Pondering Hitler's Legacy
By George Friedman
Happenstance has
brought me today to a house on the Austria-Germany border, just south of
Salzburg. That puts me about 3 miles from the German town of Berchtesgaden, on
the German side of the border. Adolf Hitler's home, the Berghof, was just
outside the town, on a mountain in the Bavarian Alps. To the extent that Hitler
had a home, this was it, and it was the place where Hitler met with many
notables, particularly before the war began.
As it happens, today
is the 76th anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe. It is always a
strange feeling to be here. There is a sense of history present here, but it is
mostly a sense of the mind, since Berchtesgaden is an attractive but ordinary
place. It always feels as if towns like this should have a patina of extraordinariness
sticking to everything. But that isn't how history works. There is a patina of
mind, but not of place. On Sept. 1 of any year since 1939, and at a place like
this, there is a sense of urgency to extract the real meaning of the man who lived
in a house on the mountain I am looking at.
After 76 years, it
seems appropriate to try to figure out what Hitler and the war he initiated
genuinely changed in the world. This is not an easy question, because to arrive
at an answer I had to dismiss from my mind the many acts of gratuitous evil
that he committed. It is hard to dismiss those, but in a sense they left little
legacy to the world except for the realization that civilization is a thin
layer over humanity's beastly savagery. But truly, we didn't have to have
Hitler to learn that. We humans have always sensed what is beneath our surface.
The question is how
the world changed as a result of Hitler's decision to invade Poland.
The Price for Europe
The first outcome,
obviously, was that he destroyed Europe's hegemony over much of the world and
its influence over the rest. Within 15 years of the end of the war, Britain,
France, Belgium and the Netherlands lost their empires. A handful of European
nations had dominated the world. By the end of the war they had lost the will,
the energy and the wealth to maintain their power. After half-hearted and
doomed attempts to resist, these countries willingly participated in the
dismantling of what they had once thought of as their birthright.
This changed the shape
of the world, of course, but the change was less the result of the world's
resistance to Europe than a result of Europe's exhaustion. After the war,
Europe faced the task of rebuilding buildings. The ambition to rule had been
exhausted. However flawed or wicked that ambition might have been, there is
still something sad in the loss of all ambition, beyond the desire for comfort.
The will to dominate, seen in its most extreme form in Hitler's appetites,
chills the blood. The loss of any transcendent ambition merely cools it. Europe
has lost its recklessness, which is on the whole good. Yet it has gained an
excessive caution that makes it difficult for Europe to make up its mind over
matters small and large.
The world is certainly
a better place without Hitler's reckless imprudence. It is probably a better
place without British or French imperialism, although when we look at what they
left behind, we wonder if the wreckage of empire is worth the wreckage of the
post-imperial world, whoever we blame for that wreckage.
Hitler clearly didn't
want this outcome. I think he was sincere when he said that he would leave the
British Empire intact, along with its navy, if the United Kingdom accepted German domination of the
European mainland. He wanted peace with the British so he could
crush the Soviets. But the British as a nation could accept that deal only if
they trusted Hitler's promise. However sincere he was in 1940, Britain couldn't
bet on the endurance of his word. As a result, Hitler in due course committed
suicide in Berlin, and Britain presided over the dissolution of its own empire
— the only thing that would have disgusted both Churchill and Hitler.
Churchill's imperialism and Hitler's racism met on that point.
There was another
thing Hitler cost Europe: the metaphysical sensibility. It is startling, the
extent to which Christian Europe has abandoned Christianity for secularism.
Consider this map:
The decline of church
attendance is the outer husk of a European sensibility that, at the highest
levels of thought, contemplated the deeper meanings of things. It was not
Hitler who destroyed the European metaphysical sensibility. In many ways it
destroyed itself from the inside, with a radical skepticism derived from the
Enlightenment that turned on itself. But Hitler provided a coup de grace to
that sensibility by appropriating figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard
Wagner to his own political ends, thereby delegitimizing not only them but also
the tradition from which they emerged. Hitler, in his own strange wanderings in
the depths, made such wanderings no longer respectable, and indeed, suspect.
There is a saying I once heard: "German philosophers go down deeper, stay
down longer and come up dirtier than any others." I don't know about
philosophers, but Hitler, the would-be philosopher, certainly did, and it cost
Europe the jewel of its intellectual heritage.
It is said that
Napoleon called the English a nation of shopkeepers. He obviously meant that as
an insult, seeing shopkeepers as people of limited imagination, ambition and
wit. There is some truth to the saying about the English, although George
Orwell was enraged at the trivialization of their achievements. To the extent
to which the English were suspicious of the wholesomeness and usefulness of
French and particularly German philosophy, Napoleon was right. But if he was,
then Hitler achieved something extraordinary: He made all of Europe into
nations of shopkeepers.
After the war, the
obsession of Europeans was to live. Then it was to make a living. Napoleon's
insult was that there was more to life than simply making a living. What Hitler
achieved was what he would have been appalled by: shopkeepers ruling Europe.
But Europe is obsessed with making a living and suspicious of profound
thinking. It has seen where that got it and it doesn't intend to go there
again. The best minds get MBAs. The broad public sleeps late on Sunday. The train wreck that Hitler made of
Europe created a secularism
not only in relation to Christianity, but in all attempts to recreate the depth
of European culture.
The Power of the United States
Of course in all of
this, perhaps the most important thing that Hitler did was unleash the United States,
a country where earning a living is the definition of life. Hitler believed
that his defeat meant the triumph of Bolshevism. It really meant the triumph of
the United States and its culture, which it distributed in Western Europe
through occupation and in the Soviet bloc through imitation.
The United States
redefined European culture. As I have written in Flashpoints:
The Emerging Crisis in Europe, it was not Coca-Cola but the computer that was the carrier of
American culture. The computer had nothing to do with metaphysics or with the
true or beautiful. It had to do with the narrowest form of instrumental reason:
It simply got things done, and in doing so, it justified its existence. The
computer dominated the world — and Europe — and with it came a mode of
thinking, contained in programming, that was so radically different from what
European culture consisted of as to almost be from another planet. Of course,
Europeans helped found the culture, but they bequeathed it to their heir, the
United States. Paradoxically, the United States remains the most religious of
countries, with church attendance at its height. Religiosity and instrumental
reason are compatible in the United States — a point to ponder.
Hitler respected Josef
Stalin. He understood the radical ideologue who was ready to kill. He had
little respect for the United States. He understood Stalin, but he couldn't
fathom Roosevelt. But as I sit here looking toward Berchtesgaden, I must recall
that it was the 7th Infantry Regiment of the Third Division, U.S. Army, that
captured the town and Hitler's home. The Americans occupied the area until
1995, using it for military purposes. This was the most important
thing Hitler achieved, and the last thing he expected. Hitler drew the
Americans into the heart of Europe and left the Europeans completely vulnerable
to the emerging, and quite strange, modes of thought that a nation that holds
shopkeepers in great regard can produce. Hitler destroyed the dams that Europe
had built around itself. He crippled all of Europe, including the Soviet Union.
He could not imagine the need to cripple the Americans, nor could he have had
realized the need. And therefore, in the end, they rebuilt Berchtesgaden and I
am sitting here looking at it.
Hitler will be
remembered not only for great evil but also — and more important, in many ways
— for the manner in which almost all of the consequences of his war were
unexpected.
