Richard Overy
“Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics.
Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives
alongside those of the twentieth century, the tenth or the thirteenth. A
hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of
signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the
miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums.
Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets
on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness,
ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; fascism has
given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the
national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal
development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist
society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of
National Socialism.
Leon Trotsky-From What Is National Socialism
“fascism comes only when the working class shows complete
incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”
― Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
First published in 1944, Konrad Heiden’s superb biography of
Adolf Hitler culminated in 20 years of study and political opposition to Hitler.
The book covers from the 1920s up to June 1934. Heiden wrote and researched it in
near real-time, and it is one of the best biographies on the subject of Hitler
and the rise of German fascism. As Robert Gale Woolbert, in his review,
correctly writes Heiden’s book is “A profusion of detail and brilliant
psychological understanding. The analysis is not only of the man but of his
movement and the economic, social, and intellectual disorder on which it fed
and finally attained success”.[1]
While many modern-day historians, such as Daniel Goldhagen,[2]
have placed the blame for the rise of German fascism and the Holocaust on
“ordinary Germans,” it was, however, a shock to see Gale Woolbert’s 1944 review
containing and defending the same right-wing theory. Wollbert writes, “Where
many will feel that Heiden's explanation breaks down is in his unwillingness to
place responsibility for Nazism squarely on the German people or any important
class or group among them. This ability to dodge the necessity of rigorous and
honest self-criticism seems to characterize even the German liberals and German
Jews who have suffered most at the hands of their countrymen.[3]
Despite being over eighty years old, Heiden’s book has a
contemporary relevance. It should be read alongside Leon Trotsky’s The Struggle
Against Fascism by all those who want to understand the development of fascism
of the past and the present. The British Historian Richard Overy writes the introduction.
Overy highly praises and defends the book against those who have sought to downplay
its significance.
Since its publication over eighty years ago, there has been
a veritable cottage industry solely devoted to the study of Hitler and German
fascism with varying degrees of success. But as John Lukacs writes in his book The
History of Hitler, “We are not yet finished with Hitler ("[wir sind] mit
Hitler noch lange nicht fertig"), wrote two members of a younger
generation of German historians, independently of each other, in the 1980s--and
this is so in both the broader and the narrower sense of "finished."
The first of these should be evident. History means the endless rethinking--and
reviewing and revisiting--of the past. History, in the broad sense of the word,
is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews: People
and events are retried and retried again. There is nothing profound in this
observation since this is what all thinking is about. The past is the only
thing we know. All human knowledge springs from past knowledge. All human
thinking involves a rethinking of the past.
This is true in the narrower sense, too, involving the
historical profession. The notion that once the scientific method has been
applied accurately, with all extant documents exhausted, the work will be
finished, and the result will be final ("the final and definitive history
of the Third Reich, certified by German, American, British, Russian, liberal
and conservative, nationalist and Jewish historians") is a
nineteenth-century illusion. There are probably more than one hundred
biographies of Hitler, while there is no certainty that the 101st may not
furnish something new and valid. What may matter even more than the accumulated
quantity of the research (note the word "re-search") is the quality
of the revision. What is its purpose? In the broader sense, the purpose of
historical knowledge is more than accuracy; it is understanding. In the
narrower sense, the purpose of a revisionist historian may be exposé, scandal,
sensation--or the more or less unselfish wish to demolish untruths. It may be his
desire for academic or financial success, to further his advancement in the
eyes of his colleagues, or, in the greater world, to gain publicity, or to
further the cause of a political or national ideology--on which the treatment
of his subject sometimes depends. There will be evidence in this book that this
applies on this occasion--to the historical treatment of Hitler too.”[4].
Hitler has legitimately long fascinated historians, but the
fascination of sections of the British ruling elite and aristocracy[5]
who saw Hitler as an ally against Bolshevism is not so legitimate. Hitler’s
Mein Kampf was a huge publishing success--in England and the United States,
especially before the war. During my research for this article, I paid a trip
to the London Library to find other work by Heiden on Hitler and the Nazis (a
term that Heiden coined). I don’t know who was surprised more, me or the
librarian, to see a copy of Heiden’s History of National Socialism published in
1934 in London by Meuthen and Co. Ltd with a gold embossed swastika on both the
spine and cover. Perhaps all the more galling since Heiden was an active socialist.
You can draw your own conclusions.
It would be a mistake to see this book as another Hitler
biography. Heiden was an active socialist in opposition to Hitler and German fascism.
He was a member of the German Social Democratic Party(SPD). Heiden, son of a
German trade union official, had studied Hitler for 23 years. So much so that,
according to Dorothy Thompson, he followed Hitler “like a Javert tracking down
his man.”[6]
As David North writes in his excellent review of Goldhagen’s
book “ The History of the German social democracy, in the years when it
represented a revolutionary mass movement of the working class—that is, from
the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War I in 1914—is one of
unrelenting struggle against anti-Semitism. The exigencies of the political
struggle in the working class required an intransigent attitude toward all
forms of anti-Semitic propaganda. Aside from democratic principles and moral
considerations, the Social Democratic Party saw the association of
anti-Semitism with demagogic anticapitalist rhetoric as an attempt to disorient
the working class and subordinate it to the political representatives of the
middle class.”[7]
Heiden completely agreed with the program of the SPD and fought for it with
every waking moment. The Gestapo hunted him, and he only just escaped with his
life.
I have been unable to ascertain whether Heiden read any of
Leon Trotsky's writings on German fascism, but some of Heiden’s analysis of the
class nature of German fascism would not look out of place in the work of
Trotsky. Heiden writes, “They drew to them “the flotsam, the stragglers living
on the fringe of their class . . . the unemployed . . . the declassed of all
classes.” In all ages, this has been the way of counterrevolution: an upper
layer that has lost its hold in society seeks the people and finds the rabble.
The officers were out to find a demagogue, of whom it could be said that he was
a worker. They found their leader in the lowest mass of their subordinates. The
spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter
figure.[8]
Perhaps Heiden’s most important contribution has been to
understand and explain the nature of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews. Hitler’s
anti-Semitism was, according to Heiden, a by-product of his all-consuming
hatred of the proletariat. Hitler, he explained,” hated the whole great sphere
of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into a
product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in
this production process. All his life, the workers were, for him, a picture of
horror, a dismal, gruesome mass. Everything that he later said from the
speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies. Herein lies the
key to an understanding of Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein
Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his
encounters with the labor movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first
came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many
Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on
him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour
movement did not repel him because it was led by Jews; the Jews repelled him
because they led the labour movement.” Heiden concluded, “It was not
Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf
Hitler’s anti-Semitism.”[9]
It would be fair to say that history has not been very kind
to Heiden’s Marxist analysis of the rise of Hitlerite fascism. The modern-day
Marxist writer David North rescued Heiden from the “condescension of history.” Apart
from North, Heiden has largely been ignored, and his opposition to the right-wing
historiography that is so loved today that “ordinary Germans” were responsible
for fascism has been written out of today's history books. Heiden shared the
same fate when he wasWhile still
alive. His Heiden’s
books and Marxist analysis came under heavy attack.
In an article called The Mass-Man: Hitler, Hans Kohn starts by
praising Heiden’s work, saying, “Mr. Heiden’s extremely well-written book is
based on expert knowledge of the biographical material and the political
background of Hitler’s rise to power. The dramatic terseness and vividness of
its narrative have lost nothing in the excellent translation. Its brilliant
analysis of German and, curiously enough, also of Russian politics makes the
book not only a journalistic masterpiece but an authentic work of historical
scholarship.
Kohn’s real opposition to Heiden comes to the fore when he
writes, “Yet the crucial question of the essentially German nature of Hitlerism
is not answered: Mr. Heiden seems to regard Hitler as representing the mind not
only of the German masses but of the modern masses everywhere. Though he
perceives the deep tie binding Hitler to the German masses and them to him, he
often writes as if Hitler had to conquer the German masses against their
innermost will. Hitlerism then appears as an international movement which could
have happened anywhere and which found in Germany only its accidental starting
point. Such an opinion underrates the deep roots of Hitlerism and Stalinism in
the intellectual soil and the social structure of Germany and Russia, and at
the same time, the intrinsic strength and the survival value of Western
civilization.”[10]
Perhaps the most provocative and repellent review of
Heiden’s work comes from the pens of the New York Times. They claimed Heiden
was a propagandist and uncritically reported: "To the leaders of the Third
Reich. Heiden was a hated and sought-after enemy. One of the Nazis' acts upon
taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books. The writer was a
propagandist of a special kind-one who used objectivity and documents to
destroy the object of his derision.... In 1932 his first book, History of National
Socialism, was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of
gaining power. When they took over... In 1933, he fled."[11]
Despite giving world governments significant examples of the
Nazi’s intentions and his books contained some of the earliest first-hand
reports of Jews who fell victim to torture and internment at Dachau near
Munich, Sachsenhausen or Oranienburg near Berlin, or Buchenwald near Weimar
following the mass arrests of 1938 western capitalist governments did nothing
to prevent the subsequent Holocaust.
Heiden is well worth reading today, and it is to David North’s
credit this great historian of the 20th century can be read in the
21st century.
Further Reading
How To Read Hitler- Neil Gregor
The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (Merit S.) Paperback
– Illustrated, 1 Jun. 1971by L. Trotskii (Author), George Breitman (Editor)
Heiden’s Selected works
History of National Socialism (Berlin, 1932)
Birth of the Third Reich (Zürich, 1934)
Hitler: A Biography (Zürich, appeared in two volumes,
1936–1937)
The New Inquisition (New York City, 1939)
Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (Boston, 1944)
[1]Der
Fuehrer-Reviewed by Robert Gale Woolbert-April 1944
www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1944-04-01/der-fuehrer
[2]
See David North The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s
Hitler’s Willing Executioners.wsws.org
[3]
www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1944-04-01/der-fuehrer
[4]
The Hitler of History- Chapter One www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lukacs-hitler.html?scp=80&sq=english%20history&st=cse
[5]
See The Queen’s Nazi salute: Historical revisionism in the service of state
censorship
Julie Hyland-22 July 2015-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/22/nazi-j22.html
[6]
National Socialism: Theory and Practice Dorothy Thompson July 1935 Published on
July 1, 1935-Foreign Affiairs
[7]
David North The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s
Hitler’s Willing Executioners.wsws.org
[8]
Der Fuehrer, Hitler’s Rise to Power-Konrad
Heiden—Haughton, Mifflin
[9]
Der Fuehrer, Hitler’s Rise to
Power-Konrad Heiden—Haughton, Mifflin
[10]
The Mass-Man: Hitler-By Hans Kohn-April 1944-
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1944/04/the-mass-man-hitler/655063
[11]
www.spartacus-educational.com/Konrad_Heiden.htm
