Richard Luckett on the irresistible rise of a minor romantic
"I think," observed Hitler in 1944, "it's pretty obvious that this war is no pleasure for me. For five years I have been separated from the rest of the world. I haven't been to the theatre, I haven't heard a concert, and I hRven't seen a movie". A few weeks before, the July bomb plot had made him cognisant of the fact that some Germans, at least, had failed to take the point, and for a moment the suspicion seems to have crossed his mind that there were those who interpreted his policies as being not merely wrong, but megalomaniac. His response seems both risible and monstrous. Yet, if we are to savour its pathos to the full we must remember just how much these recreations meant to him. What did Hitler do if left to his own devices? According to Joachim Fest* he relapsed into .a state of lethargy punctuated by "Austrian" spells of weariness. He would talk until dawn about architecture, sleep late, go to any number of indifferent films, and listen again and again to Der Meistersinger. In the hours between he would sit in cafes with his bodyguards and his chauffeurs, eating elaborate chocolate confections or Viennese pastries. When he became Chancellor in 1933 he found the routine intolerable and the duties tedious; it was not long before he gave up any pretence of fulfilling them and devoted himself to the cinema, the opera, and a re-reading of the complete works of the adventure-story writer Karl May which amounted to some seventy novels.
Such habits earned him little sympathy from those who knew about them. Ernst Rohm, the leader of the SA, was openly contemptuous: "Adolph is and always will be a civilian, an 'artist', a dreamer. Just leave me be, he thinks. Right now all he wants to do is sit up in the mountain and play God". The remark was more penetrating than Rohm knew. Almost at the very moment when he said this God had determined to come down from the mountain and wreak his vengeance on his unworthy servant Ernst Rohm. Rohm, locked in a cell with a pistol and a few minutes grace, unbuttoned his shirt to the waist but was unable to meet the final requirement of the military code of honour. As soon as it was clear that he would not shoot himself he was gunned down. But his analysis of Hitler's character was no more wrong than his ending was inappropriate; both suffered from bad timing and a failure to carry arguments through to their logical conclusions. Rohm was still seeing the Hitler of 1922 in 1934, and at the same time had failed to perceive that an artist rather than a soldier was what post-war -Germany craved. However much Hindenburg was revered it was obvious that he, though a soldier, had failed; only a leader with a vision of the future as well as a sense of the past could provide a real hope.
The military themselves sensed this. General von Blomberg, the Minister of Defence, remarked that a cordial handshake from the Fuhrer could cure him of colds — though he failed to sense that any number of handshakes could not save him from final disgrace at the Fuhrer's orders. On his deathbed Hindenburg addressed the Austrian lance-corporal as "Your Majesty", though even in delirium the ratio of moustache to face must have seemed wrong for Kaiser Wilhelm. The army, by tolerating the murders of Generals von Sleicher and von Bredow in the purge which brought about the death of Rbhm and subjection of the SA, showed that it needed a principal of loyalty above all, and that only Hitler could provide it. Once that last bastion of power had come under his control Hitler could devote himself to
turning its attentions outward, to giving it a sense of purpose and, above all, of energy. When Jacob Burkhardt, in the previous century, had commented that terrorism was essentially the "rage of literati in its last stage" he had unwittingly coined an aphorism that would serve admirably to characterise the early years of the Nazi party. But he failed to foresee — and perhaps only Nietzsche had a sense of it 7 just how far the "rage of literati" could go.
Hitler knew. He had, above all, a sense of what, given the right conditions, the imagination could accomplish. "Great liars," he said on more than one occasion, "are also great wizards". National Socialism was no mere reorganisation of the relation between public and private ownership. In_fact it was no such reorganisation at all. "Our socialism reached much deeper. It does not change the external order of things, but it orders solely the reIPtionship of man to the State." The assertion was infinitely suggestive and infinitely vague, as confused but as exhilarating as the inextricably mixed metaphors which played so emotive a part in Hitler's speeches. Just as the notion of the artist-as-magician gave rise to the legend of spirits that their creators could neither control nor exorcise, so Hitler's notion of a "new age of magical interpretation of the world", an age of the will and not of intelligence, created the entirely real spectre of the extermination of the Jews. To this, so Herr Fest tells us, Hitler made no concrete references in all his speeches or writings, and even alone with his entourage he never referred to the matter directly. When Himmler finally saw mass execution he almost fainted, and subsequently suffered a hysterical fit; the SS men engaged on the work accelerated the executions as the Allied armies approached, yet endeavoured to disguise the traces of what they had done. They experienced both a sense of the need to complete their task and a sense that it was evil and to be hidden. The great merit of Herr Fest's biography of Hitler is that his account of the Leader is also a satisfying account of the dynamics of the Nazi movement and the conditions that made such things possible.
It is a large book. Biographies of Hitler tend to be long and this is one of the longest. It could be argued that what a treatment of Hitler gains in fullness of detail it automatically loses in sharpness of outline. Such a view would make a brief, Suetonian account the preferable version, since only thus could the horror of the man and his regime be uncovered. Herr Fest admits that one of the difficulties he has experienced in writing about Hitler has been the unease his subject creates in all who approach him closely, the disgust that Hitler's personality evokes. TO his credit Herr Fest has neither allowed his disgust to modulate into fascination of prurient-kind, nor used his distaste as a justification for prolonged sermonising. He incorporates into his portrait the result of the most recent research both into Hitler's private life and into the various understandings, with industrial concerns and individuals, that helped the Nazis in their rise to power. The effect of such research, as he notes, is to amplify the picture already established, rather than to alter it. He sees no reason to support the Marxist interpretation of Hitler as a tool of international capital, and makes it clear that other parties on the right received more support fronl industrialists than the National Socialists, at least until the point when the Nazis held the reins of government. He is equally ready to condemn the vanity and foolishness of von Pappen (whom he treats much more severelY than do other recent historians) and the stuPi'' dity of the German Communist leaders who, confident in the infallibility of' doctrine, failed. to sense the crucial nature of what was going on around them. Whilst avoiding the vocabir lary and the theoretical apparatus of the sonic)" logists he draws their findings into his argU" ment, demonstrating that there is tittle or nothing which masquerades as social science
that the conventional historian cannot perfectly well handle. In so far as he is prepared to Prejudice the objectivity of his account,. it is by asking whether Hitler can properly be considered either great or revolutionary.
In both cases his answer is negative. Herr Pest sees Hitler as an ersatz great man, an imitation ot the heroes ot history, and as a revolutionary whose will for change was yoked to a superficial determination to put the world into reverse. Thus he preached socialism Whilst denying its practical implications, and at the same time industrialised his country and accelerated the flight from the land whilst idealising the peasant virtues of the middle ages. He achieved power by conjuring up the past, not the future. To a certain extent his need to maintain a sense of urgency and movement, Whilst at the same time replacing the thugs who brought him to power with the bureaucrats Who would keep him there, ensured a rate ot change and modification of mores sufficient to earn him the title. Yet his dreams were projections of a misunderstood and romanticised golden age, as derivative and inaccurate as the
sketches of triumphal architecture which he doodled in his notebook.
'Herr Fest has not produced a work of original scholarship, though his book is meticulously researched. But he'has managed to do something of the greatest importance: he has produced an account of the dictator that effectively de-mythologises him, whilst never denying him his peculiar and deadly magnetism. He explains, without ideological machinery or eschatological fervour, why Hitler's rise to power was possible, how he accomplished it, and why he was not overthrown. His account of the July bomb plot, in particular, avoids the usual fate of becoming either a hagiography of the conspirators or a crude dismissal of the claim that there could be a non-Communist opposition. He offers a portrait of Hitler remarkable for its insight, and his picture of a Germany that welcomed release from politics, rather than involvement, is wholly convincing. What is less convincing is his belief that no politicians of the future will be able to treat the apparent circumstances of the world, its seemingly inevitable direction, as Hitler so imperiously did. It is a notion that his whole book contradicts. one's own family who had happened less fortunately.
Such very proper attitudes were at last rewarded by high Success, whose lessons were more savage than any which had come before. Against most forms of flattery and envy Bennett was proof. But it took a long and painful time before he learned to recognise and arm himself against the feigned love of women; and there was one particular kind of hostility which continued to wound him cruelly to the end of his life. This was the hatred of those that excoriated him, not exactly for his work or for his wealth, but for the fact that he had made that wealth by that work. His was a career, they said, unethical and contemptible, offensive at once to the humble people from whom he came (and to whose industrious poverty his whole life was an insult) and to the world of his betters, upon whom he had obtruded himself by fraud. Poor Arnold Bennett; all he ever tried to do was to exercise his craft and to enjoy what he earned in the process; and here he was denounced as a moral and social disease. Paradoxically, it was his own self-mockery, his own want of pride, his own modesty that were to blame; for a man who is so far lacking in self-regard and pretension as to describe his profession as "farting" sensational fiction for money is apt to enrage those whom he seeks to conciliate. Why (they enquire with some show of reason) has be been so well paid for his foul wind?
All this you may read of, with great pleasure (I promise) and in full date and detail, in Miss Drabble's new biography of Arnold Bennett. You will also find an acute analysis and assessment of Bennett's literary ouevre, from the magnificent Ciayhanger down to the serials for women's glossies. Miss Drabble writes as cleverly and as fluently as ever, but not, I'm sorry to say, quite as spitefully as she once used to. Perhaps some of Bennett's amiability has rubbed off on her, rather a compliment to the man. But please, Miss Drabble, do not become too amiable; more of your lovely spite next time, dear — and less of that left wing conscience.
Simon Raven has recently converted Trollope into the television series, The Pallisers.
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