Nazism: Highway or Byway?

Abstract

For those of us who were raised politically on the vicarious experience of National Socialism, its graduation into an apparently successful and overpowering regime was a cataclysm of unparalleled proportions. The movement seemed an enormous, overbearing force whose source was beyond time and the changes associated with time. It appeared not so much to grow and develop as to manifest in apparently different, but internally affinitive, ways the relentlessly consistent potentialities which had ever been in it. Nazi opportunism was well known to us, of course, but it did not so much define the movement as express it, generalizing National Socialism and equipping it to act characteristically on all kinds of objects in all kinds of situations. Nazism, in short, was a massive central reality, sui generis. We were uneasy about Italian fascism, saddened by the Spanish version, regretful at the east European varieties, and divided both within and among ourselves vis-à-vis the instrumental similarities of the Soviet dictatorship. But Nazism was in a class by itself, at once invincibly individual and supremely representative, an inimitable compound of Germanism, fascism, and regressive autocracy that was reducible to none of these ingredients and yet intensified each of them to its ultimate power. Thus Nazism was connected to the past and contemporary worlds sufficiently to make its impact universal, but in these connections it was ever Nazism that was the senior partner: it was not German history or fascism or absolutist tradition that made Nazism relevant to us but the other way around. Nazism abolished the limitations of time and space for us: the clutches of atavism and the tentacles of technology alike could now reach to any individual anytime anywhere. It was at once fact and symbol. It marked both the climax of German history and the point at which, as the ultimate authoritarianism, this German finality met the destiny of humanity.