{Why read about Adolf Hitler? As Hillary Clinton might say, ‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’ However, Konrad Heiden’s 1944 biography (The Fuhrer) is fascinating, not least because of the quality of Heiden’s prose. The following excerpt portrays Hitler circa the early 1920s, after the Great War but before the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Oddly, it turned out that, in 1920s Germany, it was against the law to attempt to overthrow the government!}
“His eyes at night were chilling, and his words were oh so thrilling, and someday soon I fear they’ll sing that song again.” (Elliott Murphy, “Eva Braun”)
Konrad Heiden, from The Fuhrer:
A broken people, broken army, broken men. The [Nazi] movement rose out of the wreckage of the Great War. Ideals had to fall into the mire, destinies to be shattered, characters to sicken, before something new could be born. For this thing was new, and from the very beginning it was frightful.
The spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter figure. A human nothing, a gray personality even among soldiers, ‘modest and for that very reason inconspicuous,’ as a superior characterized him; not even a German, but a homeless derelict from the Viennese melting-pot. In the army, he descended to the most dubious level, that of agent provocateur; even in that field he was no leader, but an unsavory tool of counterespionage, entrusted with necessary but loathsome tasks; happy when he could obey and, by his own admission, knowing no higher goal than to follow his superior blindly and to contradict no one.
His exterior was without distinguishing marks, his face without radiance; there was nothing unusual in his bearing. He was one of those men without qualities, normal and colorless to the point of invisibility. 1 In this case, the void, it might be said, had disguised itself as a man.
The leadership of this movement was given over to this human object. They wanted a tool. They sent him through the country on speaking tours, used him in their press bureau to write releases, sent him into political meetings to hear what he could hear. At length, as orator-propagandist for the German Workers’ Party, he seemed to have found his niche in the world. He was a man of the people, at home amid the most sordid poverty, familiar with the heart of the poor. To speak in the language of his employers: That trap of his will come in handy.
For in this unlikely looking creature dwelt a miracle: his voice. It was something unexpected. Between those modest, narrow shoulders, the man had lungs. His voice was the very epitome of power, firmness, command, and will. Even when calm, it was a guttural thunder; when agitated, it howled like a siren betokening inexorable danger. It was the roar of inanimate nature, yet accompanied by flexible human overtones of friendliness, rage, or scorn.
The contradiction between the lamentable appearance and the mighty voice characterizes the man. He is a torn personality; long reaches of his soul are insignificant colored by no noteworthy qualities of intellect or will; but there are corners supercharged with strength. It is this association of inferiority and strength that makes the personality so strange and fascinating.
Adolf Hitler is portrayed here as most of his contemporaries and many of his own supporters saw him in his beginnings; and the picture is basically true. As a human figure, lamentable; as a political mind, one of the most tremendous phenomena of all world history—this is a contradiction which occurs in every man of genius, from stuttering Moses to the strange, unglamorous artillery captain Bonaparte; but few of these historic figures united so many contradictions, such lack of distinction, and such superhuman strength.
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1 “One of those men without qualities”: Heiden was here implicitly referencing Robert Musil’s classic novel, The Man Without Qualities, published in 1930.
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