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

INTERLUDE 213This was the great turning-point in German history; its aftereffects areclearly discernible in the Germany of 1940. Napoleon's France,newborn through revolution, possessed a real inner strength, asuperiority of spirit and will over the other, despotically governednations of the Continent; the Caesar of France played these forces withall the refined dexterity later so well described in the Protocols.Napoleon broke the millennial German Empire into pieces and built anew Germany. He founded new German states and created new Germanprinces, who were to endure a whole century and determine the courseof German history. To him Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated his ThirdSymphony, the Eroica; Goethe cried out contemptuously to Germanpatriots: 'Tug away at your chains, the man is too big for you, you willnever break them!' Hegel, the philosopher, saw Napoleon riding throughthe streets of Jena, and owned that he felt as though he had seen 'theworld spirit on horseback.' This son of Corsica, emperor of the French,was incon-testably the greatest single figure in German history —perhaps down to our own day. But at the same time his epoch signifiedFrench oppression and domination of Germany. France not onlyswallowed up Holland and Belgium; for a time she annexed NorthGermany as far as the mouth of the Elbe. She governed and manipulatedat will the new states she had created, the kingdoms of Bavaria,Wurttemberg, Westphalia. She brought modern militarism to Germanyand levied armies in Germany with which to conduct her own wars. Butabove all, in the person of Napoleon I, she brought to Germany the ideaof democratic Caesarism, of the conspirator who makes himself a tyrantby the abuse of democracy . . . the living model of the Wise Men ofZion.Germany learned and imitated. When the French Revolution brokeout, the best of the German intelligentsia rejoiced. For a time there wereJacobin republics on the Rhine, under the protection of the Frenchrevolutionary armies. The inner reforms in France; the immense powerthey gave the country which shortly before had been in a state ofcollapse; the systematic organization by the tyrant of this new spiritualmight, made a deep impression on the clearest heads in Germany. Whatwe today call German organization, was first learned from Napoleon,who from army