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

THE UNHAPPIEST OF ALL MEN 375picture, which is somehow always present in advance, and which themind has created with regard to this or that matter.'The purpose of books is to say yes. As a young man, according to hisown story, he began to read the 'main documents' of Marxism. Let ussuppose he was referring to Karl Marx's monumental Capital: 'If Iarrived at my goal more rapidly than I myself may at first have dared tothink, it was solely due to my newly acquired, though at that time notyet very profound, knowledge of the Jewish question. It alone enabledme to draw a practical comparison between reality and the theoreticalboasting of the founding fathers of Social Democracy, since it hadtaught me to understand the language of the Jewish people, who talk tohide, or at least to veil, their thoughts, and whose real aim is thereforenot to be found in the lines, but slumbers well hidden between them.'In other words, after reading a few dozen pages at most, he closed thethick volume forever. But there is a grave suspicion that he treated otherbooks, more important for him, in the same way. He virtually neverquotes a single word from a classic author. Once he cited a fewsentences from Clausewitz, the military theoretician, but these wereoften printed in cheap little pamphlets. Over a period of twenty years heonly once has recourse to the authority of Germany's greatest author,Goethe, and then only to quote an anti-Semitic passage in which Goetherejects mixed marriage between Christians and Jews — it seems certainthat this treasure was gleaned from some anti-Semitic tract, and notfrom the original. 'You would be astonished,' said a man who knew himwell, 'to see Adolf Hitler's library. Whole walls full of the mostbeautiful books. And all of them unread.' He could not force himself tolook at Rosenberg's important and dangerous manuscript; he releasedthe bomb, sight unseen, hoping that nothing would go wrong.Years later, a Polish journalist, by way of testing his learning, askedhim frankly: 'What great minds of the past have exerted a decisiveinfluence on Your Excellency in an intellectual sense?' Hitler replied: 'Itis hard to list the number of those minds in the past which havefurnished fertilizing contributions to every great idea. Our whole bodyof views arises in overwhelming part from