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

THE AGE OF GOLD 263ailment. The intellectual and political leaders of the epoch endeavoredto re-create what had been, to rebuild pre-war conditions. No really newidea enlivened this period of reconstruction; the only attempt of the sort,the League of Nations, degenerated into a conference of diplomats.With all their own inertia, the people for the most part felt these thingsmore sensitively than their leaders; and the echo which the NationalSocialist vagabonds found arose from this feeling. Hitler's speechesfrom this period are particularly needful of detailed criticism; hisprophecies, in part sharply confuted by events, attest a faulty knowledgeof his subject; but he did recognize, and mercilessly and effectivelydescribe, the inadequacy and folly of the attempts to reconstruct theworld that had been shattered by the war. 'All this,' he shouted, pointingto the glittering rottenness roundabout, 'must and will collapse' — thiswas his simple and cheap message of calamity, and it proved correct.He recognized decay wherever he met it; for it belonged to his ownnature. All his life Hitler never had conducted a household, never had abudget; for him money is something you give away or borrow, butnever earn; in his youth, his receipts were tiny, in his maturity they wereimmense; but he never established any relation between them and hiswork, for he worked, not to earn money, but to secure his publicposition, to win the applause and admiration— shared, to be sure, with aglass of beer — of his audience. What Hitler understands and what fillshim with enthusiasm is the heartlessly overflowing power of nature,creating superabundance of life and at the same time superabundance ofdeath, which 'only lets live the strongest and best and lets the rotten andsickly die,' in order to preserve a type in a few specimens. He was likewiseconvinced by the boundless capacity for production of the moderntechnology, by the boundless fertility of human invention, by thealchemy of technical processes, transforming stones into bread. Inpolitics he uses and squanders the superabundance of vital force andalso deathly force furnished by nature or artifice. For in his opinion lifein its mass exists to be sacrificed for the attainment of a purposesuperior to the individual life; multitudes of individuals must fall inorder that the type remain. By frugality and limitation economics strivesto preserve the individual, and Hitler's deep-