Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

100 DER FUEHRERjournalist and poet, twenty-one years older than Hitler. He had a stronginfluence on the younger man, probably the strongest anyone ever hashad on him. And rightly so. A gifted writer, satirist, orator, even (or soHitler believed) thinker, Eckart was the same sort of uprooted, agitated,and far from immaculate soul. Born of well-to-do parents in a little townof northern Bavaria, he had been a failure as a law student because hehad drunk too much and worked too little. Then in Berlin — already inhis forties — he had led the life of a vagrant who believes himself to bea poet. He could tell Hitler that he (like Hitler himself) had lodged inflop houses and slept on park benches because of Jewish machinationswhich (in his case) had prevented him from becoming a successfulplaywright. He had grown to be a morphine addict and had spent sometime in an asylum for the mentally diseased, where his theatrical giftsfinally found a haven, for he had staged plays there and used theinmates as actors. Now he was the grand old — and often drunk — manof the young Nazi Movement. It would be interesting to know how andin which member of the circle the realization dawned that The Protocolsof the Wise Men of Zion was not a pamphlet at all, but a secret textbookof world domination. Nothing contradicts the assumption that, in anyevent, Hitler secretly and with sealed lips conceived the idea that hehimself would become the 'king' and 'ruler' of the world prophesied inthe Protocols. He was now —1921 —in his thirty-third year, exactly theyear in which the diabolical vocation, preceded by a short blindness,comes to Soloviev's Antichrist.The Antichrist first appeared in the form of an utter ne'er-do-well. Heis the human scum of all classes. He is the sort of man who in a normalcivilized world is totally useless and unsuccessful, but who in adisintegrating society conquers and seizes all. The burning heavens aremirrored in a mud puddle. A world revolution has blown these uprootedexistences from all directions to a table in a Munich beer hall; from thewreckage of dead classes arises the new class of intellectuals, and at thehead march the most ruthless, those with the least to lose, hence thestrongest: the armed bohemians, to whom war is home and civil warfatherland.