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PARTISAN REVIEW
class structure of modern society, and the shadow is his notion that
each class exudes certain elements that separate themselves from the
class-e.g.
bankrupts from the middle class,
lumpenproletariat
from
the workers. Heiden rejects the idea but preserves the shadow-he is
not interested in economic classes but tries to explain fascism on the
basis of economic classlessness!
·
But if the presence in society of businessmen and workers does
not determine historical events, how can history be determined by the
presence of
bankrupt
businessmen and
unemployed
workers? Accord–
ing to this view, only those who drop out of a class are effective
politically.
Sociologically, as by definition, classlessness is simply a negation
of class. The bohemian fights against all classes- as politician, in order
to achieve power; as poet, to reach the infinite.
But power and the infinite are empty, and the bohemian's act
derives its substance from what it opposes
(e.g.
the realistic imagery
of "hallucinated" poetry). The core of Hitler's politics was propa–
ganda against class. Classes stood in his way, except the class he
couldn't see at first because it was too far above
him,
the hereditary
aristocracy. "There was one place in Germany in which there was no
class division. That was the front-line company. There no one ever
heard of a bourgeois and a proletarian platoon; there was just the
company and that was the end of it."
It is entirely accurate to say that the Nazi party was formed out
of bohemian personnel. For instance, Leudecke, one of the early fami–
liars of Hitler, told without a trace of self-consciousness that he became
a Nazi only after it was no longer possible to get money from rich
American women. But just because the Nazi movement was an upris–
ing of the classless, its history is inseparable from the inner history of
Germany's classes, their political consciousness, their economic col–
lapse and moral apathy.
Tremendous fluctuations occurred in the Nazi movement up to
the final consolidation of State power. The party of the classless was
constantly being drained and refilled through rhythms in the depths
of each class in Germany. The very existence of the Nazi party was
dependent on these organic processes taking place outside itself. The
peculiarity of fascism as a parasitic growth lies precisely in this in–
ability to develop from within but only through absorbing the secre–
tions and evacuations of the whole social organism. No doubt this has
something to do with Hitler's sense of identity with the German folk.
But this dependent character of Nazism places definite limits on
the meaning of Hitler's own acts and ideas-many of which are eccen-
