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

234 DER FUEHRERhe walked back and forth between the countenance of the Saviour andthat of the Kaiser.Chamberlain denied that he was Nietzsche's successor, but nonethelesshe was. From Richard Wagner he took over the doctrine of race,but he totally rejected the master's theory of decay and degeneration,rather holding, with Nietzsche, that a higher race could and must bebred. But while the German had doubted his own nation, theEnglishman placed the Germans above everyone else in the world, andagreed with Wagner that they were destined 'to ennoble mankind';though first, to be sure, 'mankind must be made sufficiently German infeeling and thought to be able to assimilate this ennobling influence.'As a pearl forms about a tiny irritant, a grain of sand or the splinter ofa shell, a nation forms around an historic irritant; around a spiritualevent which is strong enough to give the entire population the feeling ofa homogeneous and equal spiritual participation. Thus the British nationarose in the struggle for freedom of conscience, the French in thestruggle for the moral perfection of man. Thus the German nation arosethrough faith in the omnipotence of education, which later degeneratedinto a belief in the omnipotence of technology. And since the intellect,as Chamberlain puts it, 'leaves nothing to chance,' it does not leave thebirth of a nation to chance, to the historical grain of sand; but, as pearlscan be grown by means of artificial irritants, the intellect artificiallycreates the nation, and manufactures a people as an instrument of itsdomination.Race is made by man — this is Chamberlain's key to the secrets ofhistory. 'A noble race does not fall from heaven, it becomes noble littleby little, like fruit trees, and this process of development can begin anewat any moment, as soon as a geographico-historical accident or (as in thecase of the Jews) a fixed plan cre-ates the conditions.' A fixed planallegedly created the Jewish race, and a fixed plan must create the great,intellectual, organizing, and ruling race of the future. Chamberlain saidthat he had learned the essential facts about race, like Charles Darwin,'in the horse stable and on the chicken farm.'Four phenomena are needed to produce Chamberlain's race.