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

INTERLUDE 247case unexcelled, and their scientific capacities unequaled; it is on thisthat I have built my hope. . . .'Now perhaps we can better understand the deep meaning of seeminglysimple words. To this end we have taken a long excursion through thehistory of the European nations and the German mind. In the world oftoday we see this history reflected, intensified as in a concave mirror.We see Adolf Hitler as the belated anachronistic German answer toNapoleon. We see him cursed in advance by the Richard Wagner he sovenerates, as an imitator of Napoleon, a man of violence, a beast ofprey. We see in him a man regarding himself as business manager of theworld spirit, which can do no wrong, because to Napoleonic greatnessevery wrong is permissible. We see him as Thor, the thunder-god,raising his giant hammer and smashing the talisman of our culture, thecross. We see him rise up out of the teeming, nameless 'intelligent herdmass,' writing a book of 'power philosophy'; see the student rejected bythe Vienna Academy of Art, growing to be an 'artist tyrant.' We see him,with subtle science, building a human machine such as the world hasnever known, and, at an early date, drawing up plans according to whichthe entire globe will become his machine. We see him as the Antichristwith the banal mustache, gathering round him the uprooted intellectualsamong his own people and among many foreign peoples; a type of menwilling to go to any length in order that the machine may 'work': willingto command and also to obey, to trample and to be trampled, to kill andeven, if they must, to die.We see Adolf Hitler surrounded by half-Englishmen, half-Americans,half-Frenchmen, half-Italians, half-Czechs, half-Rumanians, and all ofthem also half-Germans; and we hear him utter his wolf-cry, expectingthe howling wolves from everywhere to answer him: 'Aryans and anti-Semites of all nations, unite!'