Hitler and his God

A Place in the Sun

Germany as a coherent nation was born in 1871, strangely enough in the Hall of Mirrors of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles. Its formation was the result of the political talent and unrelenting efforts of one man, Otto von Bismarck, who became its first chancellor. The emperor of the new nation was the Hohenzollern William I, king of Prussia, who thus became the primus inter pares of no less than eighteen German princes, including four kings, all continuing to wield the sceptre in their hereditary principalities. Prussia became not only the heartland of the new nation, to which it would impart its autocratic and militaristic peculiarities, it also accounted for something like two thirds of the total territory, comprising most of the Rhineland.

A profound change took place in the new Germany, clearly discernible in the last decade of the nineteenth century: the transition from an agrarian country into an industrial state. Sebastian Haffner writes: “Germany had already to a great extent become an individual state under Bismarck [who was Chancellor until 1894], but it was in the Wilhelmian period [i.e. under William II] that the industry developed as it did in no other land except far away America.” 398 The statistics provided for instance in Fritz Fischer’s Krieg der Illusionen are impressive. Germany in those years beat its neighbours in practically every field. It became the leading nation in the chemical, electrical and optical industries, backed up by the powerful banks. It planned and began building the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, aimed directly at the ever more important oil fields in the Middle East and at the heart of the British colonial empire, while securing a strong foothold in Turkey, on the southern threshold of Russia. It intended to challenge Great Britain also on the seas.

In step with “the enormous German economic upswing” (Fischer) grew its hardly less considerable self-esteem, which might also be called Prussian arrogance or conceit. Haffner says that “an excessive feeling of power” developed at that time. “The nation’s mood of conscious power could absorb unlimited bombast”, writes Barbara Tuchman sarcastically. “Germans knew themselves to be the strongest military power on earth, the most efficient merchants, the busiest bankers, penetrating every continent, financing the Turks, flinging out a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad, gaining the trade of Latin America, challenging the sea power of Great Britain, and in the realm of the intellect systematically organizing, under the concept of Wissenschaft, every branch of human knowledge. They were deserving and capable of mastery of the world. Rule by the best must be fulfilled. By this time Nietzsche, as Brandes wrote in 1909, held ‘undisputed sway’ over the minds of his countrymen. What they lacked and hungered for was the world’s acknowledgment of their mastery. So long as it was denied, frustration grew and with it the desire to compel acknowledgment by the sword.” 399

The slogan of those years was that Germany, latecomer among the dominant European nations, wanted its own “place in the sun” – but then a rather ample one. Its industry consumed vast amounts of iron ore and coal, of which it had only limited reserves; therefore its industrialists and military planners cast a greedy eye on the iron ore mines and coal fields in Belgium and northern France. The myth of the lack of “living space”, launched at that time of a rapid population increase (and actually contradicted by the success of its industry and economy), initiated the first ideas of a conquest of spaces in Russia, sparsely populated by backward, inferior people. Germany should become at the very least the dominant nation in Central Europe, not only economically but also politically and culturally. “Since Bismarck’s departure a kind of big power awareness had manifested itself. Many Germans of the Wilhelmian time, including members from all social classes, saw suddenly a great national vision, a national goal: we become a world power, we spread over the whole world – Germany on top of the world!” All this led to an unbridled pride, reflects Haffner, but unfortunately also to “a bombastic, excessively self-conscious, self-loving attitude”. 400

The members of “all social classes”, as Haffner would have it, belonged mainly to the middle class on the traditional, conservative right. They were the nurturing ground of the fanatically rightist university students at the feet of nationalist and anti-Semitic professors like Treitschke; and they constituted the reading public of authors like Lagarde, Langbehn, Bernhardi and Spengler who edged Germany on along its predestined glorious path of world hegemony. One finds the diverse trends represented by those authors merged in the writings of a curious figure, Houston Chamberlain (1855-1927), especially in his hugely successful book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899. Chamberlain was an Englishman, son of an admiral and cousin of the statesman Neville Chamberlain; he was educated in France, became a qualified biologist, and chose Germany as his second fatherland. He wrote (sometimes in trance) in German, and married Eva, the daughter of Richard Wagner, thereby becoming the master of Haus Wahnfried in Bayreuth, where the composer had spent the last years of his life and were he lay buried. Georges Mosse calls Chamberlain “the most influential of racial theorists”, and Joseph Goebbels praised him as “the father of our thought”.

“If from now on [the Germans abroad] remain closely bound to Germany, consciously, openly and proudly German”, wrote Chamberlain, “then the world conquest will mature with astonishing rapidity. To mention but one example: why should Germany have to conquer Australia? How would this conquest be begun? How would it be executed? But once even ten per cent of the inhabitants of that continent are conscious Germans, they will constitute nine tenths of the intelligence and education, and consequently provide the guiding mind.” Konrad Heiden, who quotes these words, comments: “Chamberlain writes ‘Australia’, because the vigilant military censorship forbade the intended ‘South America’ or plain ‘America’. Inspired by the mania of perfection, he foresaw a perfect Germany that would create a perfect world.”

And Heiden quotes Chamberlain again: “Once Germany has achieved the power – and we may confidently expect her to achieve it – she must immediately begin to carry out a scientific policy of genius. Augustus undertook a systematic transformation of the world, and Germany must do the same … Equipped with offensive and defensive weapons, organized as firmly and flawlessly as the Army, superior to all in art, science, technology, industry, commerce, finance, in every field, in short, teacher, helmsman and pioneer of the world, every man at his post, every man giving his utmost for the holy cause – thus Germany, emanating efficiency, will conquer the world by inner superiority.” 401 Race was for Chamberlain “the dominant principle of history. He saw the German race as the only one capable of creating culture and rising up, since the third century, from the ‘chaos of peoples’ caused by the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. To this race belonged the future if it could free oneself from the anti-Germanic elements, in the first place from the Jews. Of all Germanic peoples it was specifically the Germans who were called to rule the world. If they did not succeed in this, they were condemned to perish.” 402

Emperor William II was one of Chamberlain’s readers, considered him his intellectual advisor and even mentor, decorated him with the Iron Cross, a war medal, and decreed that a copy of Foundations should be present in every Prussian library. As late as 1922 the emperor would write in his memoirs: “Germanhood in its glory was first explained and preached to the enthused German people by Chamberlain.” 403

Another admirer paying homage to Houston Chamberlain was Adolf Hitler when in 1923, a few weeks before his Beer Hall Putsch, he visited Haus Wahnfried for the first time. “It is clear that Hitler had carefully planned his visit to Wahnfried”, writes Brigitte Hamann, “which happened at a moment when he was already considered someone special, even the generally hoped for future ‘saviour of Germany’ … That he went there at that very moment, shortly before the Putsch and the expected breakthrough to power, took on the air of a sort of consecration. As religious believers go on a pilgrimage before making an important decision, so Hitler went to obtain the blessings of Chamberlain and of the deceased master, Richard Wagner.” 404

By then Chamberlain was a bedridden man who could only hold Hitler’s hand and mumble some hardly understandable words. But afterwards he still managed to write a letter to Hitler in which he thanked God for having been able to meet, at the end of his life, the redeemer of Germany. “That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality … May God protect you!” 405 Siegfried Wagner was equally impressed by Hitler’s first visit: “Hitler is a wonderful man, the real soul of the German people. He must succeed.” 406

“Hitler appears as the specifically radical representative of a concept of German world hegemony that can be traced back to the late Bismarck period. As early as the turn of the century, it had condensed into specific war aims, and after the failed attempt of 1914-18 a fresh attempt was made to carry it out, with new and greater resolution, in the Second World War. An imperialistic drive nearly a century old culminated in Hitler.” (Joachim Fest 407)