THIS HITLER

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 65, 16 March 1940, Page 21

THIS HITLER

A ]ot of people have tried to debunk +_:,. ~ . .., , , ~. „.. Hltler > but have failed by taking him too seriously. Mr. Wyndham Lewis. j n "The Hitler Cult" writes a reviewer Jh th Liter Su pp lem ent of the Lon- / don "Times, beats them at the game because he refuses to take the Fuhrer se riously; to him this divinity is just -other of the fa.se gods, that history throws up, and he gives him only six years to live. If British propaganda should . eve r become genuinely abusive •■• ■ ■.. -; it need go no further than these pagps for epithets, not only for Hitler but for his henchmen, too. Goering ' like a sheriff in a- cowboy film ; GoebbGiS "a cockily arrogant lawyer's 'dog '; Hitler himself 'a. bashful Violet, a business man's hero, bathing in : the music of Wagntar "much in the same way as Walt Whitman bathed in the surf of the Atlantic." .There is a good deal of knowledge in I^^ .™3SS knowledge of "Mem Kampf" and the biographies of Hitler would have made p OSS j-ble tl.e brilliant sketches of "Hitler as a\ fairy tale," emanation of the old many-schlossed, spiky, and bosky landscapes, the feudal val]s ey of the/Oesterreich'*; xif.; Hitler as a if^fiiaty^"corfipTfed "wfbst sSldessrullji'' w ith Rousseau; as a slfep%alker who has dilcovered ihat he can spell-bind; as the foe of "pigheaded intellectuals." If he hag come a hundred years too late to lay his trickg he will be a menace by his determination to turn the German p e Ople into a "Sunday school of sUnburnt paupers, armed to the teethi >. tj ow effect ive, too, is the fett & tk that one would "naturally expect eSS'tho SS class mind- 'Re. Pins down for examare^"^V"? >di?ectiC^" S^ absurdities °. f th,f ■ Nazi .fantasy "a fa^iry tale crea*]°f .all: the; more.^mazing because >} has'been, created a.man .who.is deep down: stiH ,a peasant. This com: nient'Ms profoundly true. .^Peasant 9 n Sm must account ;tor\ Hitler sintense, conservatism: as Nietzsche would have said- he is an agriculturist of the. spirit"; for him a thing is good according to the length of its 'roots. The peasant whi has vainly tried to make; a success of lower middle-class life as an artist has harnessed a movement based o Communism to his own discontent; as Mr. Lewis calls it, "a middle-class Juggernaut of bastard Communism, begotten on a bankrupt bourgeoisie." In fact. National Rodalism is nothing but an exploitation of an emotional need: that satisfied, the movement will collapse as Communism. has collapsed. So deep is Mr. Lewis's contempt for the man and his movement that he states as a matter of course that Hitler, could never win a war of nerves.

DEBUNKING AN IDOL

' After some 120 pages of delicious, belabouring. . the author surveys the world 'situation and discusses whether Britain "is in a spot." Presumably he.is trying to show why this con[temptible movement should have had 'such success. Briefly his thesis is that !we have made the great mistake of [trying simultaneously to look good and |be powerful. Having belaboured the I British governing class, the sovereign State, the League of Nations Union, and a number of other post-war targets, Mr. Lewis comes down on the side of his countrymen because he thinks on the whole they are more civilised than the nation that produced Wagner. It is all very good reading, full of personality, and, if one may say so. much more typically English than the "closely reasoned analyses," the "penetrating discussions," and "the vivid, revelations" of which books on the Nazis generally consist.