Defying Hitler: A Memoir

by Sebastian Haffner

Can such a man, you ask, be a leader of the masses? Surprisingly, the answer is Yes. The masses – by which I mean not the proletariat, but the anonymous collective body into which all of us, high and low, amalgamate at certain moments – react most strongly to someone who least resembles them. Normality coupled with talent may make a politician popular. But to provoke extremes of love and hate, to be worshipped like a god or loathed like the devil, is given only to a truly exceptional person who is poles apart from the masses, be it far above or far below them. If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this. Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness. Both, and this is decisive, came from inaccessible regions, from some sort of ‘beyond’. The one from a sphere of sublime spirituality where the cultures of three millennia and two continents hold a symposium; the other from a jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls, from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench of petty-bourgeois back rooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines and the hangman’s yard. From their different ‘beyonds’ they both drew a spell-binding power, quite irrespective of their politics.