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

FEW FLAMES BURN IN GERMANY 281which would definitely fix the party's aims; and Hitler, the great oratorand strategist, was not this intellectual authority.Thus he, too, had to write something and that was how he began hisbook, A Reckoning. The underlying thought of the first chapter aroseunconsciously and characteristically: Hitler described his own youth. Hesaw it as a hard struggle for self-assertion and self-education. In hisaccount he became a symbol of the socially and politically oppressedGerman masses; he himself was a victim of German fragmentation, avictim of the racial conquest of Germany by inferior peoples,particularly the Jews. In his person he had borne Germany's suffering —as he saw it. A metaphysical line runs through the book, not always easyto find amid all the vulgar vilification and barren, long-windedmeditations; here a man seeks for God and discovers himself. This isexactly what had happened to Soloviev's Antichrist; he too, like Hitler,had written in his thirty-third year, a book in which he claimed to be theSavior.For the book tried to give an answer to the question of the meaning oflife, and that is its significance; this is far more important than theparticular political remarks, which for the most part have been taken tooseriously. The actual content of the confused book is that young Hitlerthanked God on his knees for the World War; that he declared successto be the highest criterion of right and wrong; that he regarded thepitiless extermination of the weak as the premise of all culture; that hedemanded the immersion of the individual in the nation; and that finallythe nation, in turn, like a thinning mist, is sucked up by the radiance ofthe individual genius shining over all things.He wrote a good part of the work in the fortress of Landsberg,dictating it at first to his friend, Emil Maurice, later to Rudolf Hess.Hess did more than take dictation. He was then twenty-seven, a man offlawless manners. His admiration for Hitler filled his whole person and,like an expert secretary, he tried to make everything as easy as possiblefor the author; when Hitler's flow of thoughts clogged or his store ofknowledge was wanting, Hess was rich in helpful suggestions. Havingenjoyed a fair academic education, Hess had a mature contempt forbloated school learning; he found it right and proper that his leader —who far surpassed him in sheer