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

HE IS BOTH TERRIBLE AND BANAL 75was not lack of success and resultant poverty that made him into suchan overpowering nonentity. He might have been great in the contemptof outward success; instead he passionately worshiped it. Success in hiseyes is the ultimate standard of human worth — yet what a minuteparticle he is, vegetating beside his own standard. And as a nonentity heis by no means modest; in his lonely hours he has been filled with anexuberant megalomania since childhood; but he pays dearly for thesehours with the feeling of pitiful doubt in himself which attacks himagain and again in the presence of strange people. He is not modest —that is, conscious of his worth and therefore not insisting on it; no, leftalone with himself, he finds everything within him, but in the presenceof men, he feels himself to be nothing. And thus he moves among themin an obscurity which has become a mask; and except in moments ofspecial excitement, this obscurity expresses itself in a strange shrinkingof his physical aspect. In good times it is his aims, his plans, his desiresthat give him life and energy; but people are only a burden, an exertionto him; every new face is in a sense a new task, something that must beconquered and subjugated — discouraged by his terrible failure inyouth, he does not feel equal to this task. As for his finer feelings —tenderness, affection, friendliness — he devotes them chiefly to himself.Here, be it noted, we are speaking of a young man of twenty-five andhis private aspect; this private aspect has a poverty of feeling that robshis relations to men of all color and charm. Richard Wagner had writtenthat the study of history must create hatred of mankind, and in exactlythis sense Hitler, even in his youth, saw man only as a fragment ofcurrent history. The living world around him is for him nothing,consequently he is nothing for it; hence the shadow of hostilenothingness about him, rendering him almost invisible. Hence hisunconscious demand for a new world in which, as he himself expressedit, he would be permitted to do nothing but 'respect his superior,contradict no one, blindly obey.'Heaven sent this new world to him and many of his like in August,1914. In Berlin, Vienna, Paris, St. Petersburg, enthusiastic masses, filledwith a sense of happiness mysterious to us today, marched through thestreets, singing Die Wacht am Rhein, the