THE MOB AND THE ELITE
III
very few of this generation were cured of their war enthusiasm by
actual experience of its horrors. The survivors of the trenches did not
become pacifists. They cherished an experience which, they thought,
might serve to separate them from the hated surroundings of respect–
ability. They clung to their memories of four years of life in the
trenches as though they constituted an objective criterion for the
establishment of a new elite. Nor did they yield to the temptation to
idealize this past; on the contrary, the worshipers of the war were the
first to concede that war in the era of machines could not possibly
breed virtues like chivalry, courage, honor, and manliness, that it
imposed on men nothing but the experience of bare destruction to–
gether with the humiliation of being only small cogs in the majestic
wheel of slaughter.
This generation remembered the war as the great prelude to the
breakdown of classes and their transformation into masses. War, with
its constant murderous arbitrariness, became the symbol for death,
the "great equalizer" and therefore the true father of a new world
order. The passion for equality and justice, the longing to transcend
narrow and meaningless class lines, to abandon stupid privileges and
prejudices, seemed to find in war a way out of the old condescending
attitudes of pity for the oppressed and disinherited. In times of grow–
ing misery and individual helplessness, it seems as difficult to resist
pity when it grows into an all-devouring passion as it is not to resent
its very boundlessness, which seems to kill human dignity with a more
deadly certainty than misery itself.
In the early years of his career, when a restoration of the Euro–
pean status quo was still the most serious threat to the ambitions of
the mob, Hitler appealed almost exclusively to these sentiments of
the front generation. The peculiar selflessness of the mass man ap–
peared here as yearning for anonymity, for being just a number and
functioning only as a cog, for every transformation,
in
brief, which
would wipe out the spurious identifications with specific types or pre–
determined functions within society. War had been experienced as
that "mightiest of all mass actions" which obliterated individual
differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off
individuals through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be
interpreted as "an instrument of historical progress." Nor did national
distinctions limit the masses into which the postwar elite wished to
