The Rise of the Ridiculous Corporal

...he should have been stopped early on—and easily could have been...

...Many preached this poisonous doctrine...

...One of Hitler's many early victims, the Ultranationalist General Erich von Ludendorff, knew exactly where this fatal error would lead...

...Hitler indulged the lavish tastes of his gutter elite in return for their vassalage...

...There was no distinguishing him from his message...

...the Weimarperiod's "golden years," were those of Thomas Mann and Joseph Schumpeter...

...Indeed, we damn him to this day...

...But in these waning days of the millennium it is Adolf Hitler, "the ridiculous corporal," as one of his henchmen secretly called him, whose hold on us is strongest...

...He journeyed there in 1908, at age 18, hoping to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Arts...

...He was also an "authoritarian, overbearing, domineering husband" and a "stern, distant, masterful, and often irritable father," not above beating his children...

...Alan Bullock's Hitler: ? Study in Tyranny (1952), in many respects still the pre-eminent Hitler biography, was the first to present the Führer in this light...

...The origins of Hitler's sociopathic bloodlust are mysterious...

...It was Ernst Röhm, leaderof the SA, the Nazis' paramilitary army of thugs, who referred to Hitler as the "ridiculous corporal...

...Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done...

...It was Vienna that formed Hitler's political consciousness...

...Once Hitler took power, says Kershaw, the Third Reich "developed into a modern variant of a feudal system...

...He was recuperating from a mustard-gassing when he learned of Germany's defeat, what he later called "the greatest villainy of the century...

...The only hint was, perhaps, the grandiose future Adolf fancifully predicted for himself against every outside judgment, including those of his teachers, who found him lazy, undisciplined and unexceptional...

...But the Great Depression came, and the Weimar Republic dissolved into anomie...

...Upon his release, he remained a fringe figure...

...His approach requires a delicate sense of balance and proportion...

...By this time he may have had no alternative...

...Hitler the person was irrelevant...

...He was convinced his destiny now lay in Germany, where (he assumed) the pure Aryan spirit could be found...

...Still, he witnessed at street level what Robert Musil in his great novel, The Man without Qualities, set in Vienna just before World War I, saw equally from his upper-class parapet: that beneath its glittering surfaces the structure of the Old Empire was cracking...

...Anyone persuaded at this late date that artistic ambition occupies a plane lofted high above the low appetites of politics and power should read Kershaw's pages on the 20ish Hitler, the shabby artist manqué who lived in a flophouse and subsisted on the kronen he made selling kitschy paintings to pubs and frame-makers...

...they, in turn, were not much deluded by him...

...This was his genius, instantly perceived by senior activists, who singled him out for bigger things, albeit never as big as he foresaw...

...In the first months of the Reich, when the brutality of his regime began to disturb some Germans, Hitler sent out squads to kill the leaders of the S A. Arrest and trial were out of the question...

...Like many others, he was certain that Germany's democratic government had sold out to the Allies in 1918, that the War might still have been won...

...Bavarian authorities could have destroyed him after the bungled "beer-hall putsch" of 1923...

...Instead they let him transform the courtroom into a self-serving theater...

...Yet Martin Heidegger and Gottfried Benn, among others, joined the Nazi Party, thereby demonstrating that Hitler's twisted message of deliverance could mean whatever one liked and be embraced on any stratum...

...He was twice rejected, to his astonishment and rage...

...Instead, they handed him the chancellorship...

...What if those former cronies should announce to the world precisely what kind of man was promising a thousand-year German reign...

...The new society would be fair without destroying talent, flair, ability, initiative, creativity in the way they saw threatened by the social egalitarianism preached by the Marxists...

...By 1913, when Hitler fled Vienna for Munich to avoid being conscripted into the Austrian Army, his "worldview' was virtually formed...

...For, despite the economic disaster and political crisis that beset Germany in the 1920s, the country's intellectual and cultural life remained vibrant...

...Though convicted of high treason, he received a light five-year sentence and was imprisoned "in conditions more akin to those of a hotel than a penitentiary...

...It would be one...

...After a tumultuous sequence of elections, the Nazis began to make steady inroads...

...Reviewed by Sam Tanenhaus Author, "Whittaker Chambers" In the Introduction to the fine first part of his projected two-volume biography, Ian Kershaw asks, "Has this been Hitler's century...

...In a letter to Hindenburg, he wrote: "I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation into inconceivable misery...

...At every critical juncture, from his early street-fighting days in Munich to his invasion of the Rhine in 1936 (the concluding event of this book), he succeeded less through a "triumph of the will" than through his opponents' failure of nerve...

...Some of his most dedicated followers saw cleanly through him...

...There were, further, his pedantic raptures over Richard Wagner, his banal architectural plans, his stiff sexless courtesies toward women, his petty tirades, and worst of all his tedious War monologues...

...Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among the savior statesmen...

...Was the child the father of the man, as W. H. Auden famously proposed when he wondered "What huge imago made/A psychopathic God...

...This oversimplifies matters too...

...He has rivals, of course —Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung among the criminal tyrants...

...It was Hitler the leader who achieved "near deification' as he perfected the idea of "the Führer state," a regime that functioned, in effect, without a government or cabinet but as an extension of his personality...

...Hitler offered a redemptive vision of a Germany reborn: "There would, recruits to the Nazi Party believed, be no return to the class-ridden, hierarchical society of the past, resting on status, privilege, and the wealth of the few at the expense of the many...

...The answer remains, appallingly, yes...

...joined the tramps, winos, and down-and-outs in society's basement...

...Numerous pathographies present Hitler as being infected almost exclusively with murderous anti-Semitism...

...Of course it was not to be...

...Arriving in time for World War I, Hitler joyously enlisted in the Army and performed valorously as a message dispatcher, winning the Iron Cross...

...And he was stirred by what Kershaw describes as "'the belief that pluralism was somehow unnatural or unhealthy in a society, that it was a sign of weakness, and that internal division and disharmony could be suppressed and eliminated...

...Its strongest appeal was to those spoiling to have at the "Jew Bolsheviks" with truncheons...

...In 1928, the Nazi Party received less than 3 per cent of the vote in national elections and looked on the brink of extinction...

...Adolf equated him with all that was repellent in the bourgeois life, and later attached himself to submissive women who doted on him as his mother, Klara, had done...

...In fact, this was the driving force of his fanaticism, but only one component of it...

...Hitler's story, however, began earlier in anotherplace, lower Austria during the last years of the 19th century...

...Hitler's father, Alois, did present a baleful image, but not more so than others of his caste...

...Murder, later expanded to genocide, seems to have been the only political solution he took seriously...

...The decades since have seen a vast efflorescence of new scholarship, and Kershaw seems to have absorbed it all in the attempt, admirably realized, to make the centerpiece of his book an exploration of the complex interaction between the Führer and the German people...

...But what did they matter...

...Then again, Hitler's intentions were hardly a secret...

...This leads inevitably to the thesis that much of the German nation was, to some degree, as evil as he was, and enacted its madness through him...

...During this time he entertained colleagues, polished his image, and composed Mein Kampf, the blueprint of the nightmare to come...

...With the Reichstag practically inoperative, crisis beset the land...

...Kershaw grimly inventories the many errors committed by Hitler's adversaries...

...With most other experts, Kershaw believes the initial signs of the Hitler we know emerged during his five miserable years in Vienna...

...Hitler joined the demobilized legions who returned to a Bavaria teetering on the brink of social and political anarchy...

...It was there, in his first beerhall orations, that Hitler discovered his gift for giving voice to latent resentments and conjuring, in fanatical yet vivid rhetoric, a treasonous conspiracy led by "Jew Bolsheviks" in collaboration with Socialists, democrats, industrialists, and bankers—all enemies of the German Volk...

...This was the famous "stab in the back" that became the rallying cry sounded by the parties of the nationalist Right which sprang up in the bitter first years of the armistice...

...There is a danger, on the one hand, of an unrealistic determinism whereby Hitler becomes the instrument of forces larger than himself...

...With no other future beckoning him, the "would-be artistic genius...

...He did not have an unusual childhood, Kershaw tells us, yet it seems anomalous enough since his parents were second cousins born 24 years apart...

...Hitler uniquely personified it...

...Such an account distorts the pre-Hitler experience of the Jews, who, though faced with anti-Semitism (as they were everywhere else), felt more at home in Germany than almost anywhere in Europe...

...It is impossible to imagine Stalin (or Mao or Pol Pot) acting out his obsessions as publicly as Hitler did through the shameless theater of hatefilled orations, minutely planned spectacles and gorgeous cinematography—all with the intent, made chillingly explicit in Mein Kampf, of penetrating the mass mind and shaping it toward ends we know too well...

...Not exactly...

...Apart from his visits to the opera and to the academy that spurned him, Hitler glimpsed very few of Vienna's diverse splendors—he knew nothing of Arnold Schoenberg or Rainer Maria Rilke, and the little he did take in seemed to him corrupt variations on the theme of metropolitan vice...

...The opposite danger is presenting the German nation as an inchoate mass, mere putty in Hitler's hands...

...This was the Hitler who waited in line for hours to get a standing-room ticket to his 10th performance of Lohengrin, who read haphazardly but widely, who prudishly disdained sex, and who grew convinced, with a mystic's heartless passion, that the bearded Jews in long coats struggling alongside him in the slums were the "germ" of his own and the German people's misery...

...More than any 20th-century figure, Hitler seized upon the evil energies of our age, fused them with his own raging demons, and made this conjunction the impetus for atrocities committed on a worldhistorical scale...

...Others mocked his slackly bohemian habits—the indolence and languor left over from the lost years in Vienna...

...where sweeping social reform would ensure that those who deserved it would gain their just rewards, where the 'littleman' wouldno longer be exploited by big capital or threatened by organized labor, where Marxist internationalism would be crushed and replaced by loyal devotion to the German people...

...A strength of Kershaw's work is that it bypasses the usual psychoanalytic profile and instead gives us a boldly brilliant political figure who, much of the time, operated on a rational plane...

...His ascent was rapid, as he asserted his will to dominate the reactionary movement...

...Even in the gangster climate of Bavarian politics, his appetite for physical violence was extreme...

...A short-lived Communist government was brought down bloodily by counterrevolutionary troops...

...Kershaw does not shrink from telling us that in addition to the extermination of his enemies...

...As late as 1933, though, 85-year-old Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and his adviser, the inept Franz von Papen, could have handed Hitler a final defeat...

...Thereafter Bavaria became a "magnet for Right-wing extremists...

...Yet depressing as his childhood was, nothing in it predicted the monster to come...

...He was, says Kershaw, "an archetypal provincial civil servant—pompous, status-proud, strict, humorless, frugal, pedantically punctual, and devoted to duty...