Hitler's Private Library Page 15
Christa Schröder remembered how Hitler would discuss the length of a river or the size of a city and then turn to his encyclopedia. “Hitler, excessively exacting in all things, would then look it up in two encyclopedias in order to be entirely certain,” Schröder recalled. Traudl Junge related an identical process, recalling an evening debate on the exact height of Napoleon Bonaparte, when Hitler left the room and returned with the corresponding volume of his encyclopedia. Both Junge and Schröder spoke of Hitler’s preference for Meyer’s Encyclopedia, a set of which is visible in a photograph of a Berghof bookcase, but the presence of The Great Brockhaus Encyclopedia, in an edition published between 1928 and 1934, with a supplemental volume from 1935, and the Hitler ex libris bookplate pasted on the inside cover of several volumes, preserves in tangible form the physical structures that come closest to reflecting the inner dimensions of Hitler’s intellectual world.
In the lagarde volume, we can observe the application of Hitler’s reading technique in all its selective intensity, sense the pencil hovering beside the book as the eye scans the page for any information that is “useful,” then striking the page, underlining a single passage or an entire sentence, then double striking the margin to highlight the importance. Occasionally there are exclamation points and sometimes question marks, but mostly there are a series of focused and sporadic lines indicating a plundering of the volume for facts that can be fit into his preconceived “mosaic” of ideas.
This process is especially evident in passages relating to the Jewish question, which are repeatedly highlighted throughout the 520-page tome, beginning on page 41, where Lagarde adopts the Fichtean stance that the Jews, now numbering two million, can never be assimilated. There is a pencil line beneath the passage recommending their “transplantation” to Palestine, with two dense vertical lines in the margin. The pencil continues to trace Lagarde’s references to Jews, pausing at a passage where Lagarde asserts that Germans are incapable of competing with the Jews. The Germans, Lagarde claims, are made of “inferior material” (zu weiches Material) compared with the Jews, “who have been hardened in the forge of Talmudic training.” Lagarde draws the only natural conclusion, which is underscored with a particularly dense marking: “Because I know the Germans, I cannot wish that Jews be allowed to live with them.”
Two hundred and fifty pages later, on page 292, when Lagarde again addresses the fundamental irreconcilability between Germans and Jews, the entire passage is highlighted: “Despite their desire to be placed on equal terms with Germans, the Jews continually emphasize their foreignness in the most obvious manner through the style of their synagogues. What is that supposed to mean, to lay claim to the honorable German name while constructing the most sacred sites one has in a Moorish style in order not to forget that one is a Semite, an Asian, a foreigner?” The passage is indicated with thick pencil lines, twice struck in the right-hand margin. On page 370, an even more ominous passage is highlighted: “Each and every irksome Jew is a serious affront to the authenticity and veracity of our German identity.” The pencil lines track Lagarde’s words across the page as he insists that “Jews will remain Jews” and that it will ultimately be left to the German people to resolve the “Jewish question.” This is the last marked passage in the volume.
These marginalia bring little that is new to our understanding of Hitler per se or the Nazi movement in general. The belligerent sentiments and rhetoric are familiar to us from Hitler’s speeches and writings during the previous fifteen years. They are redundant mosaic pieces being fit into a redundant pattern. What is new and notable is the context. Since Lehmann never dated his inscriptions, we rarely know the exact date when Hitler received a particular volume, with the exception of the occasional holiday gift, though the pattern suggests that Lehmann inscribed and dispatched the individual volumes in the same year they were published. With Lagarde, we can place a bit more certainty around the time frame and context. We know that German Essays was published in 1934 and that Lehmann died in March 1935, making this volume one of the few books Lehmann inscribed to Hitler after his appointment as chancellor.
When this copy of Lagarde entered the Hitler book collection in 1934 or early 1935, Hitler was no longer the leader of a radical right-wing party that was frequently in crisis or on the verge of dissolution. He was now a head of state, who, following the burning of the Reichstag in March 1933, declared a state of emergency, suspended democratic process, and assumed the dictatorial powers he was to retain for the next twelve years. Guided by a hand imbued with dictatorial powers, Hitler’s penciled intrusions resonate differently than they did before 1933.
When Lagarde writes about the responsibilities of being German on page 164, and Hitler frames the paragraph with a phalanx of three dense lines to the left and three equally intense lines to the right, the markings resonate ominously with the words: “Germany is the totality of all those Germans who feel German, who think German, who long to be Germans: each and every one of us is a traitor to the nation if we do not realize and respect our personal responsibility to the existence, the happiness, the future of the fatherland in every moment of our lives; each of us is a hero and a liberator when we do.”
These are no longer the marginalia of the marginalized. A penciled mark can become state doctrine. The Lehmann volumes had become the building blocks the publisher had always intended them to be.
* * *
1 Steven Bach, author of a recent biography of Leni Riefenstahl, advises caution regarding the details of this incident. Bach notes that Riefenstahl was a notoriously unreliable narrator. Nevertheless, the Fichte volumes lend some credence to her account, as does a shooting script for Franz Wenzler’s film Hans Westmar with the film’s original title, Horst Wessel: A German Fate. An undated handwritten inscription from the screenwriter, Hanns Heinz Ewers, reads to “Herr Reichskanzler Hitler.” The score was written by Giuseppe Becce, who had done the music for The Blue Light and the score for the filmed version of Peer Gynt, and for Riefenstahl’s Tiefland. In composing the score for Hans Westmar, Becce was assisted by Ernst Hanfstaengl, who wrote incidental music for the film and had significant involvement in the production, which he describes in detail in his memoirs.
2 Moeller von den Bruck met Hitler in 1922 but rejected his “proletarian primitiveness.” Nevertheless, the Nazi movement did not hesitate to use select ideas from von den Bruck’s theories and most famously plagiarized the title of his book for their movement. Von den Bruck suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide in May 1925.
3 The two books are Carl Ludwig Schleich’s The Wisdom of Happiness, published in 1924, and Ernst Schertel’s Magic: History, Theory, and Practice, published in 1923.
BOOK SIX
Book Wars
Hasn’t National Socialism also brought the German people a good, worthwhile idea so that the support of the movement by people with a positive religious attitude is not only desirable but is absolutely necessary?
From the introduction to Foundations of National Socialism by BISHOP ALOIS HUDAL, July 11, 1936
WITH ITS TITLE and author whispered in muted gold across a linen cover that appears to be of a hue halfway between the shrill brown of a storm trooper uniform and the rich chocolate tone of a Franciscan cassock, Hitler’s copy of the Foundations of National Socialism hardly seems like a conspiratorial tract, just as the full-page glossy photograph of its forty-nine-year-old author, with his gentle, bookish, even boyish look, more quizzical than calculating, hardly seems like the image of an architect of a Vatican-based plot to fracture the Nazi movement from within, to leach it of its anti-Semitic toxins, to infuse it with Christian beneficence, and to awaken in Adolf Hitler the latent Roman Catholicism that the plotters were certain lay dormant within his soul. It was a plan that seemed as naïve as it was ambitious, but for a few hours in November 1936, when Hitler received the book, it appeared to totter on the brink of success, a one-man conspiracy initiated two and a half years earlier, on the afternoon of February
7, 1934, by a scholar of the Old Testament.
On that particular afternoon, Hitler received Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte, the bishop of Cologne, in his Reich Chancellery office. Schulte, responsible for the spiritual lives of the huge number of Roman Catholics in the German Rhineland, had come to Berlin to express his concern over the growing anti-Christian agitation among local Nazis, and, in particular, Hitler’s recent appointment of Alfred Rosenberg as his “chief ideologue” in charge of the “spiritual” welfare of the German people.
The copy of Alois Hudal’s Foundations of National Socialism handed to Hitler in November 1936 as part of a plot to split the Nazi movement
Rosenberg was among the most militantly anti-Christian Nazis, his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century a compendium of heresies including the advocacy of polygamy, forced sterilization, and the propagation of a “fifth Gospel” that allegedly revealed the true nature of Jesus Christ. According to this “lost Gospel,” Jesus was not the embodiment of forgiveness and beneficence whose identity was defined by suffering and crucifixion. Instead, he was a raging prophet bent on destruction and vengeance. In the book, Rosenberg claimed that Saint Paul, working as a Jewish agent, changed his name from Saulus to Paulus, and obscured this fifth Gospel as a means of enslaving the peoples of Europe.
Rosenberg spoke of a “Jewified” Christian ethic, and envisioned the emergence of a new religion. “The horrific crucifixes of the Baroque and Rococo eras, which display emaciated limbs on every street corner, will gradually be replaced by monuments to fallen soldiers,” Rosenberg predicted. “They will bear the names of those men who, as a symbol of the eternal myth of blood and will, gave their lives for the noblest cause: for the honor of the German name.”
In October 1933, the Vatican had formally protested the inclusion of Rosenberg’s Myth in school curricula, but to little avail. In January, the Prussian ministry of education included the book on a list of “recommended” titles for school libraries. The bishops sounded the alarm. “Recently, I heard that the two books Mein Kampf and The Myth of the 20th Century were supposed to be included in the school libraries of the middle schools,” one bishop complained. “There is nothing to object to in this first book, but Rosenberg’s book does not belong in such a library; if anything, it belongs on the Index [the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the legendary list of banned books].”
Now Schulte was raising the issue with Hitler himself. Schulte was responsible for the spiritual welfare of seven million Catholics, he reminded Hitler, who had initially welcomed the Nazi seizure of power and the concordat that had been forged with the Vatican. Schulte said he had noticed an unsettling increase in anti-Christian and anticlerical rhetoric among many Nazi leaders, a trend that was only aggravated by Rosenberg’s appointment as “deputy” for “ideological and spiritual” instruction. Not only did the monitoring of religious instruction violate the terms of the Vatican agreement, but Rosenberg was a known militant critic of the Church, a fact that was abundantly clear in his Myth. At the mention of the Rosenberg book, Hitler stopped Schulte.
“I don’t want that book,” Hitler barked. “Rosenberg knows it. I told him that myself.” Hitler said he wanted nothing to do with “these heathen things.”
“You cannot talk like that about Rosenberg and his book anymore, Herr Reich Chancellor,” Schulte shot back.
“And tell me why not?”
“Because a few days ago you officially appointed this same Herr Rosenberg as ideological instructor of the Nazi Party and thereby as instructor to a large portion of the German people,” Schulte reminded him. “Henceforth, whether you like it or not, you will be identified with Herr Rosenberg.”
“That’s right, I identify myself with Herr Rosenberg but not with the author of the book Myth,” Hitler said. How then, Schulte pressed, did Hitler intend to make this distinction clear to the German people?
Hitler ignored the question. He confirmed that Rosenberg was indeed the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue. He repeated his conviction that the Rosenberg appointment had nothing to do with Myth. The book, Hitler again insisted, was a purely private matter. Then he added derisively that if anyone was to be held accountable for the book, it was the Catholic Church. “The bishops are the ones who have made Rosenberg’s book so well known,” Hitler said. “Without them no one would have paid any attention to the book.”
Schulte was stunned. “What, the bishops are to blame?”
“Yes, the bishops,” Hitler repeated. “Wasn’t it the Cardinal of Munich who talked about it in his sermons and tried to destroy the ancient German ideals in our young people?” When Schulte told Hitler he was “twisting” things, Hitler changed the subject. The meeting sputtered to a conclusion.
Hitler was showing himself as chancellor to be master of the rhetorical dodge, the dialectical diversion, the off-kilter counterpoint thesis that sent an argument careening into a tangential direction, never to return to the original point. And he did so with the ease and confidence of a head of state. Seated in the office once occupied by Otto von Bismarck, Hitler no longer needed to dodge or duck. He evaded with beneficence and lied with magnanimity. He had come a long way in twelve months.
In February 1933, when Paul von Hindenberg appointed him the sixteenth chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was just the next politician to take his place in a notoriously shaky seat from which fifteen predecessors had toppled since 1919, an average of one per year. A cache of right-wing newspapers from February 1933, found in the Berlin Führerbunker in the spring of 1945, hint at the “insecurity” Franz von Papen then sensed in Hitler. In one yellowed newspaper, Hitler has highlighted several passages in an article—“Herr Chancellor! Just a Few Questions”—needling him about his campaign promises, and in another asserting that he has fallen into a “Jewish trap” laid by von Papen. Here Hitler has underlined part of a sentence that says he could only see Hindenburg when von Papen was present. The passage of ten months had brought a total change.
The chancellor of the troubled and turbulent Weimar Republic was now the Führer of the Thousand-Year Reich. The books he received that December reflect not only his new circumstances but also Germany’s. A collection of “wit and wisdom” gleaned from Goethe’s writings is dedicated “respectfully” to the “Führer, founder and first chancellor of the Third Reich.” A copy of Wagner’s Resounding Universe is inscribed by its author, Walter Engelsmann, to “the steward and shaper of the descendents of Siegfried upon the earth.” On the following page, Engelsmann has written triumphantly, “Wotan’s dream of the man-god is fulfilled.”
In June 1934, Hitler would give final shape to this new Germany. Having dismantled the democratic structures of the Weimar Republic, and with them any effective political resistance, he turned on his own men. On the night of June 30, 1934, in an operation code-named “Hummingbird” but better known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler had eighty Nazi Party leaders, including his close associate Ernst Röhm, arrested and executed. Hitler now commanded absolute authority, and the ruthless nature of his regime was evident to all.
But even as Hitler eliminated dissent within his country and his own party, Alois Hudal’s plot to undermine the Nazi movement was already under way. On the same afternoon that Hitler sparred with Schulte over Rosenberg’s Myth, an assembly of cardinals known as the Sanctum Officium met in Rome to take a decision that set Hudal’s ambitious designs in motion.
On the afternoon of February 7, 1934, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published a news item reporting that the Sanctum Officium had recommended that Rosenberg’s Myth be placed on the Vatican’s Index. The list of banned books was most catholic in the literal sense of the word, and its thousands of titles included Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Generally, books were placed on the Index with no explanation or commentary, but in this case, the Sanctum Officium felt compelled to make its reasoning public. L’Osservatore Romano
reported:
The book scorns all dogmas of the Catholic Church, indeed the very fundamentals of Christian religion, and rejects them completely. It argues for the need for the founding of a new religion or a Germanic church and proclaims the principle: “Today there is awakening a new faith, the myth of the blood, the faith in defending with blood the divine being of man; the faith that embodies the absolute knowledge that the northern blood represents that mystery that has replaced and overcome the old sacraments.”
The appearance of Rosenberg’s Myth on the Index transformed this bizarre, overwritten, and by general consensus impenetrable eight-hundred-page tome into an overnight sensation. A book that had taken seven years to write and another six to find a publisher—it was taken on by Hoheneichen Verlag, Dietrich Eckart’s former publishing house, after being rejected even by Hanfstaengl and Bruckmann—was suddenly one of the most talked about books in the world, featured in headlines in Paris, London, and New York. Its indexing led to a public debate in Germany and made Rosenberg a cause célèbre in the Nazi press.
Hitler once described Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century as impenetrable. This 1940 edition contains Hitler’s ex libris but shows no signs of having been read.
Six months after Myth was proscribed by the Vatican, German theologians published a major study dissecting the book line by line, exposing not only its religious but also its historical, geographic, and orthographic transgressions, which they published anonymously—for fear of Nazi reprisal—in a two-hundred-page book titled Studies of Myth. Beyond the substantive issues, they observed that the Hadrian IV mentioned in the book was in fact Hadrian VI, that one church historian was named “Merx,” not “Merk,” that another, Eusebius, was not a eunuch, as Rosenberg claimed, and that the assembled “monks” Rosenberg described as gathering in Nicaea were in fact bishops. When Rosenberg inquired with Hoheneichen about removing all the errors from future editions, his editor advised against it. It would require excising 60 percent of the book’s content.