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Passion and the Origin of Hitlerism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Denis de Rougemont  and
Earl F. Langwell
Earl F. Langwell
Affiliation:
Notre Dame, Indiana.
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Extract

Hitlerism is not the creation of a single individual, the personal creation of Hitler: it is a mass phenomenon. Nor is it the necessary result of a determined economic system, since we see individuals in the most dissimilar countries, who are “converted”: rich and poor, industrialists and farmers, intellectuals and army men. The enumeration of the more or less immediate historical causes of Hitler's success, such as Eternal Germanism, the Versailles Treaty, inflation, the fear of Bolshevism, the Dictator's personality, the defects of the democracies, the complicity of big business, does not suffice to explain why they have all converged to the same result. Viewing the breadth and depth of the phenomenon, these heterogeneous “causes” seem to play the part of mere pretexts, of catalyzing agents determined, orientated and carried along by the phenomenon itself—which, therefore, still remains to be explained.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 1941 , pp. 65 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1941

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References

1. L'Amour et l'Occident. Paris, 1939Google Scholar. Translated into English by Belgion, Montgomery, under the title of Passion and Society. London, 1940Google Scholar. and Love in the Western World. New York, 1940Google Scholar.

2. I refer the interested reader for this development to Books I and II of Love in the Western World, and particularly to Chapter V of Book II, for the theological aspect of the problem.

3. See Huizinga, J.: The Waning of the Middle Ages. p. 96Google Scholar.

4. Cf. C. S. Jung, Psychologische Typen; Psychology and Religion, etc.

5. Mein Kampf, pp. 136–137. I quote the translation of Mein Kampf, published in 1939 by Reynal and Hitchcock, made by a group of professors and journalists, such as John Chamberlain, Alvin Johnson, G. N. Shuster, etc. It seems to me to offer every desirable safeguard.

6. Ibid., pp. 467–468.

7. Ibid., p. 707.

8. Cf. pp. 709–710.

9. Ibid., pp. 710–711. The italics are mine.

10. Ibid., p. 714.

11. Ibid., P. 469.

12. Ibid., pp. 697–698.

13. Ibid., p. 463.

14. Ibid., p. 702.

15. Ibid., p. 469.

16. Ibid., p. 486.

17. Ibid., p. 713.