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

720 DER FUEHRERthe legend of his monastic frugality, giving it a quality of the pitiful,saintly, and awe-inspiring.Restless, insatiable, and longing for greatness as a public figure, inprivate life he found his well-being in a mild uneventfulness, and theinevitable apparatus of luxury that grew up about him was calculatedonly to protect him from noise, disturbance, and compulsion. Even hiscrowded banquets were a kind of menagerie which he attended as aspectator. Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Wilhelm Frick, resembledhim in this; they were silent, fishlike natures, with a taste for quiet andlittleness. But the party leadership was also full of beasts of prey, thetype which rends more than it can consume, and which likes to take itspleasures beneath the public eye. Goring and Goebbels were typical;Hitler was obliged to attack them publicly, but could not improve them.They were at all times ready, was their reply, to die for their Leader; butyou could not expect a man, who gave his life without stint, to stint himselfin the pleasures of life. It seemed to afford these men a perversepleasure to insult public opinion by a shameless exhibition of theirmagnificence. There was a kind of sporting rivalry between them intheir experiments on the public patience: how long would peoplecontinue to find mockery wonderful?The band of armed intellectuals had at last come into money. Theyflung themselves into lives of wild, indecent sybaritism, forever pursuedby the secret anxiety that they might be dead tomorrow or sooner. Hitlertried to teach them that it was better to 'find bliss in commanding' ratherthan in stolen motor-cars, expropriated castles and villas, wild eatingand drinking bouts, and obscene distractions which sometimes occurredbefore the eyes of an indignant public.This conflict between the Leader and his lieutenants involved morethan dignified behavior. It was an attempt to remold the character of theleaders, to cleanse them of the incalculably and wildness of the years ofstruggle and give them the hardness and sobriety which are needed in aruling class. Ruthlessness in batde and pleasure had given the armedbohemians force for the attack; but to preserve and to mold, they wouldneed the self-discipline which makes the bohemian into an armedintellectual. The 'chosen