Please do derail the thread with your thoughts. Or to put it another way: this thread can't be derailed, as it is already on the topic of Hitler.
I guess it's interesting enough to share, maybe this is very highly informative and insightful.
I do not think that Adolf Hitler's rise to power, nor Nazi Germany as a whole, should be treated like some sort of freak accident. As if an otherwise liberal and bourgeois Western country had been temporarily hypnotized by some weird Austrian painter who happened to be in the right place at the right time. I think that view of history is a fairy tale.
I also want to explicitly clarify that I am not saying that Hitler was literally inevitable, as if history had a railroad track and Adolf was the conducting the train. But if Hitler himself had never existed, Germany would still have an enormous ideological garbage dump and sewage system underneath it, and somebody else could very plausibly have climbed out of that sooner or later.
The basic ingredients of Hitler's ideas were not invented by Hitler. He did not create German anti-liberalism, nor German state worship, nor German romantic anti-bourgeois contempt, nor German collectivism, not German nationalist metaphysics, nor German anti-capitalist resentment, nor the habit of treating the individual as subordinate to some allegedly higher collective organism. All of those things were already present at the time, and Hitler inherited them.
Clarifying just in case: when I say "anti-liberal" I don't mean "anti-woke/progressive/green/communist" the way Americans now use the word "liberal" after communists and social democrats fucked over that word beyond all recognition. I mean "anti-classical-liberal", i.e. hostile to individual liberty, private property, voluntary exchange, bourgeois independence, and limitations on state power.
Also, just in case: do not confuse this with me defending classical liberalism as if it were some perfect doctrine. My take is that classical liberalism is functionally defective and compromised. Also, parliamentarism and democracy are also not "freedom", structurally they are just another form of communism. And the word "capitalism" is so annoying because people equivocate between an actual stateless market order that would obtain in a society in which private property is universally consistently respected and the state-protected, cartelized, tax-fed, regulatory corporate pile of shit that is "capitalism" (the accurate term for the latter is interventionism).
So, whatever you do, do not think I'm writing a song of praise to parliamentarism, democracy, or "capitalism" as manifested under the state. My point is quite narrow and harsh, namely that
even weak, inconsistent, semi-liberal bourgeois civilization was
too much for many German intellectuals and political actors to tolerate.
With those disclaimers out of the way, let's get into some German history.
The German ideological/philosophical sickness goes back a very long way. A
very very long way. Not to 1933, not to 1918, not even merely to Bismarck.
You can already see important roots of German anti-liberalism in the Reformation era (16th century). Martin Luther is relevant here because German Lutheranism developed in a very specific political environment (like, the Scandinavian countries were Lutheran too, but they did not have Hitler). Luther sacralized obedience to worldly authority to a disturbing degree, viciously sided against rebellious peasants, and helped establish a model in which religion and territorial state authority became fused.
In Germany, the Reformation did not mainly become a great free-church tradition of voluntary association against state power. Instead, it became a territorial state religion. "Whose realm, his religion" was not a working recipe to get robust individual liberty. It meant that the prince, the church, the bureaucracy, and the subject population were welded together. Subjects being folded into an authority structure (instead of free men organizing civil society against power) is a very recurring pattern in German intellectual history.
Then the came Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) which devastated huge parts of the German lands and killed a today-unimaginably large share of the population. You're probably more familiar with English history than with German history, so I will make some comparisons. Germany did not develop like England. It remained politically fragmented, heavily territorial, and deeply shaped by princely authority. The German bourgeoisie never achieved the same stable political self-confidence as the English bourgeoisie. In many German lands, the cultural role that was played elsewhere by a self-confident bourgeois was instead occupied by the absolutist bureaucratic state, the officer class, the nobility, and the university-trained civil servant.
That alone is sufficient to give you a very different national psychology. Where, in other countries, you had intellectuals looking at private property, individual independence, trade, contract, local self-government, and suspicion of centralized authority, in Germany you had the state, order, duty, administration, officialdom, obedience, national mission, learned bureaucracy, army, hierarchy.
There is a German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation. "Civilization" was often associated with the West. Think: England, France, commerce, markets, bourgeois life, parliamentary politics, individualism, urbanity. "Culture" was imagined as something deeper, more spiritual, more organic, more German.
That distinction ended up becoming poisonous. It allowed German writers to sneer at bourgeois market civilization as shallow shopkeeper materialism while dressing up collectivism, state worship, and mystical national community as if it were spiritually profound.
And that is a pattern that repeats again and again. The West is shallow, commercial, materialistic, procedural, legalistic, individualistic, money-minded. But Germany is allegedly deeper, more inward, more spiritual, more communal, more organic, more heroic. You can call that politics if you like, but I think that is metaphysical vanity pretending to be national culture.
Now, on this already-existing fire, German Romanticism has been poured like gasoline. In many ways, Romanticism was a revolt against the Enlightenment, reason, commerce, individualism, bourgeois normality, and the supposedly soulless modern world. It idealized the Middle Ages, myth, homeland, rootedness, language, the Volk, blood-warm community, organic unity, and the nation as something that's almost mystical.
Doesn't mean every Romantic was a proto-Nazi, that'd be stupid. But Romanticism did create a vocabulary and emotional style that could be easily radicalized later by anti-liberal movements. If you already think that "cold reason", "commerce", "bourgeois individualism", and "Western civilization" are spiritually inferior, then you have prepared the ground for some very ugly politics.
Add German Idealism and the philosophical overvaluation of the state to that and it gets from
worse to
much worse.
The obvious villain here is Hegel. Press S to spit on him and his legacy.
Hegel's defenders can argue about nuances all day, but the practical effect of him cannot be honestly called into question. Hegelian language helped give German intellectuals a way to speak of the state not as a coercive institution that must be chained down, but as something like the highest ethical embodiment of social life. The state became not merely an institution, but the march of reason, the ethical idea, the concrete universal, and whatever other vacuous fog-machine phrase you can come up with.
Once intellectuals start talking that way, the individual is already up to the navel in the meat grinder.
In the 19th century, there were a few German liberals. Some people who wanted constitutions, civil rights, freer institutions, and limitations on arbitrary rule. But unlike in America or England, these people did not become dominant. The German bourgeoisie often wanted national unity, respectability, recognition, order, and a strong state more than they wanted a hard and principled limitation of state power.
In this context, the failed revolutions of 1848 are important. In a nutshell: across German lands, liberals and nationalists tried to force constitutional reform and national unification. They failed. The monarchs, armies, bureaucracies, and conservative forces recovered, and the bourgeois liberals proved to be too weak, too timid, too divided, and too deferential to authority. As a consequence, Germany did not build its national unity through a robust anti-absolutist liberal revolution. It later got unity through Prussian militarism and Bismarckian statecraft instead. Which is indeed a very different founding myth.
England gets parliament against the king. America gets secession from an empire. France gets revolution. But Germany gets Prussia. Not a very libertarian origin story.
This also shaped the field of economics. A dismal science, but important to mention. The German Historical School and the Kathedersozialisten (the "socialists of the chair", meaning academic social policy economists) helped normalize an anti-laissez-faire, anti-universal-law, state-guided view of economics among the educated classes. Not saying these people were Nazis, but I am saying that these people trained
generations of academics, bureaucrats, and policy people to think in terms of national economics, state guidance, social policy from above, historical particularism, and hostility to "Manchesterism" (which was their sneering label for liberal free-market economics).
In other words, even economics was filtered through the state.
Instead of asking "what are the universal laws of human action, exchange, prices, capital, and intervention?", the German academic instinct often became "what does the national state need? What does the historically specific Volk need? What social policy should wise officials impose from above?"
So, economics was not a neutral science, but bureaucratic statism in academic clothing basically.
Notice how the pattern keeps repeating. Liberalism, markets, commerce, and bourgeois independence are treated as alien, English, Jewish, Western, shallow, atomistic, materialistic, and/or morally inferior.
That anti-bourgeois and anti-market mindset is crucial for understanding both the radical right and the radical left in Germany.
Marxism and National Socialism hated each other, but they were not opposites. Both hated bourgeois liberal society. Both despised the autonomous individual. Both rejected private-property civilization. Both subordinated the person to a collective historical project. One framed history as class struggle, the other framed history as racial struggle. Different mythology, but the underlying anti-liberal structure is the same.
That is why people could move seamlessly between socialist, nationalist, fascist, and other anti-liberal milieus more easily than a contemporary "left vs. right" midwit can imagine. "Left versus right" simply was not always the hard boundary. Often, it was individual liberty versus collectivist anti-liberalism.
Now look at the period after World War I.
The Weimar Republic was Germany's first serious attempt at a modern parliamentary republic after the empire collapsed. Weimar represented something that the German anti-liberal mind hated. Procedural politics, parties, compromise, civil liberties, parliamentary bargaining, bourgeois normality, constitutionalism, pluralism, Westernization. That alone was enough to make many German intellectuals despise it.
Now, the so-called "Conservative Revolution" after WWI was not one single party. It was a loose intellectual current, consisting of writers, theorists, nationalists, militarists, anti-liberals, anti-bourgeois romantics, and enemies of Weimar. They wanted something harder, more heroic, more national, more organic, more authoritarian, more "German".
Many of these people did not want Marxist international socialism. They wanted a German socialism. A
national socialism. A socialism of the people, the nation, the front soldier, the state, the organic community. Purified and cleaned of disgusting liberalism, parliamentarism, Western bourgeois values, and market civilization.
That is the atmosphere that the Austrian painter stepped into.
Mr. Hitler did not need to invent an entire ideological cinematic universe. He could simplify, vulgarize, radicalize, and weaponize what respectable German intellectuals had already been saying in fancier language decades before him. And he did.
Two names are especially useful here: Werner Sombart (1863-1941) and Carl Schmitt (1888-1985).
Werner Sombart was not some random drunk in a beer hall. He was one of Germany's most famous economists and sociologists, a major intellectual. In WW1, he wrote
Händler und Helden ("Merchants and Heroes"), where he contrasted the English merchant spirit with the German heroic spirit. The English were cast as shopkeepers, traders, utilitarians, comfort-seekers, commercial men. The Germans were cast as heroic, sacrificial, spiritual, martial, state-oriented, and superior.
If that sounds like anti-bourgeois ressentiment with an academic title page, that's because it is.
Sombart's point was not merely "England bad, Germany good". Rather, the deeper contrast was merchant civilization versus heroic state civilization. Commerce versus sacrifice. Individual profit versus national destiny. Bourgeois calculation versus martial greatness. Liberal market society versus organized national community. Does that sound familiar? It should.
The Nazis later sold a vulgarized version of the same emotional package. Contempt for the shopkeeper, contempt for bourgeois comfort, contempt for liberal individualism, contempt for commercial civilization. Glorification of sacrifice, nation, struggle, and collective destiny.
Sombart also moved through a long ideological arc. Early sympathy for Marxism, later socialism, anti-capitalism, and ultimately sympathy for National Socialism. That kind of trajectory is not some bizarre and weird outlier. It shows just how weak the boundary could be between left-wing anti-capitalism and right-wing anti-liberal nationalism when both sides shared a hatred of bourgeois market society.
Then there's Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt was a legal and political theorist, and one of
the most important anti-liberal thinkers of the 20th century. He hated liberal parliamentarism because he saw it as discussion without decision, procedure without substance, talk without sovereignty. Schmitt's central political distinction was "friend versus enemy". For him, politics was ultimately about the existential grouping of people into friends and enemies. Which is a very revealing way of thinking.
In a liberal, or at least semi-liberal, framework, politics is supposed to be constrained and limited by law, property, contract, rights, and procedural restraint. At least it aspires to do these things. Schmitt hated that shit. He wanted decision. Sovereignty. The power to declare the exception. The authority that stands above normal law in the moment of crisis. His famous formula was that sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
That is basically an intellectual crowbar against all constitutional limitation. When normal law is inconvenient, all the sovereign has to do is declare an exception and act. In other words, when the state needs to be unchained, oh boy, unchained it will be.
Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and become one of the regime's legal apologists. But even apart from his direct Nazi involvement, his importance is that he shows just how sophisticated German anti-liberalism was. The liberal state was not merely unpopular among the mobs and peasants. It was despised by highly educated theorists who produced elaborate arguments against it.
Against such a background, Adolf Hitler becomes very intelligible.
Hitler was not a deep thinker. Nor was he a philosopher with original ideas. Nor was he some great theorist. He was a crude agitator, synthesizer, and political weaponizer. However, just because he was crude doesn't mean he was disconnected. Quite the opposite. His political success came partly from condensing themes that were already familiar to millions of people around him.
National humiliation. Hatred of Versailles. Anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, anti-capitalism, anti-semitism, anti-Western resentment. The Führer principle. Organic peoplehood, racial mythology, historical destiny. Militarized politics, state direction. And contempt for bourgeois normality.
Given everything I described so far, I hope it's clear that Hitler was not some alien parasite injected into a healthy body. Rather, he was a fever erupting from a body full of disease.
The anti-semitic component is also not an emergence from nowhere. In Central Europe, Jews had long been associated by anti-semites with finance, commerce, liberalism, journalism, intellectualism, urbanity, cosmopolitanism, markets, and modernity. If you happen to already hate liberalism, markets, bourgeois life, and modern commercial civilization, then it is very very easy for that hatred to fuse with anti-semitism.
"The Jew" became the symbolic carrier of everything the anti-liberal mind hates. Money, markets, rootlessness, individualism, contracts, cities, finance, journalism, intellectual criticism, cosmopolitan exchange.
That should also explain why Nazi anti-semitism was able to portray Jews as both capitalist exploiters and Bolshevik destroyers. If you take this literally, it's straight up incoherent. But a myth doesn't need coherence, it just needs emotional utility. If "the Jew" is treated as the hidden enemy behind every hated aspect of modernity, then he can be blamed for capitalism and communism at the same time.
To summarize, Germany did not become Nazi Germany just because one evil Austrian painter with funny facial hair got lucky. Hitler succeeded because large parts of German intellectual, political, academic, bureaucratic, religious, and cultural life had already been prepared for centuries to reject individual liberty and market civilization.
Not saying "every German". Nor every intellectual, nor every Romantic, nor every conservative, nor every Lutheran, nor every anti-capitalist. I don't want to hear any midwit "so youre saying everyone was a nazi" nonsense.
The point is that enough of German culture was hostile to liberal civilization, and has been hostile to it for such an absurdly long time, that Weimar had shallow roots and many enemies from the moment it started.
Germany's problem was not merely Hitler. Germany's problem, to this very day, is centuries of state worship, obedience culture, romantic anti-rationalism, anti-bourgeois sentiment, collectivist metaphysics, national mythology, economic statism, and contempt for the individual. And I'm partially seeing the same shit gain traction outside of Central Europe too.
None of these things were created by Hitler. Hitler just inherited and vulgarized them, and ended up causing catastrophe.
Do you think Germany would have been more or less raped if Hitler hadn't become the führer?
It's a question that can't be answered cleanly. You can say fairly confidently that, without Hitler - had he never been borned, gotten killed as an infant, or accepted into Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts - you wouldn't have had the same timing, the same war, the same strategic insanity, or the exact same regime.
But the underlying ideological condition of Germany was already FUBAR before Hitler. He was not the original disease, he was more of a fever. An opportunist, an accelerator. A vulgar political embodiment of literal centuries of anti-liberal and collectivist cancer.
