The German Genius

achievement: a neurotic striving for affection; a neurotic striving for power; neurotic withdrawal; and neurotic submissiveness.
    The most contentious part of Horney’s theory was her blaming neurosis on the contradictions of contemporary American life. She insisted that in America more than anywhere else there existed an inherent contradiction between competition and success on the one hand (“never give a sucker an even break”) and good neighborliness on the other (“love your neighbor as yourself”); between the promotion of ambition by advertising (“keeping up with the Joneses”) and the inability of the individual to satisfy these ambitions. This modern world, despite its material advantages, foments the feeling in many individuals that they are “isolated and helpless.”
    F ROM H EGEL TO H ITLER
     
    In 1924, the year that tuberculosis killed Kafka, Adolf Hitler celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday—in prison. He was not sent back to Austria, but was in Landsberg jail, west of the Bavarian capital, serving a five-year sentence for treason and his part in the Munich Putsch of 1923. The trial was front-page news in every German newspaper for more than three weeks, and Hitler broke through to a national audience. During his time in prison Hitler wrote the first part of Mein Kampf , which helped establish him as the leader of the National Socialists, helped him lay the foundation of the Hitler myth, and helped him clarify his ideas.
    Whatever his other attributes, Hitler certainly thought of himself as a thinker and an artist, with a grasp of technical-military matters, of natural science, and above all of history. He was transformed into the figure he became first by World War I and the ensuing peace, but also by the education he gave himself. The Führer’s ideas, as revealed in his table talk during World War II, are directly traceable to his thinking as a young man.
    The historian George L. Mosse has disinterred the more distant intellectual origins of the Third Reich, on which this section is chiefly based. 6 He shows how an amalgam of völkisch mysticism and spirituality grew up in Germany in the nineteenth century, in part a response to the Romantic movement and to the bewildering pace of industrialization, and was also an aspect of German unification. In addition to the influence of thinkers and writers who helped create this cast of mind—people like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, who stressed “German intuition” as a new creative force in the world, and Eugen Diederichs, who openly advocated “a culturally grounded nation guided by the initiated elite”—there were nineteenth-century German books such as that by Ludwig Woltmann, examining the art of the Renaissance, identifying “Aryans” in positions of power and showing how much the Nordic type was admired even then. Mosse also emphasizes how Social Darwinism threaded through society and describes the many German attempts at utopias—from “Aryan” colonies in Paraguay and Mexico to nudist camps in Bavaria, which tried to put völkisch principles into effect. 7
    In his own book Hitler insists that while at school in Linz he “learned to understand and grasp the meaning of history.” “To ‘Learn’ history,” he explained, “means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events.” One of these forces, he felt (and this too he had picked up as a boy), was that Britain, France, and Russia were intent on encircling Germany, and he thereafter never rid himself of this view. For him history was invariably the work of great men—his heroes were Charlemagne, Rudolf von Hapsburg, Friedrich the Great, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Kaiser Wilhelm I. Hitler therefore was much more in the mold of Stefan George or Rainer Maria Rilke than that of Marx or Engels, for whom the history of class struggle was paramount. For Hitler, history was a catalog of racial struggles, although the outcome always depended on great men: “[History] was the sum total of struggle and war, waged by each against all with no room for either mercy or humanity.”
    Hitler’s biological thinking, says Mosse, was an amalgam of Thomas R. Malthus, Charles Darwin, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, and William McDougall. “Man has become great through struggle…. Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality…All life is bound up in three