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p .
from social identification, from the multiplicity of interchangeable
roles and functions which society had imposed. The point was to do
something, heroic or criminal, which was unpredictable and unde–
termined by anybody else.
The pronounced activism of the totalitarian movements, their
preference for terrorism over all other forms of political activity,
attracted the intellectual elite and the mob alike, precisely because
this terrorism was so utterly different from that of the earlier revolu–
tionary societies. It was no longer a matter of calculated policy which
saw in terrorist acts the only means to eliminate certain outstanding
personalities who, because of their policies or position, had becomq
the symbol of oppression. What proved so attractive was that terrorism
had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration,
resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which
used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity
given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price
of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one's exis–
tence on the normal strata of society.
It
was still the same spirit
and the same game which made Goebbels, long before the eventual
defeat of Nazi Germany, announce with obvious delight that the
Nazis, in case of defeat, would know how to slam the door behind
them and not to be forgotten for centuries.
Yet it is here if anywhere that a valid criterion may be found
for distinguishing the elite from the mob in the pretotalitarian atmos–
phere. What the mob wanted, and what Goebbels expressed with
great precision, was access to history even at the price of destruction.
Goebbels' sincere conviction that "the greatest happiness that a con–
temporary can experience today" is either to be a genius or to serve
one, was typical of the mob but neither of the masses nor the sympa–
thizing elite. The latter, on the contrary, took anonymity seriously
to the point of seriously denying the existence of genius; all the
aesthetic theories of the twenties tried desperately to prove that the
excellent is the product of skill, craftsmanship, logic, and the realiza–
tion of the potentialities of the material. The mob, and not the elite,
was charmed by the "radiant power of fame" (Stefan Zweig) and
accepted enthusiastically the genius idolatry of the late bourgeois
world. In this the mob of the twentieth century followed faithfully
the pattern of earlier parvenus who also had discovered the fact that
