Far too few Americans know little accurate, detailed history as schools and colleges give short shrift to the teaching of government, social studies and history. Add to this the number of Americans who pay little attention - often saying they "don't do politics - and one has a recipe for sleepwalking into a dictatorship. Worse yet, many on the political right, including some media moguls (think Fox News) who know better focus on perceived short term political or monetary advantage or foolishly believe that they can control and manipulate demagogues like Donald Trump, a man with little self control and consumed by his ego and narcissism who has contempt for the rule of law and democracy itself. A new book
“trusted that constitutional processes and the return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic." Much the same is occurring today in America and the false belief that something similar cannot happen here is very dangerous. Here are article highlights.
Hitler is so fully
imagined a subject—so obsessively present on our televisions and in our
bookstores—that to reimagine him seems pointless. As with the Hollywood
fascination with Charles
Manson, speculative curiosity gives retrospective glamour to evil. Hitler
created a world in which women were transported with their children for days in
closed train cars and then had to watch those children die alongside them,
naked, gasping for breath in a gas chamber. . . . Yet allowing the specifics of his ascent to
be clouded by disdain is not much better than allowing his memory to be
ennobled by mystery.
So the historian
Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” (Knopf), an
aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an
inspired one. Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by
hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed
absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual
election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic
clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they
could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after
the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to
expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses
thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative
antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money.
The decent right
thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the
decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought
that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by
itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces
stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing
the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still
has not.
Ryback’s story begins soon
after Hitler’s very incomplete victory in the Weimar Republic’s parliamentary
elections of July, 1932. Hitler’s party, the National Socialist German Workers’
Party (its German initials were N.S.D.A.P.), emerged with thirty-seven per cent
of the vote, and two hundred and thirty out of six hundred and eight seats in
the Reichstag, the German parliament—substantially ahead of any of its rivals.
In the normal course of events, this would have led the aging warrior Paul von
Hindenburg, Germany’s President, to appoint Hitler Chancellor. The equivalent
of Prime Minister in other parliamentary systems, the Chancellor was meant to
answer to his party, to the Reichstag, and to the President, who appointed him
and who could remove him. Yet both Hindenburg and the sitting Chancellor, Franz
von Papen, had been firm never-Hitler men, and naïvely entreated Hitler to
recognize his own unsuitability for the role.
[A] failed attempt at a putsch in
Munich, in 1923, left him in prison, but with many comforts, much respect, and
paper and time with which to write his memoir, “Mein Kampf.” He reëmerged as
the leader of all the nationalists fighting for election, with an accompanying
paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (S.A.), under the direction of
the more or less openly homosexual Ernst Röhm, and a press office, under the
direction of Joseph Goebbels. (In the American style, the press office
recognized the political significance of the era’s new technology and social
media, exploiting sound recordings, newsreels, and radio, and even having
Hitler campaign by airplane.) Hitler’s plans were deliberately ambiguous, but
his purposes were not. . . . . he had, Ryback writes, “been driven by a single
ambition: to destroy the political system that he held responsible for the myriad
ills plaguing the German people.”
Ryback skips past the underlying
mechanics of the July, 1932, election on the way to his real subject—Hitler’s
manipulation of the conservative politicians and tycoons who thought that they
were manipulating him—but there’s a notable academic literature on what
actually happened when Germans voted that summer.
The popular picture of
the decline of the Weimar Republic—in which hyperinflation produced mass
unemployment, which produced an unstoppable wave of fascism—is far from the
truth. The hyperinflation had ended in 1923, and the period right afterward, in
the mid-twenties, was, in Germany as elsewhere, golden. The financial crash of
1929 certainly energized the parties of the far left and the far right. Still,
the results of the July, 1932, election weren’t obviously catastrophic.
The Germans were voting, in the
absent-minded way of democratic voters everywhere, for easy reassurances, for
stability, with classes siding against their historical enemies. They weren’t
wild-eyed nationalists voting for a millennial authoritarian regime that would
rule forever and restore Germany to glory, and, certainly, they weren’t voting
for an apocalyptic nightmare that would leave tens of millions of people dead
and the cities of Germany destroyed. They were voting for specific programs
that they thought would benefit them, and for a year’s insurance against the
people they feared.
Ryback spends most of his time
with two pillars of respectable conservative Germany, General Kurt von Schleicher
and the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. Utterly contemptuous of
Hitler as a lazy buffoon—he didn’t wake up until eleven most mornings and spent
much of his time watching and talking about movies—the two men still hated the
Communists and even the center-left Social Democrats more than they did anyone
on the right, and they spent most of 1932 and 1933 scheming to use Hitler as a
stalking horse for their own ambitions.
Schleicher is perhaps
first among Ryback’s too-clever-for-their-own-good villains, and the book
presents a piercingly novelistic picture of him. Though in some ways a classic
Prussian militarist, Schleicher, like so many of the German upper classes, was
also a cultivated and cosmopolitan bon vivant, whom the well-connected journalist
and diarist Bella Fromm called “a man of almost irresistible charm.” . . . . He
had no illusions about Hitler (“What am I to do with that psychopath?” he said
after hearing about his behavior), but, infinitely ambitious, he thought that
Hitler’s call for strongman rule might awaken the German people to the need for
a real strongman, i.e., Schleicher. . . . .the game plan was to have
the Brown Shirts crush the forces of the left—and then to have the regular
German Army crush the Brown Shirts.
Schleicher imagined himself a
master manipulator of men and causes. He liked to play with a menagerie of
glass animal figurines on his desk, leaving the impression that lesser beings
were mere toys to be handled. In June of 1932, he prevailed on Hindenburg to give
the Chancellorship to Papen, a weak politician widely viewed as Schleicher’s
puppet; Papen, in turn, installed Schleicher as minister of defense. Then they
dissolved the Reichstag and held those July elections which, predictably, gave
the Nazis a big boost.
Ryback’s gift for
detail joins with a nice feeling for the black comedy of the period. He makes
much sport of the attempts by foreign journalists resident in Germany,
particularly the New York Times’ Frederick T. Birchall, to normalize
the Nazi ascent—with Birchall continually assuring his readers that Hitler, an
out-of-his-depth simpleton, was not the threat he seemed to be, and that the
other conservatives were far more potent in their political maneuvering.
Given that Hitler had repeatedly
vowed to use the democratic process in order to destroy democracy, why did the
people committed to democracy let him do it?
Many historians have jousted with
this question, but perhaps the most piercing account remains an early one,
written less than a decade after the war by the émigré German scholar
Lewis Edinger, who had known the leaders of the Social Democrats well and
consulted them directly—the ones who had survived, that is—for his study. His
conclusion was that they simply “trusted that constitutional processes and the
return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic
and its chief supporters.”
The Social Democrats
may have been hobbled, too, by their commitment to team leadership—which meant
that no single charismatic individual represented them. Proceduralists and
institutionalists by temperament and training, they were, as Edinger
demonstrates, unable to imagine the nature of their adversary. They acceded to
Hitler’s ascent with the belief that by respecting the rules themselves they
would encourage the other side to play by them as well.
Indeed, most attempts to highlight
Hitler’s personal depravities (including his possibly sexual relationship with
his niece Geli, which was no secret in the press of the time; her apparent suicide,
less than a year before the election, had been a tabloid scandal) made him more
popular. In any case, Hitler was skilled at reassuring the Catholic center,
promising to be “the strong protector of Christianity as the basis of our
common moral order.”
Hitler’s hatred of
parliamentary democracy, even more than his hatred of Jews, was central to his
identity, Ryback emphasizes. Antisemitism was a regular feature of populist
politics in the region: Hitler had learned much of it in his youth from the
Vienna mayor Karl Lueger. But Lueger was a genuine populist democrat, who
brought universal male suffrage to the city. Hitler’s originality lay
elsewhere. . . . . Hitler’s hatred of the Weimar Republic was the result of
personal observation of political processes,” Ryback writes. “He hated the
haggling and compromise of coalition politics inherent in multiparty political
systems.”
Second only to Schleicher in
Ryback’s accounting of Hitler’s establishment enablers is the media magnate
Alfred Hugenberg. The owner of the country’s leading film studio and of the
national news service, which supplied some sixteen hundred newspapers, he was
far from an admirer. He regarded Hitler as manic and unreliable but found him
essential for the furtherance of their common program, and was in and out of
political alliance with him during the crucial year.
Hugenberg had begun
constructing his media empire in the late nineteen-teens, in response to what
he saw as the bias against conservatives in much of the German press, and he shared
Hitler’s hatred of democracy and of the Jews. But he thought of himself as a
much more sophisticated player, and intended to use his control of modern media
in pursuit of what he called a Katastrophenpolitik—a “catastrophe
politics” of cultural warfare, in which the strategy, Ryback says, was to
“flood the public space with inflammatory news stories, half-truths, rumors,
and outright lies.” The aim was to polarize the public, and to crater anything
like consensus.
What strengthened the
Nazis throughout the conspiratorial maneuverings of the period was certainly
not any great display of discipline. . . . The strength of the Nazis lay,
rather, in the curiously enclosed and benumbed character of their leader.
Hitler was impossible to discourage, not because he ran an efficient machine
but because he was immune to the normal human impediments to absolute power:
shame, calculation, or even a desire to see a particular political program put
in place.
He ran on the hydrogen
fuel of pure hatred. He did not want power in order to implement a program; he
wanted power in order to realize his pain. A fascinating and once classified
document, prepared for the precursor of the C.I.A., the O.S.S., by the
psychoanalyst Walter Langer, used first-person accounts to gauge the scale of
Hitler’s narcissism: “It may be of interest to note at this time that of all
the titles that Hitler might have chosen for himself he is content with the
simple one of ‘Fuehrer.’ . . . “His hatred for his opponents was both stronger
and less abstract than was his love for his people. That was (and remains) a
distinguishing mark of the mind of every extreme nationalist.”
Hindenburg, in his
mid-eighties and growing weak, became fed up with Schleicher’s Machiavellian
stratagems and dispensed with him as Chancellor. Papen, dismissed not long
before, was received by the President. He promised that he could form a working
majority in the Reichstag by simple means: Hindenburg should go ahead and
appoint Hitler Chancellor. Hitler, he explained, had made significant
“concessions,” and could be controlled. He would want only the Chancellorship,
and not more seats in the cabinet. What could go wrong? “You mean to tell me I
have the unpleasant task of appointing this Hitler as the next Chancellor?”
Hindenburg reportedly asked. He did. The conservative strategists celebrated
their victory. “So, we box Hitler in,” Hugenberg said confidently. Papen
crowed, “Within two months, we will have pressed Hitler into a corner so tight
that he’ll squeak!”
“The big joke on
democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own
destruction,” Goebbels said as the Nazis rose to power—one of those quotes that
sound apocryphal but are not. The ultimate fates of Ryback’s players are
varied, and instructive. Schleicher, the conservative who saw right through
Hitler’s weakness—who had found a way to entrap him, and then use him against
the left—was killed by the S.A. during the Night of the Long Knives, in 1934,
when Hitler consolidated his hold over his own movement by murdering his less
loyal lieutenants. Strasser and Röhm were murdered then, too. Hitler and
Goebbels, of course, died by their own hands in defeat, having left tens of
millions of Europeans dead and their country in ruins.
Does history have
patterns or merely circumstances and unique contingencies? Certainly, the
Germany of 1932 was a place unto itself. . . . .
We see through a glass
darkly, as patterns of authoritarian ambition seem to flash before our eyes: the
demagogue made strong not by conviction but by being numb to normal human
encouragements and admonitions; the aging center left; the media lords who want
something like what the demagogue wants but in the end are controlled by him;
the political maneuverers who think they can outwit the demagogue; the
resistance and sudden surrender. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in
bright midafternoon light, where politicians fall back on familiarities and
make faint offers to authoritarians and say a firm and final no—and then wake
up a few days later and say, Well, maybe this time, it might all work out, and
look at the other side! Precise circumstances never repeat, yet shapes and
patterns so often recur. In history, it’s true, the same thing never happens
twice.
Be very afraid for the future if Americans refuse to wake up to the danger Trump poses.
