Interlude

It is said that during the years of the Great War, during which the self-effacing Hitler won the Iron Cross First Class (a thing unheard of!) for his personal courage and bravery, that he carried around, in his knapsack, a copy of the Complete Works of Schopenhauer. By War’s end it was said to be well dog-eared and falling apart from much study.

No doubt his eyes widened as he read this passage from Schopenhauer’s “The Basis of Morality”:

“He, who goes to meet death for his fatherland, has freed himself from the illusion which limits a man s existence to his own person. Such a one has broken the fetters of the principium individuationis. In his widened, enlightened nature he embraces all his countrymen, and in them lives on and on. Nay, he reaches forward to, and merges himself in the generations yet unborn, for whom he works ; and he regards death as a wink of the eyelids, so momentary that it does not interrupt the sight.

“We may here sum up the characteristics of the two human types above indicated. To the Egoist all other people are uniformly and intrinsically strangers. In point of fact, he considers nothing to be truly real, except his own person, and regards the rest of man kind practically as troops of phantoms, to whom he assigns merely a relative existence, so far as they may be instruments to serve, or barriers to obstruct, his purposes ; the result being an immeasurable differ ence, a vast gulf between his ego on the one side, and the non-ego on the other. In a word, he lives ex clusively centred in his own individuality, and on his death-day he sees all reality, indeed the whole world, coming to an end along with himself. 1 Whereas the Altruist discerns in all other persons, nay, in every living thing, his own entity, and feels therefore that his being is commingled, is identical with the being of whatever is alive. By death he loses only a small part of himself. Putting off the narrow limitations of the individual, he passes into the larger life of all mankind, in whom he always recognised, and, recog nising, loved, his very self; and the illusion of Time and Space, which separated his consciousness from that of others, vanishes. These two opposite modes of viewing the world are probably the chief, though not indeed the sole cause of the difference we find between very good and exceptionally bad men, as to the manner in which they meet their last hour.”

In fact we can see in this poem, written by Herr Hitler in 1916, the working of his own feeling of the sublime:


In the Thicket of the Forest at Artois

It was in the thicket of the Artois Wood.
Deep in the trees, on blood-soaked ground,
Lay stretched a wounded German warrior,
And his cries rang out in the night.
In vain ... no echo answered his plea ...
Will he bleed to death like a beast,
That shot in the gut dies alone?
Then suddenly ...
Heavy steps approach from the right
He hears how they stamp on the forest floor ...
And new hope springs from his soul.
And now from the left ...
And now from both sides ...

Two men approach his miserable bed
A German it is, and a Frenchman.
And each watches the other with distrustful glance,
And threatening they aim their weapons.
The German warrior asks: "What do you do here?"
"I was touched by the needy one's call for help."

"It's your enemy!"
"It is a man who suffers."

And both, wordless, lowered their weapons.
Then entwined their hands
And, with muscles tensed, carefully lifted
The wounded warrior, as if on a stretcher,
And carried him through the woods.
'Til they came to the German outposts.
"Now it is over. He will get good care."
And the Frenchman turns back toward the woods.
But the German grasps for his hand,
Looks, moved, into sorrow-dimmed eyes
And says to him with earnest foreboding:

"I know not what fate holds for us,
Which inscrutably rules in the stars.
Perhaps I shall fall, a victim of your bullet.
Maybe mine will fell you on the sand —
For indifferent is the chance of battles.
Yet, however it may be and whatever may come:
We lived these sacred hours,
Where man found himself in man ...
And now, farewell! And God be with you!"

Till his final hour Hitler never forgot the unity of us all.