The Enchanting Fehrer

...His ministers and generals held office because they could say, along with Goebbels, "the Rihrer leads, I obey...

...Any statement about the progress of Western civilization must be qualified by the knowledge that a Hitler, no less than an Einstein, a Schweitzer, or a Thomas Mann, was born and brought up within the compass of that civilization...

...His adopted people provided that audience, to the point where they were no less dependent on him than he on them...

...We are prone to talk about "fully human beings," forgetting, when we do so, that Adolf Hitler was every bit as much a human as Biondi, his Alsatian, was a dog...

...We can add to this that this same man ended the colonial era, accelerated progress in vast areas of technology, and transformed thepattern of world power...

...There are Spaniards who openly venerate Hitler, lighting votive candles to his memory on April 29...

...The fairy tale held out fears and delights to protected children...

...A Thuringian churchwarden is on record as supposing him to be God's agent on earth, Prussian conservatives thought him an upstart who would serve their turn, Arnold Toynbee described him as a "political mad mullah," whilst Bertolt Brecht diagnosed, even in Hitler's enemies, traces of "the usual disastrous respect we feel for great murderers...

...National Socialism offers "a new age of magical interpretation of the world...

...We struggle fitfully to conserve countryside and wilderness, anxious to save something that we value largely because we once had to save ourselves from it...

...But the desire to fill out the picture goes deeper than this...

...The blankness of his features holds out the promise that features, by themselves, are nothing...

...unit...

...Her most trivial requests were often met with brusque refusals...

...It is a feeling that combines attraction and repulsion: the subject is enthralling in part because it is obscene...

...But she was fighting against forces greater than pretty actresses or fullblown Valkyries: she was fighting Hitler's imagination...

...An artist was not so much a man who made as a man who dreamed...

...It needed an audience, whether of two people or a hundred thousand, to set the adrenaline moving once again, to make possible the moment of crisis or climax which translated will into event...

...for Germans, at least, it is a need...

...But such enthusiasms indicate an extreme: they are no more typical of the widespread interest in Hitler than is the occasional gang of Hell's Angels modeled on an S.S...

...Imagine if on top of everything else,I had a woman who interfered with my work...

...Eva (again, the subject of several books) was not so much primitive and stupid as enslaved...

...What he did not understand was committed action by someone other than himself—the firm response to the Munich Putsch or Churchill's successful invocation of a spirit of national resistance...

...The real neo-Nazis, though they no longer seem an electoral threat in West Germany, continue to command some popular support...

...It would not be far from the mark to say there is about it more than a hint of the pornographic...

...Given this her devotion is startling...

...From that one man sprang the design of a culture which, in visual terms alone, seems as alien as that of the Aztecs or Mayas, an entire world that an archaeologist would presume to require centuries of gestation...

...Yet his life was still circumscribed by convention and concern about his image...

...But he had another, and better, word for it...

...It is clear that Hitler's view of the artist was an outsider's view, and that his bohemianism and his respectability were two sides of the same coin...

...The rout in France and the orderly queues for the gas chamber, inexplicable to the commentators, were explicable to him...

...His chief antagonist within the party, Ernst Ram, regarded him as too much of the impractical dreamer...

...it was a criticism that a bullet effectually answered...

...Since she wanted him to need her it seems that she sensed in him a sublimated yearning for everday contacts and -comforts...

...In the days when original sin was a sufficient explanation of human wickedness the weight of guilt would not have mattered...

...Hitler's admission that magicians worked with lies is the clue to the kind of magic in which he dealt...

...He offered them warmth, enchantment, the grail of belonging...

...Only by adopting the philpsophy of National Socialism and embracing a racial interpretation of Teutonic history can we suppose the inclinations and temperament of the Germans to be a special case in European culture...

...Even before the Fiihrer was dead the other inhabitants of his bunker, without apparent reason and despite the bombardment, had begun to dance...

...his ambitions extended to opera production, and he hoped to end his days as the director of an enormous art gallery in Linz, his home town...

...Science fiction, adult comics, the titillations offered by girlie magazines, play an increasing part in casual reading...

...Both the argument that makes Hitler a mere tool, and the argument that makes the German people a dupe, are equally spurious, equally facile attempts to shift the burden of guilt...

...When all this has been said we are still a long way from offering a satisfactory account of the general infatuation with a man who died, ignominiously defeated, nearly thirty years ago...

...At the same time, it is hard to believe that the persistent audience for books on Hitler and the Nazis, at whatever level, is unaware of what Joachim Fest, the Fiihrer's most recent biographer, has described as the "feeling of disgust" that hangs around his subject...

...He" fails to call, fails even to send a message, keeps her waiting for hours, flirts with actresses and women of those generous proportions which she knows "him" to like, but does not herself possess...

...It was an opinion that he did not hesitate to pronounce in front of Eva herself...

...He smelled out the feebleness of the democracies, their moral ambivalence and lack of principle, just as he grasped the passivity that prevented any Jewish resistance, the sense that God, who had chosen Israel, couldalso cast Israel away...

...His spells worked only in his own twilight kingdom...

...it casts a light which, for a moment, lends relief to her lover's blurred features...

...He openly referred to his "eccentric" and "bohemian" past and maintained, when he wearied of official routine, that "one stroke of genius was worth more than a lifetime of conscientious office work...

...But the dreams did not come true and the wand was shattered...

...As it happens the parable of his story contains its own critique: the inefficient incineration in the smoking ruins of Berlin, the final collapse of the magician's dark tower...

...Great liars are also great wizards...

...Hitler applied to them something like the criterion by which, as he told Albert Speer, he selected Eva Braun: "A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman...

...What mattered was the will to cast the spell: "Why should we need to socialize banks and factories...

...Hitler fascinates today because he demonstrates, to an extraordinary degree, the power of the imagination in an age given increasingly to abstraction and theory...

...But that, too, marches with one kind of daydream and provides a further reason why, historical justifications aside, the story remains obsessive in its fascination...

...Yet nothing that he thought is unfamiliar, and much of it is instantly recognizable as deriving from the most commonplace of fantasies...

...now we are in their place...

...A fairy-tale people, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, eating no meat, were to inherit the land, whilst dwarfish slaves toiled to serve them...

...an age committed to a concept of human perfectibility has to explain Hitler, even to the point of explaining him away...

...The water-colors he painted in his failed art-student days fetch prices that compare favorably with Old Master sketches, signed copies of Mein Kampf command considerable sums, and the sale of Nazi weapons and insignia supports both dealers and forgers...

...In her diary Hitlerfeatures as "him...

...He exploited doom amongst the conservatives, defeat in the army, helplessness amongst small traders...

...He traded in failure, the stock commodity of his early years...

...To prevent him breaking off even this unsatisfactory relationship she had to refrain from sun-bathing, dancing, and smoking, and to keep out of the way of his guests, remaining always in the background and leaving the room when he demanded...

...As the world contracts so fantasy explodes...

...No account of his career can write out of the record the extent to which the German people were Hitler...

...Great cities would spring up at his command, whilst round the coasts of Europe lonely towers of archaic aspect would commemorate the dead...

...At various points in his life Hitler described himself as an artist, a writer, and an architect...

...in the metaphor natural to Germans who survived the spring of 1945, the spell was broken...

...This burden is as obvious a feature of non-German fascination as of German fixation...

...Again and again he talked of magic...

...There have been any number of different ways of regarding Hitler...

...Mussolini, who at first considered him a "clown," became his abject puppet...

...it was this that condemned Eva to the backstairs and prompted his remark, on seeing a picture of Mussolini in bathing trunks, that a really great statesman would not have permitted such a photograph...

...he" breaks his promises and seems to need her "only for certain purposes...

...He spoke for the unemployed, the disgruntled, the lonely—and the massive displacement of classes that followed the Treaty of Versailles drove hundreds of thousands of Germans into loneliness...

...Hitler offers not simply a career that is truly fantastic, but also an unparalleled rationale for fantasy, doing for the daydream what Orpheus once achieved for the power of music...

...If they are to understand their history, even themselves, they must understand him...

...The point is less fanciful than it may at first seem...

...His words became words of power, altering the relationships between things in the most fundamental way...

...There are, needless to say, the cultists and the cranks, from those who believe the Fiihrer to be alive and well and fishing on the upper reaches of the Amazon, to the more sinister followers in the British National Front, who have recently published a pamphlet assailing what they are pleased to call the "myth" of the extermination camps, and have enacted Aryan rites onthe estate of a Norfolk landowner...

...We are socializing the people...

...For himself, he never ventured out in a new suit without first having been photographed in it to observe the effect...

...Away from an audience he was nothing: a failed artist, a dreamer, an idler who talked long and tediously into the night and passed days of indolence in eating sweet cakes, going to the cinema, and reading adventure stories...

...It was Ernst Rohm who was nearest in his view of Hitler to Hitler's view of himself, though judgment embodied a—literally—fatal error...

...The enormity of his crimes is matched only by the enormity of his alibi: what is impressive is less the number of deaths than the notion that one man could dream up so grotesque a series of postulates to bring about those deaths...

...Defended from the elements by air-conditioning and central heating, and from fortune by insurance and pension schemes, excitement is restricted to sport or a change of partner in domesticity...

...His intimates—his bodyguard, chauffeurs, and secretaries—were chosen in large measure for their ability to merge into the background and adapt their manner and conversation, even their behavior amongst themselves, to the FUhrer's moods...