182
PARTISAN REVIEW
conflicting opinion<> of experts, without knowing more about them
than Hitler. It may be that one of, the things that gave Hitler his
"nerve" was an early discovery that, with strong enough backing or
forceful assertion, almost any opinion can, apparently, be put over,
especially in matters of taste and theory. A mediocre artist? Kill the
highbrow critics, then who will know? Perhaps it
is
not the "intellec–
tuals" who are responsible for Hitler, even indirectly, but the unin–
tellectuality, the enmity toward intellect, promoted by modem "men
of affairs." ... After all France, which had a larger proportion of
intellectual bohemians than Germany, never yielded to the fascist
bait-and I see no reason for denying some credit for this restraint
to the Left Bank sophistication as well as to the rational tradition of
French culture. "Damn the intellectuals!"
is
a slogan not inconsistent
with fascism.
It would also be possible to go deeper than Heiden into the
relation of Hitler's personal experiences to his political stresses if one
were not burdened by Heiden's pseudo-aristocratic (another synonym
for bohemian?) prejudice that Hitler
is
"a pure fragment of the mod–
ern mass souL" Both the emptiness and the strength of Hitler are more
characteristic of the visionary neurotic than of the average man, who
is a class man, moulded and limited by social participation, and has
never had his ego wiped out and released by ecstasy. Heiden passes
too lightly over Hitler's testimony concerning
his
"ecstatic feeling"
in the trenches, "in the night when the roaring of twenty-one-centi–
meter cannons suddenly began to speak and illumine the horizon
with lightnings." It is worth pursuing the hypothesis that this frontline
experience, which contains all the psychological conditions of con–
version, fixed in Hitler's consciousness the image that changed
him,
once for all, into the furious Maker of Soldiers- which, in the last
analysis, is both
1
the chief content of
his
politics and
his
supreme
service to the rulers of Germany.
