In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

INDIVIDUALITY = COLLECTIVITY (LEADER) 387
For Adolf Hitler, the political crisis is less a problem to be solved
through leadership than an opportunity for the potential Leader to
discover and prove his genius. In his description of how a Leader finds
his way to power, he pays no attention to strategies: "Nearly always,
such an impetus is needed in order to summon genius to action. Fate's
hammer-stroke, which throws one person to the ground, suddenly finds
steel in another, and although the shell of everyday life is broken, the
nucleus lies open to the eyes of the astonished world. Society now resists
and does not want to believe that the apparently 'identical' person is now
suddenly supposed to be a 'different' being-a process that is repeated
with every eminent individual" (Hitler, 321). The Leader's most important
task is "to set the masses in motion" (118), and to this end he is
ready to sacrifice all personal interests (167). But in contrast to the
widely accepted notion of Leadership, in which the Leader is driven by
the masses even as he inspires them, Hitler's concept denies this reciprocity.
For him, politics is characterized by an almost hostile polarity between
the Leader's genius and the inertia of the masses. Since he sees no
need for collective approval of the Leader's decisions, he abhors the idea
of a nonhierarchical relationship between the Leader and the populace:
"Shouldn't the task of the leader lie in conceiving a creative idea or plan,
rather than in making the ingeniousness of his plan understandable to a
flock of sheep and blockheads for the purpose of begging for their
gracious consent? ... Has this crowd ever been able to grasp an idea
before its greatness was proclaimed by its success? Is not every ingenious
action in this world the visible protest of genius against the inertia of the
masses?" (86).
Scarcely anyone ever raises the question of where a Leader will take
his followers once he has set them in motion and once the original crisis
that brought him to power is resolved. Does the concern with keeping
things in motion replace the need to know the direction of the movement?
Having emerged from a military revolt in Rio Grande do SuI, the
southernmost state of Brazil, and having marched across the whole
country, the Coluna Prestes (Prestes Column), a group of several hundred
soldiers led by Captain Luis Carlos Prestes, arrives in the northern state
of Maranhao in January. [see Center = Periphery (Infinitude)] By the end
of the year, Prestes and his men have covered almost fifteen thousand
miles and are planning to seek political asylum in Bolivia (Drummond,