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

INTERLUDE 237Physically and spiritually, the Aryans stand out among all men; hencethey are by right the lords of the world.'This was just what the German intellectuals, who had once created theGerman people without being able to give it a state, and who now had astate to whom they could give no people, had to be told. The Kaiser wasfirmly convinced that God in person had sent him this Englishman. In1902, he wrote Chamberlain that according to his generals 'nearly all theyoung officers in the Guard Corps study and discuss The Foundations ofthe Nineteenth Century.' The officers of the Guard Corps were theleaders and demigods of the Kaiser's regime.What Chamberlain wrote was a very bold self-portrait of an importanttrend in German opinion; but it was not a reflection of basic Germanthought. Just as this book chooses Hegel as an example of the politicalphilosophy of the early nineteenth century, so Chamberlain, at the endof the century, stands for a series of political thinkers — Treitschke,Lagarde, Langbehn, Bernhardi; finally, and most significant, OswaldSpengler. Hegel, like Chamberlain, had founded or led a new school ofpolitical philosophy, but not (contrary to popular belief) the only, norindeed the dominant, school. Through the entire nineteenth century thespiritual leader of German thought was not Hegel, but FriedrichSchiller, a humanist if there ever was one, and a believer in the nobilityof mankind. Between 1900 and 1914 the most successful political bookswere Berta von Suttner's radical and paciflstic Down Arms! and theautobiography of the Socialist leader, August Bebel, a book hostile tomilitarism. True, the 'Pan-German' movement had found its strongestsupport among the intellectuals and among the big business men, butHeinrich Class, their leader through thirty years, called his life-work an'upstream' struggle.For the nation as a whole was averse to taking the bold and dizzy pathto Aryan world domination, and no one knew this better than the Kaiser.Chamberlain, to whom the restlessly speech-making, traveling,telegraphing monarch opened his heart, so often bleeding from bitterwounds, knew it too. He wrote the Kaiser that public opinion was madeby idiots or malicious traitors, and the Kaiser replied, in someembarrassment, that the two of them, he and Cham-