Hitler and his God

Rienzi

Normally one does not become a medium, one is born with the disposition. Are there any indications of occult occurrences in Hitler’s life prior to the period to which the testimonies refer? One such event is well known in the literature, but never followed up in its far-reaching consequences. At the age of sixteen Hitler saw in Linz for the first time, and in the company of his friend August Kubizek, Wagner’s opera Rienzi. Kubizek has related Hitler’s reaction to this experience in detail. What renders it especially important is that Kubizek’s narration was afterwards confirmed by Hitler himself.

Wagner’s Rienzi is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313-54), the tribune who wanted to restore the glory of a corrupt and decadent Rome at the time that the Popes were residing in Avignon. Born in a humble family, Cola di Rienzo, in 1347, took up the gauntlet with the noble families who were de facto rulers of the city and oppressed the lower classes. Cola’s dream was the revival of the dignity and power of the former capital of the world. His ideal of a “sacred” and unified Italy bordered on the sublime, for he seems to have wanted to initiate the third period in humanity’s history, the Realm of the Spirit, as envisioned by Joachim of Fiore. At first the populace followed Rienzi (as he became known), who saw himself as a tribune like the leaders of the people in ancient Rome had been and consciously behaved like one. But when he began perorating about his higher speculations, beyond the improvement of their daily life, the popular classes abandoned him. Ultimately they revolted against him, at the instigation of the nobles, and killed the tribune, whom Wagner lets die in a vast conflagration.

Young Adolf seems to have felt, unexpectedly and forcefully, that his own destiny was prefigured in the events on the stage, carried by Wagner’s intensely evocative music. There was the idealistic man from nowhere; there was a crisis situation caused and exploited by despicable people; and there was the heroic protest and revolutionary action of a people’s tribune whose intention it was to usher in a new era. The dramatic betrayal by his people and the final conflagration will most probably have been felt as no more than a theatrical climax, although Hitler kept the possibility of a Weltenbrand, a world conflagration, in mind even in the 1930s; but Wagner’s opera libretto proved to be prophetical.

“It was the most impressive moment which I have known with my friend”, writes Kubizek. “When I think back to my friendship with Adolf Hitler in my youth, what has remained most strongly and clearly in my memory are not his monologues and neither his political ideas, but that nightly hour on the Freinberg”, where Hitler had “a visionary revelation of the way he was to follow”. After they had seen Rienzi and were shaken by the tragic end of the hero, they left the opera house in silence. “It was now midnight, but my friend, serious and withdrawn, both hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, continued walking down the street and out of the town.” They walked up to the top of a hill, the Freinberg. There “Adolf stood in front of me. He grasped both my hands and pressed them in his. This was a gesture which I had not yet known of him. The pressure of his hands told me how deeply his was moved. The words did not flow from his mouth as easily as usual, they rather burst forth from it, raw and hoarse …

“Gradually he freed himself by talking … It was as if another I spoke through him, by which he was touched as strongly as I was. It was in no way as when one says from a glib orator that he becomes intoxicated with his own words. On the contrary! I rather had the impression that he himself underwent with amazement what burst forth from him with elementary force … He was in an ecstatic state, a state of total rapture, in which he transposed what he had experienced in Rienzi into a formidable vision on another level, his own …The impression received from the opera was only the outward occasion forcing him to speak. As an accumulated flood breaks through a bursting dam, so the words broke forth from him. In magnificent, compelling images he disclosed to me his future and that of his people … He spoke about an assignment which he would receive from the people, to lead it from servitude up to the heights of freedom … He spoke about a special mission which would be conferred on him.” Many years would have to pass, wrote Kubizek, before he understood what that moment under the dark sky of a November night had meant for his friend. When they walked down from the hill into the town, the bells struck three. But Hitler turned around and started walking back towards the hill. “I want to be alone”, he said – and never mentioned the experience again.

Till July 1939, “before the war started”, when Hitler was the world-renowned all-powerful German Führer and Chancellor, Kubizek, though an accomplished musician, had never done better than becoming the secretary of a small municipality. Hitler now had the pride and joy of inviting his rediscovered friend to the Festspiele in the Bayreuth of their venerated Wagner, where he reigned as the supreme protector and benefactor. In one of their conversations Kubizek reminded Hitler of that moment on the Freinberg, supposing that, after all he had gone through and the vastness of his task, he would have forgotten it. “But I noticed as soon as I said the first words that he remembered that moment precisely, in every detail … I was also present when Adolf Hitler narrated to Mrs [Winifred] Wagner, whose guests we were, the occurrence which had taken place after the performance of Rienzi at Linz. Thus I found my own memory confirmed twice. And I have never been able to forget the words with which Hitler concluded his narration to Mrs Wagner. He said gravely: ‘That was when it began’.” 912

The very reliable Brigitte Hamann writes: “Hitler found it later of importance to be known as the incarnation of Rienzi.” 913 He was often called “the Tribune”, especially during the Munich period; and the not less reliable Ralph Reuth mentions that he was called “the Tribune” by his co-prisoners at Landsberg “with reference to Wagner’s Rienzi”. 914 This opera, Wagner’s first, was hardly ever performed; we may therefore suppose that Hitler had confided to one of his followers what he would tell later to Winifred Wagner. The Party Rally in Nuremberg will each year open with the Rienzi overture, which Köhler calls “the quasi official Reich overture” and “a musical summary of Hitler’s ideological programme”, while Serpico calls it “the unofficial hymn of the Third Reich”. “In the Third Reich the music of Wagner occupied a dominating position, because it was so eminently tuned to the Nazi myths and served as their ideal background.” 915

And hereby goes a story. In the spring of 1938, Robert Ley, the Reichsführer of the German Workers’ Front, asked Hitler why it was always Wagner’s music which had to open the Party Rallies when there were so many excellent living composers in Germany, eager to express the National Socialist worldview in their music. Hitler was sceptical but fixed a date to hear the submitted compositions. The day before the audition, however, he asked that after the other works the Rienzi overture would also be played. And so it happened. “I must admit”, wrote Speer years later in Spandau prison, “that the familiar sublimity of [the Rienzi overture], which hitherto regularly had opened the Party Rallies, came across like a revelation.”

Hitler’s words to Ley on that occasion have been passed down: “You know, Ley, it isn’t by chance that I have the Party Rallies open with the overture to Rienzi. It’s not just a musical question. At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper’s son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theatre at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more.” 916 But the day came, in April 1945, that Kubizek was once more reminded of “the primal scene of Hitler’s career” on the Freinberg. “When in those terrible days of April 1945 I followed deeply shaken the battle for the Reich Chancellery which ended the world conflagration [the Second World War], I could not help thinking of the final scene in Rienzi, when the Tribune perishes in the flames of the burning capitol.” 917