THE MOB AND THE ELITE
815
bourgeois society would rather open its doors to the fascinating "ab–
normal," the genius, the homosexual, or the Jew, than to simple
merit. The elite's contempt for the genius and its yearning for anony–
mity was still witness of a spirit which neither the masses nor the mob
were in a position to understand, and which, in the words of Robes–
pierre, strove to assert the grandeur of man against the pettiness of
the great.
This difference between the elite and the mob notwithstanding,
there is no doubt that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld
frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing.
The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the
destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had
been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. They
were not particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in his–
toriography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which
announce themselves clearly enough in totalitarian propaganda. They
had convinced themselves that traditional historiography was a
forgery in any case, since it had excluded the underprivileged and
oppressed from the memory of mankind. Those who were rejectGd
by their own time were usually forgotten by history, and insult added
to injury had troubled all sensitive consciences ever since faith in a
hereafter where the last would be the first had disappeared. Injustices
in the past as well as the present became intolerable when there was
no longer any hope that the scales of justice eventually would be set
right. Marx's great attempt to rewrite world history in terms of class
struggle fascinated even those who did not believe in the correctness
of his thesis, because of his original intention to find a device by
which to force the destinies of those excluded from official history
into the memory of posterity.
The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested
largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the
latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German
steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler
the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with
the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian move–
ments in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the
subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one
consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was rather gratifying to see
