The Hollow Man Hitler. By Konrad Heiden. (Constable. 10s.) HERR
HEIDEN has already written the best history of the National Socialist movement. He has now written the berg biography of its Fiihrer. It is not a perfect or a final account of the man, for Hitler must remain a nightmare figure, so long as Europe endures the bad dream caused by its undigested and unwholesome meals of the post-War periOd. We cannot say what Herr Hitler will look like in the light of common day ; the dream is not yet over, but Herr Heidili has almost succeeded in piercing the illusion. He throws ra sharp light upon Herr Hitler's character, of which the moat important qualities are these.
He is essentially uncivilised. The son of a petty anti- Semite civil servant of poor stock, a failure as an art [nude*, an unskilled labourer in Vienna, a corporal in the War, 14 agent of the Reichswehr, a political adventurer, he is experienced nothing which could teach him what civilisation is. What he knows of it he has learned from books, froiii Wagner and from such authoritiei as Goebbels, ROSenberg and Hanfstaengl. His knowledge is secondhand and fits hita like a cheap suit. It remains outside him, and when he speaks of civilisation it is with the mingled cunning and ignorance of the ambitious grocer who talks of charity bilt practises putting sand in the sugar for his poorer cust.)merii.
Therefore the values of civilised men are unreal- to him what is real are the instincts of brutality and barbarism whose effects can be seen, touched, smelt, and easily under- stood.
He is an uneducated man, and is too lazy to educate himself. He is ignorant of facts and does not understand theories. One idea is to him very much like any other, and for him words have r o meaning but only an emotional propriety. When he says Peace he might as well say War, for all the meaning his words and actions have ; what is significant is the emotion with which he charges them.
He is a treacherous man. He has, in the past, made many promises and broken many. Those who believed him are dead, tortured or defeated. For he understands promises, not as obligations to be kept but as instruments for deceiving people.
He is a superb actor. His real personality is expressed only by his instincts. They are violent and intense, but can only be sustained for short moments of brutal ecstasy. Soon exhausted, they leave him empty, and, being sensitive as an octopus, he takes on any character, which suits the circumstances and pleasesthe observer. His instincts assuaged,. the murderer of Iltihm, torturer of Ossietsky, becomes to the timid middle-aged lfausfrau a gentle celibate, stooping with dim eyes over the perambulator to kiss the baby that can never be his.
He is a lucky man, because he is a representative man. He rose to power at a time when the pressure of starvation, bad nerves and unemployment broke the fabric of German society, and reduced men to the state of nature. To Herr Hitler that state is natural and he has never known any other, and in it his qualities have a survival value superior to that of men who were born for better things. It was this pressure which reduced Germany to his level; When it was relieved, he sank into insignificance : when it was intensified, he was again the man of the day.
/lc has many qualities which are less than human, but one which raises him, as a politician, above the ordinary. }le has an unerring sense of power, without minding what it is used for Other politicians are handicapped by the double task of seeking power and trying to use it for some end. Herr Hitler has only the one preoccupation : to seek power. He does not mind how it is used ; he lets it use him and passively enjoys it. And for him power has always meant—the Reichswehr, and nothing is better or more . valuable in Herr Heiden's book than his long and detailed analysis of Herr Hitler's extraordinarily shrewd career of intrigue with the Reichswehr and dependence upon it. So Herr Heiden, and though his estimate may be exaggerated it is certainly not baseless. Many people should read this book, and especially those politicians now engaged in the perilous task of negotiating with Herr Hitler. That is not a reason for not negotiating, but it is a reason for hedging any agreement about with any conceivable safeguard.
GORONWY REFS.
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