Читать книгу Adolf Hitler - Clemens von Lengsfeld - Страница 18

Weeping clown

That Hitler was tolerated as a leading light in a party, which stood for pure Aryanism, may well be astonishing in retrospect. This fact also preoccupied his contemporaries as there was a lot of talk in the inner circle about Adolf Hitler’s dubious origins. He, the Jew-hater, was said to have Jewish origins himself or even to be the child of an incestuous relationship. Adolf Hitler did not dispute this. Even defamation of him as a “weeping clown”⁴⁹ could not irritate him. A sentence of his companion’s, Hermann Göring, has frequently been repeated: “Hitler needs to come here and weep.”⁵⁰ The former is bound to have meant this sympathetically. The dashing officer pilot and bearer of the significant Pour le mérite order had seen Hitler at some NSDAP party events before he asked him for a meeting in October 1922. He must have really impressed Hitler, so much so that, only a few weeks later, Hitler appointed him to head of the SA in December 1922. In contrast, a rival from within the party, Otto Strasser, expressed himself on the subject in less than flattering terms: “Hitler cried deliberately and overdid it.”⁵¹ And Carl Zuckmayer even called him a “howling dervish”⁵². That the person thus described could apparently switch human feelings on and off, turned out to be very advantageous at party rallies.

“Hitler has to come and weep”. Hitler with handkerchief in orator pose. Photographic postcard (Heinrich Hoffmann), before August 1927. From a series: “Adolf Hitler speaks, 6 photographic moments (…) “.

As Hitler was also regarded as a gifted speaker, his enemies could not say anything against him. Whilst the outside world sank in the chaos of hyperinflation, unemployment, hunger and impoverishment, under the big top one was only too glad to listen to the prophesying baying of this petit bourgeois saviour from the Austrian forests. In the meantime so many people were streaming to the events that they had had to move out of the bierkellers into the largest venue, the Krone circus. In the circus tent packed with 6000 people, on 30 October 1923 Hitler enjoyed rapturous applause until it “ebbed away in solemn silence” as he later wrote.