Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People

"He was a literary scholar who applied much more attention to matters of language , looking at the rhetorical concepts that someone like Hitler was using. So everything gets reduced to these militaristic concepts of struggle and battle. Really, it’s about the way in which someone like that successfully turns his own quite odd life story into the story of a country. All political extremists do this. You convert your individual grudge or grievance into a bigger narrative. That would be true of Islamist radicals in this country right now, as well as Nazis. Someone like Hitler successfully made his own life story emblematic. Yes, exactly. He was making himself into an animated version of the unknown soldier on the war memorial. He was the ordinary person who came back to articulate the alleged views of the people killed in their millions in the First World War. Yes, on the largest scale. J P Stern is very well placed to talk about his, as he knows about language, probably from reading Karl Kraus , the great inter-war satirist who also wrote very astute things on all this. Hitler’s speeches have very particular patterns in them. It’s essentially the redemptive story – there we are down in this abyss and I’m going to lead you out of it. No, no! I don’t think that at all! I’ve listened to lots of his speeches, including things like opening a motorway or something, and you’d be surprised at the level of economic analysis, and then, of course, there are these moments when he just goes off on a completely wild tangent, whenever he touches upon the subject of Jews. Like all anti-Semites. “ The Hitler Myth is about how grannies would knit socks for him, about the whole interaction with the German people” Supposing you and I were having lunch and one of us looked down at the salt cellar and said: ‘It’s a well-known fact that the Jews monopolised the Medieval salt trade in the South of France.’ That’s what he would be like and that would lead on to some other aspect of their perfidy. That’s an incredibly complicated subject. In a way there’s a type of contempt and hatred with a sneaking admiration for their biological pertinacity. That they survive everything. It’s a love-hate relationship, though with a great deal less love, obviously. What I mean is that he would have thought they maintain their racial integrity, which he admires. Yes. And it’s a very complicated relationship. If you go to Israel the Polish Jews always talk about the snobbery of German Jews, who are the most cultured and sophisticated. The most German, basically. Ironically, they were assimilated and non-religious so that their point of identification was with German culture. Of course. He must have been. It’s also the way in which he offers a transgressive temptation. In other words he is inviting you to think dark thoughts. He’s articulating dark thoughts people had in their heads anyway and giving them voice. A bit like that, yes. He’s tempting people to think things and go along with things he’s articulating. The whole thing was set up and he would deliberately hold the speeches in twilight or in darkness, all of which he says he got from being inside Catholic churches which use twilight and candlelight to manipulative effect. He deliberately set out to do that because people become emotionally susceptible in that kind of environment. If you factor in the darkness, the flaming torches, the drum rolls and trumpet blasts it would have been almost tribal in its power. It was quite deliberate. Also because he didn’t get up for most of the day. He didn’t surface until late in the day. He reversed time. He was a night operator. They all were. Stalin was another one. Well, it was very frustrating for the nine-to-five bureaucrats. It would have disordered orderly government and then the other annoying thing if you were a general was to have some little bloke who constantly harped on about his worm’s eye experience of WWI to people who’d been to the most intellectually rigorous staff colleges of the world. They’d spent five years doing this intellectual training to be told by this little jerk: ‘What do you know? I was there.’"