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

INTERLUDE 221Meanwhile, the revolution, abandoned by a part of its supporters, wascrushed in hard-fought and bloody struggles (1849), in places with thehelp of the Russian tsar. It was in one of these lost battles that RichardWagner threw down his slips of paper from the Church of the Cross inDresden.The rise of economic thinking at the middle of the nineteenth centuryhad broken the momentum of the great revolution. When the neweconomic age began to appear above the horizon, the most ardent soulsamong the intellectuals lost their glowing confidence that world historyin the Hegelian sense would be a progressive self-realization of worldreason.One of the most moving examples of this despair is Heinrich Heine,who in his youth had uttered the most eloquent words in the Germanlanguage about democracy and socialism. Then came the recoil.Observation of the Parisian masses brought him to the pessimisticconviction that 'the premature triumph of the proletariat would be ofshort duration and a misfortune for humanity. In their mad intoxicationfor equality, they would destroy everything that is beautiful and nobleon earth and unleash their iconoclastic rage on art and science. . . . Thekings vanish, and with them the last poets. . . . The barren work-a-daysentiment of the modern Puritans will spread over all Europe like a graydusk, foreshadowing rigid winter. . . .'Heine's backsliding from democracy was more than a personal matter.Others said the same thing with greater thoroughness and depth; butwith him it was more than a statement, it was an event; he not onlyexperienced an historic turn; he was that turn. In the person of Heine,the penitent intellectual fell from his proud rational glory, confessed hisgreat sins, and renounced humanity's most regal thought: the equality ofall mortals:As long as such doctrines [he is referring to freedom, equality, andparticularly atheism] remained the secret possession of an intellectualaristocracy and were discussed in the refined language of a coterie,incomprehensible to the servants who stood behind us as we bandiedblasphemies at our philosophical petits soupers — I, too, countedmyself among the frivolous esprits forts. Most of us resembled thoseliberal grands seigneurs who shortly before the