The German Genius

theses: struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive…He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world where eternal struggle is the law of life has no right to exist.” 8
    Hitler’s biologism was intimately linked to his understanding of history. 9 He knew very little about prehistory but certainly regarded himself as something of a classicist, fond of saying that his “natural home” was ancient Greece or Rome, and he had more than a passing acquaintance with Plato. 10 Partly because of this, he considered the races of the East (the old “Barbarians”) as inferior. Organized religion, Catholicism in particular, was also doomed, owing to its anti-scientific stance and its unfortunate interest in the poor (“weaklings”). For Hitler, mankind was divided into three—creators of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture—and only the “Aryans” were capable of creating culture. The decline of culture was always due to the same reason: miscegenation. 11 This helps explain Hitler’s affinity for Hegel. Hegel had argued that Europe was central in history and that Russia and the United States were peripheral. Land-locked Linz reinforced this view. “Throughout his life Hitler remained an inland-orientated German, his imagination untouched by the sea…He was completely rooted within the cultural boundaries of the old Roman Empire.” This attitude may just have led Hitler to fatally underestimate the resolve of that periphery—Britain, the United States, and Russia.
    It is doubtful that Hitler was as well read as his admirers claimed, but he did know some architecture, art, military history, general history, and technology, and also felt at home in music, biology, medicine, and the history of civilization and religion. He sometimes surprised his listeners with his knowledge in a variety of fields. One of his doctors, for example, was once astonished to discover that the Führer fully grasped the effects of nicotine on the coronary vessels. But Hitler was largely self-taught, which had significant consequences. He never had a teacher to give him a systematic or comprehensive grounding in any field. Furthermore, World War I, which began when Hitler was twenty-five, acted as a brake (and a break) in his education. Hitler’s thoughts stopped developing in 1914; thereafter, he was largely confined to the halfway house of ideas in Pan-Germany described in Chapter 22.
    We must be careful, moreover, not to pitch the Führer’s thought too high. 12 As Werner Maser highlights in his psychohistory of Hitler, much of his later reading was done merely to confirm the views he already held. Second, in order to preserve a consistency in his position, he was required to do severe violence to the facts. Hitler several times argued that Germany had abandoned its expansion toward the East “six hundred years ago.” This had to do with his explanation of Germany’s failure in the past, and its future needs. Yet both the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns had had a well established “ Ostpolitik ”—Poland, for instance, being partitioned three times.
    C ULTURAL P ESSIMISM , C ONSERVATIVE R EVOLUTIONARIES , R EACTIONARY M ODERNISM
     
    The well-established German tradition of cultural pessimism had been continued in Weimar by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Fritz Stern describes Moeller van den Bruck as an outsider from his early years. Expelled from his Gymnasium in mysterious circumstances, he went into exile to escape military service, while the modest fortune he inherited “freed him from the obligation of steady employment.” 13 He began his writing with a trilogy on modern German art but he finished only the first volume. After other books, on theater, he was finally forced into military service where, for a short time at least, he was branded a military deserter. 14 He did know some of the early figures of German Expressionism, notably Ernst Barlach and certainly, to begin with, he was not anti-Semitic. But his extensive time abroad seems to have produced in him an idealized image of Germany and his eight-volume history of the Germans, Die Deutschen (1904–10) was the first expression of his nationalism. After this, he made the fateful turn to meta-history, distinguishing in Die Zeitgenossen (six volumes) between the “young peoples” and the “old peoples,” between French skepticism, English common sense, and Italian