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

THE REICHSTAG FIRE 569that his state was the best democracy; 'an ennobled form of democracy,'as Goebbels some months later declared to newspapermen at themeeting of the League of Nations; only that we do not 'obscure the willof the people streaming upward or render it infertile by parliamentaryintercalations.' There was more truth in this lie than the speakersthemselves believed. For it is not the force of armies, police, judges, butthe so-called 'will of the people,' that almost imperceptibly, but mosteffectively, tyrannizes the will of the individual; caught in the popularwill or the social mood, the individual is carried upward by themounting flood or drawn down by the receding wave — this is humannature and cannot be entirely prevented by the most excellent state. Butit was to the credit of the liberal state that it did make room for theindividual conscience amid the maelstrom of the mass; that it did forceupon him a freedom of choice, which he himself was far from alwaysdesiring. The new democracy, ennobled by flags, drums, andconcentration camps, now quickly put an end to this liberal freedomwhich elevates its citizens by education. Set in motion through no effortof their own, that section of the people which had hitherto resisted nowbegan to forget its remnant of personal conscience; it no longer obeyedits own judgment, but the great super-mind which led the marchcolumns and thought for all. The soul of the individual was broken apartby the disintegration of the popular will, and National Socialistpropaganda skillfully exploited the lack of logic in human desires. Eventhose who were most violently opposed to National Socialism could notdeny its reality; and this reality was a mighty attraction. The bitteresthatred against Hitler could not deny the grandeur of the mass drama thatwas breaking over the nation — no political conviction could banishfrom the world the eternal march rhythm of the Horst Wessel song. Thepower of accomplished facts called forth reluctant admiration; theworship of bigness, even when it is hostile, degenerated, in the Germanyof 1933, into an ugly fanaticism and servility. Napoleon, the century-oldnightmare of foreign grandeur, had appeared among the Germans; nowhe belonged to them, as though created and achieved by their longing;Fate, which had denied them victory in 1918, now belatedly gave them,if not victory, a victory celebration.