96
PARTISAN
REVIEW
will be destroyed by the Nazis together with all other German tradi–
tions and time-honored institutions. German militarism as represented
in the German arrhy scarcely had more ambition than the old French
army of the Third Republic: the German officers wanted to be a
State within a State, and they foolishly assumed that the Nazis would
serve them better than the Weimar Republic. They were already in a
state of dissolution when they discovered their mistake-one part was
liquidated and the other adjusted itself to the Nazi regime.
It is true that the Nazis have occasionally spoken the language
of militarism as they have spoken the language of nationalism; but
they have spoken the language of every existing ism-socialism and
communism not excluded. This has not prevented them from liqui–
dating socialists and communists and nationalists and militarists, all
of them dangerous bedfellows for the Nazis. Only the experts with
their fondness for the spoken or written word and incomprehension
of political realities have taken these utterances of the Nazis at face
value and interpreted them as the consequence of certain German or
European tradition<;. On the contrary, Nazism is actually the break–
down of all German and European traditions, the good as well as
the bad.
2.
Many premonitory signs announced the catastrophe which has
threatened European culture for more than a century and which
was divined though not correctly described in Marx's well-known
words regarding the alternative between socialism and barbarism.
During the last war this catastrophe became visible in the form of
the most violent destructiveness ever experienced by the European
nations. From then on nihilism changed its meaning. It was no longer
a more or less harmless ideology, one of the many competing ideolo–
gies of the nineteenth century; it no longer remained in the quiet
realm of mere negation or mere scepticism or mere foreboding despair.
Instead it began basing itself on the intoxication of destruction as
an actual experience, dreaming the stupid dream of producing the
void. The devastating experience was enormously strengthened during
the aftermath of the war, when through inflation and unemployment
the same generation was thrown into the opposite situation of utter
helplessness and passivity within the framework of a seemingly normal
society. When the Nazis appealed to the famous
Fronterlebnis
(bat–
tlefront experience), they not only aroused memories of the
Volks–
gemeinschaft
(people's community) of the trenches, but even more
