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

222 DER FUEHRERrevolution sought to dispel the boredom of their idle court existencewith the new revolutionary ideas. But when I saw that the raw plebs,the Jan Hagels, were beginning to discuss the very same topics in theirgrimy symposia, where wax candles and girandoles were replaced bytallow and oil lamps, [when the old ideal of his youth] began to stink ofcheese, brandy, and tobacco: then suddenly my eyes were opened, andwhat I had not understood by my reason, I now understood by my senseof smell, by nausea and discomfort. . . . We shall gladly sacrificeourselves for the people; self-sacrifice is among our subdest pleasures— the emancipation of the people was the great task of our life, for itwe have struggled and borne nameless misery, at home as in exile —but ... I would wash my hand if the sovereign people honored me withits handshake. The 'trahison des clercs,' the betrayal by the intellectuals,as a French philosopher a hundred years later called it! Public life — alllife in a sense — began to look questionable. In opposition to Hegel, agloomy prophet arose: Arthur Schopenhauer. Hegel had taught that theessence of all things was world reason and that every event was an actof its self-realization. Schopenhauer angrily replied that the center of allthings is the most irrational thing conceivable, the blind will, the desire,the urge. It lay at the base of all happenings in nature, and since it couldnever achieve fulfillment, its existence was suffering without end; thefunction of reason was to recognize this tragedy and put an end to thesuffering by putting an end to the will, that is, to life. 'Every human lifeas a whole,' he wrote, 'shows the qualities of a tragedy, and we see thatlife, in general, consists only of hopes gone astray, thwarted plans, anderrors recognized too late.' Consequendy, life is 'something which betterwere not; a sort of delusion, knowledge of which should remove usfrom it.'The corner of this sad world in which Arthur Schopenhauer spent hisearthly existence, or, as he would have said, his existence subject to thewill, was an upper-class house in the city of Frankfort on the Main.From its high windows he viewed the ships on the Main, the whitefacades and tall pointed towers of the city, the crowd in the narrowmedieval streets, and, in language ringing with the fury of the prophets,painted the emptiness of human