headed by a Social Democratic Chancellor, Hermann Mueller, because of a proposed measure that might have had the effect of reducing unemployment benefits in the future. The Weimar politicians had long been engaged in Kühhandel, as the Germans called it, “cattletrading,” and had treated the country to a procession of musical-chair coalitions, sudden governmental collapses, and continual new elections. The spectacle had evoked widespread contempt for popular government even before the depression. After the Mueller cabinet fell on March 27, however—the “black day” of the Republic—no new coalition could be formed; the economic warfare among the parties was too virulent. The Germans’ contempt for the Reichstag became disgust. There was only one solution that seemed feasible.

On March 28, 1930, the Reichstag’s normal legislative prerogatives were suspended by President Hindenburg. A semi-dictatorial system of government, a system of rule by emergency executive decree, was established under Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, a conservative Centrist. Popular government was abandoned for the duration of the emergency. The dichotomy between political and economic freedom was breaking down by itself, without any help from the Nazis.

In regard to methods, the Bruning government was dictatorial. In regard to policies, however, it was democratic. The program Bruning (and his two short-lived, authoritarian successors in 1932) enacted was an exact reflection of the popular will. These men “did something,” in the German sense of the term.

The government issued a torrent of new decrees. It raised the tariffs, the taxes, the unemployment-insurance premiums; it expanded public works, imposed rigid restrictions on foreign exchange, and introduced a twenty-month “voluntary labor service” for young people; etc. Most important of all, the Reich in this period effectively erased the last significant remnants of private economic power, by turning the banks, the cartels, and the labor unions into mere administrative organs of the state. The Republic, writes Gustav Stolper (a member of the Reichstag at the time), “came close to being a thoroughly developed state socialism.... Government was omnipresent, and the individual had become used to turning to it in every need.”
³

The government’s policies did not work. Among other things, hyperprotectionism (in Germany and abroad) was strangling the country’s vital foreign trade; the cascade of sudden new taxes and emergency decrees was creating a climate of acute business uncertainty, which made impossible any significant recovery of German investment and production; the unions’ adamant opposition to further wage cuts was exacerbating the unemployment.

The Germans attempted to assess the situation and determine the cause of the government’s failure. “At last,” writes Stolper,

it became common knowledge that all this state interference ... was of no avail in the most disastrous economic crisis that had befallen Germany in the course of her history. Paradoxically, the system of state interference as such, being far too deeply rooted in the German political and economic tradition, was not blamed by the opposition. On the contrary, the general mood of the public backed the demands that this imperfect and incomplete system of state intervention be superseded by one more perfect and complete. This was the content of the so-called anticapitalistic yearning which, according to a National Socialist slogan of the time, was said to pervade the German nation.
⁴

The harbingers of the era to come were the university students. Well before the rest of the country, these young intellectuals turned for guidance to the self-declared “party of youth,” whose leader was promising “a revolt of the coming generation against all that was senile and rotten with decay.”
⁵

In the student elections of 1929, the Nazis won a majority or plurality of the vote at nineteen universities. Hitler’s off-campus support at the time was still insignificant; many Germans were not yet reconciled to the Nazi manners. The students, however, placed content above form, i.e., ideals above social graces. Their ideals were instinct, sacrifice, and hatred, hatred of “the Western enemy” and of “the bourgeois system.”

One German observer noted in these youths a “strange connection” between “revolutionary mutiny against authority” and “blind discipline toward the
‘Führer.’
”
⁶
In fact, the students were mutinying against the Republic not because it stood for overbearing authority in their eyes, but because it stood for freedom. They regarded even some shaky fragments of an individualist way of life as selfish materialism. What they wanted was service to a social cause they could accept as noble, and when they found the cause’s spokesman they were ready to bow obediently.

As living standards continued to fall, their parents began to mutiny, too. Hitler offered people leadership, an end to class warfare, a “final solution” to the problems of the mixed economy, and, to each group, his special protection. These were the practical inducements. He also offered what had won the campuses: “idealism,” as all understood the concept. In the September 1930 Reichstag elections, the first nationwide result of these promises leaped into view: the Nazi vote increased sevenfold (to about six and one-half million votes), making the party Germany’s second largest (after the Social Democrats). According to one study, the party membership in 1930 included among other groups: blue-collar workers, 28.1 percent; white-collar workers, 25.6 percent; self-employed, 20.7 percent; and farmers, 14.0 percent.
⁷

If any of these Germans wanted to be moral, he was ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of others, and intrigued by a party that loudly demanded this of him. If he wanted to live, it seemed necessary to sacrifice others to his own group, by joining a party that loudly promised this to him. If he despaired of either course, he was ready to lash out blindly, at fate or at the Jews, and he knew which party felt the same way. The motive might vary, but not the result. It was Hitler for the love in men, and Hitler for the greed, and Hitler for the hatred. “Love” in this context means Christian love; “greed” means the desire to survive in a controlled economy; “hatred” means nihilism.

In 1930-31, pro-Hitler feeling surged higher at the universities. The Nazi totals “rose at the University of Munich from 18.4 to 33.3 percent, at Jena from 30.0 to 66.6, at Erlangen from 51.0 to 76.0 and at Breslau from 25.4 to 70.9.” The Nazis were winning something like a fifth of the national vote; the students already “were largely National Socialist in sympathy; perhaps half of them were Nazis. . . .”
⁸

Again, as people grew still more desperate, the country moved to catch up. In the March 1932 election for President, Hitler polled more than 11 million votes. In the July 1932 Reichstag elections, the party doubled its 1930 vote. For the first time the Nazis were the largest party in Germany. The hours of Weimar, it was widely said, were numbered.

The Nazis, however, were far from being a majority. Almost 64 percent of the votes in July 1932 were cast for non-Nazi candidates. To some Germans, the action to take seemed obvious: if the other parties would only join forces, they said, Hitler, despite his following, could never gain power.

The other parties were unable to join forces. Each acted according to its nature and its basic premises.

The Nationalists, who had long scorned Hitler as a proletarian rowdy, soon discovered his popular appeal and decided to make use of it. In 1929, Alfred Hugenberg had welcomed Hitler onto a prominent committee he was chairing, designed to fight against the latest reparations plan. For Hitler, writes historian Erich Eyck,