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

572 DER FUEHRERthat he was already master and that resistance would serve no purpose.This state — which dominated men by fear and hope; which did notentrench itself in citadels of power, but permeated the whole people;which did not bind itself by laws, but commanded and altered itscommands according to circumstance — had its models in history.Plutarch tells us that Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, purposely issuedno written laws; 'for he believed that the most important and excellentdecrees, aimed at the happiness and virtue of the state, persist firm andimmutable only if they have been deeply imprinted upon the characterof the citizens by education, because in the free will they have a bondwhich is stronger than any compulsion. . . . On the other hand, he held itadvisable not to restrict, by prescribed formulae and immutablecustoms, all the trifling concerns which relate to trade and commerceand which are continuously changed this way and that, but to leavethem to the judgment of wise and prudent men....' It was into such an'educational state' that Hitler wished gradually to remold the old 'legislativestate.' He took his first measure in this direction on March 14, whenhe created, through his cabinet, a 'Ministry for Popular Enlightenmentand Propaganda,' and entrusted it to the most willing and capable of hispupils, who until then had implemented his propagandist inspirations inthe party: Doctor Joseph Goebbels.Goebbels had been an unsuccessful novelist, an unsuccessfuldramatist, and an unsuccessful film writer — all this side by side withhis activity as an extremely successful political speaker. He waspossessed by the idea that all success in these fields is merely a questionof publicity; he was convinced, far more seriously than Hitler, thatideas, desires, standards, could be forced on a nation from above. Themunicipal theaters of Germany suddenly began to produce his plays; hisnovel Michael suddenly found a mass public, and only because he wasthe minister. This was the beginning of an artificial intellectual tornado,in which the driest leaves flew highest. Writers whom no one hadwanted to read marched, with the swastika in their buttonholes, up toterrified publishers and forced them to print large editions;incompetence loudly protested that it had been repressed only becauseof its patriotic