The God That Failed

The National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party ruled, first Germany and then much of continental Europe, for only 12 1/2 years, from January 1933 until the regime’s and the nation’s collapse in May 1945. But if anything can be concluded from the still-accelerating appearance of new works in every genre and medium about the Nazi era, it is how central that catastrophic period remains to the ways we make sense of our world today. Although the devastation inflicted by Soviet-style communism lasted longer and ultimately claimed even more lives, the specter that, in the West at least, continues to haunt us is no longer Marxism but the legacy of the Nazis’ methodical transgression of what we had previously imagined as humanly possible. Prominent among the traumatic aftereffects of the Third Reich is how hard we find it not to interpret contemporary events in its light and how fearful we are at any signs of its rebirth. It is the family resemblance to Nazism we can’t help but discern when we see skinheads marching against immigrants or hear terms like “ethnic cleansing” invoked as deliberate national objectives. So to the question, “Do we really need another synoptic history of Hitler’s malignant Empire?,” the answer is undoubtedly “Yes” when that work is as powerful and lucid as Michael Burleigh’s long-awaited study.

Burleigh calls his work “A New History,” and for once that claim is fully justified. He has given us not merely the most comprehensive one-volume account of the Third Reich in any language but an original work of interpretation in which straightforward narrative history, rigorous analytic explanation and unblinking intellectual-moral judgment are united with compelling originality. Burleigh, whose earlier books include “Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich”; “Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany 1900-1945”; “Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide”; and, with Wolfgang Wippermann, “The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945,” turned to writing his general history only after years of close archivally grounded research into specific aspects of the Nazi regime.

“The Third Reich” is based on an unrivaled knowledge of the immense quantity of specialized monographs on the topic, and although one may differ with Burleigh’s interpretations of particular issues, his mastery of the sources is never in doubt. But as in all the best historical writing, the author’s tone and interpretive horizon quickly become as central to the unfolding story as the explicit articulation of his judgments. From the outset, the book’s opening epigraphs by Goethe, Pascal and Norman Cohn make clear that we are encountering a provocatively ambitious undertaking, one that aligns its concerns with literary, moral, philosophical as well as strictly historical reflections on the cost of human striving for the absolute. Indeed, a significant measure of the book’s authority comes precisely from its principled rejection of such distinctions. I know of no other contemporary historical work that would frame its argument in the language of Pascal’s deeply unsettling insight from the “Pensees”: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” The more orthodox view is undoubtedly Ian Kershaw’s, the second volume of whose massive new biography of Hitler insists that “evil is a theological or philosophical, rather than a historical concept. To call Hitler evil may well be both true and morally satisfying. But it explains nothing.” Burleigh, on the other hand, writes from the conviction that there is much more at stake in such categories than mere moralistic self-satisfaction--that, in fact, something very like the traditional categories of ethical judgment are indispensable if we are to understand Nazism at all.

“The Third Reich” opens with the following succinct description of its subject:

“This book is about what happened when sections of the German elites and masses of ordinary people chose to abdicate their individual critical faculties in favor of a politics based on faith, hope, hatred and sentimental collective self-regard for their own race and nation. . . . It deals with the progressive, and almost total, moral collapse of an advanced industrial society at the heart of Europe, many of whose citizens abandoned the burden of thinking for themselves, in favor of what George Orwell described as the tom-tom beat of a latter-day tribalism. They put their faith in evil men promising a great leap into a heroic future, with violent solutions to Germany’s local, and modern society’s general, problems. The consequences, for Germany, Europe and the wider world, were catastrophic . . . the price of mass stupidity and overweening ambition.”

This is far, indeed, from Kershaw’s suspicion of the language of judgment, and it strikes one tonally, intellectually, even historiographically as entirely apposite. The invocation of Pascal’s dark insight into human nature, along with Cohn’s seminal study of medieval millenarian and apocalyptic movements, “The Pursuit of the Millennium” (1957), locates Burleigh’s work in a speculative tradition whose terms have only infrequently been applied to modern political movements. Recently, Burleigh co-founded a new journal, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, and his analysis of how Nazism constituted itself as a political religion, marshaling quasi-mystical claims and emotions as well as strictly political ones, generates many of the book’s finest insights.

Hitler’s Reich was not just a modern industrialized empire dedicated to foreign conquest and eliminationist biological racism; it was also, at its roots, an eruption of the most primitive, chiliastic longings grounded in resentment, self-pity and a longing for redemptive, messianic violence for its own sake. Hitler always insisted on speaking of Nazism as a movement, in the sense of a total system of beliefs, to distinguish it from mere political parties, and his decisions during the war make clear that the realization of Nazism’s eschatological goals (by then, chiefly, the genocide of European Jewry) was more important to him than even national self-interest or the prudential use of scarce war resources.

One of the great blind spots of most modern accounts of Nazism is that so few of the authors and readers of serious books on the topic can imagine how it could ever have had any appeal except to people already completely debased and degraded. One still sometimes hears communism referred to as “the god that failed,” but it is impossible to imagine such language being used about Nazism. Yet this blindness profoundly misunderstands both the potency and nature of Nazism’s attraction. There was, as Burleigh lets us see, a very strong, if perverted, utopian element in Nazism, even if it is one that most of us have great difficulty recognizing. The Nazi ideal of a volksgemeinschaft, a racial, communitarian state united by blood and custom, proved as utopian a longing and as potent a myth as that of Marxism’s egalitarian, universalist and classless society, and it is far from extinct today.

Hitler appealed to broad sections of the German people, to intellectuals, students and white-collar professionals, as well as to the unemployed and uneducated. For example, Burleigh tells us that by 1930, three years before the party had attained state power, Nazi students already had a majority in the student unions of nine universities and, only a year later, they had gained control of the national German University Students’ Union. Moreover, there were powerful pro-Nazi currents in many other European countries, including France, the home of Enlightenment universalism. The list of gifted writers, thinkers and musicians who were, for a while, at least, willing adherents to Nazi beliefs is as extensive as it is demoralizing, and it contains eminent names from virtually every European country. Clearly, the deep humiliation of the defeat in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, the catastrophic economic collapse of the Great Depression and the relative weakness of Weimar’s political and civil institutions were necessary preconditions to the political success of Nazism, but by themselves they were not sufficient to carry Hitler to power. Something more was required, and only an understanding of the movement’s utopian and millenarian dimension can explain both that success and its lethal consequences for the entire continent.

The devastation that Nazism perpetrated was so catastrophic and far-reaching that it has left behind something like a Medusa effect, petrifying our normal intellectual discriminations and throwing into doubt the pertinence of our fundamental moral categories. Yet these moments of confrontation with the monstrous require more, not less, clarity and demand a greater measure, rather than an abdication, of the ability to stay focused on basic distinctions. Burleigh splendidly fulfills this requirement and, along with a sweeping and highly readable narrative that carries us from a vanquished Germany at the end of World War I to the Nuremberg Trials after the Third Reich’s final disintegration, he offers a series of judicious local observations and engrossing mini-stories that enliven the larger structure.

Some of the best of these include a scrupulous tracing of the path from a broadly shared European and American belief in eugenics (“the world’s first professorial chair in eugenics was established in 1909 at University College, London; the first Institute for Racial Biology at Uppsala Sweden in 1922”) to the Nazi policy of deliberately murdering the mentally and physically handicapped. The Nazi euthanasia program employed many of the same techniques and personnel that were later instrumental in the Holocaust, and Burleigh is right to point out how ominous the moment was when the “taboo had been broken [and] doctors were being encouraged to take life.” He also makes clear the absurdity of talking about Hitler as an “agent” of the bourgeoisie, a class that Hitler, as a self-proclaimed artist and revolutionary, thoroughly despised. Burleigh quotes, to great effect, a 1936 speech by Hitler in which even the Communists are preferred to their bourgeois opponents:

“We did not defend Germany against Bolshevism back then because we were intending to do anything like conserve a bourgeois world. . . . Had Communism really intended nothing more than a certain purification by eliminating isolated, rotten elements from among the ranks of our so-called ‘upper ten thousand’ or our equally worthless Philistines, one could have sat back quietly and looked on for a while.”

Nazism and communism were the two great and greatly murderous political religions of the 20th century, and Burleigh is superb at succinctly bringing out the relationship between the two, thereby illuminating both. Perhaps the sharpest drawn of these comparisons occurs early in the book:

“But Nazism was distinct from other political creeds which regarded present sacrifices as a price worth paying for deferred bliss, or which claimed that all virtue resided in one group of people, whose enemies were vessels of demonic iniquity. It lacked Communism’s deferred, but dialectically assured, ‘happy ending,’ and was haunted by and suffused with apocalyptic imaginings and beliefs which were self-consciously pagan and primitive. . . . Nazism had one foot in the dark, irrationalist world of Teutonic myth, where heroic doom was regarded positively, and where the stakes were all or nothing--national and racial redemption or perdition.”

Today, it is hard to remember that, as Burleigh puts it, throughout the 1930s, liberal democracy “was regarded as a waning force, rapidly being superseded by authoritarianism, communism, fascism and Nazism--the alleged forces of the future. Liberal democracy was in danger of becoming an extinct species in inter-war Europe, where by 1939 undemocratic regimes already outnumbered constitutional democracies by 16 to 12.” One finishes Burleigh’s study with a deep suspicion of all utopian solutions and a chastened sense of how easily a politics of dreaming great dreams can result in perpetrating great evil. In contrast, what emerges is a renewed appreciation for everyday, prosaic practices and values, for the anti-utopian texture and rhythm of our daily routines and decisions and the myriad minute and careful adjustments that we are ready to offer in the interest of a habitable social world. It is hard to imagine a more salutary lesson or, alas, a more difficult one to which to adhere.