Hindenburg by Von der Goltz Anna;

Author:Von der Goltz, Anna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Power, Myth, and The Rise of The Nazis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2009-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Have these gentlemen forgotten that Tannenberg is in East Prussia? Have they forgotten how, in August 1914, the East Prussian people fled from the Russian bands, how the villages burned, how the cities were bombarded, how a cry of despair went through the country, and how they themselves feared for their possessions, until Hindenburg appeared, saved East Prussia, and how, instead of a cry of despair, the gratitude to the liberator resounded?141

Julius Elbau, editor of the Vossische Zeitung, equally resorted to mythical rhetoric in an article entitled ‘The Marshal of Peace’. The millions of votes cast for Hindenburg on 13 March showed the gratitude of all reasonable people for the ‘deed of the leader who (…) has once again sacrificed his glory to salvage the country from civil war and self-destruction’, Elbau exclaimed.142

This Hindenburg fervour of liberal campaigners was no aberration on their part—an inexplicable temporary clouding of their judgement by the ‘banal’ and ‘sentimentalist’ Hindenburg myth which none of their ‘critical contemporaries’ subscribed to.143 These highly educated and acute republicans did not resort to the rhetoric of myth because they had lost touch with reality. Quite the reverse—because they expected their readers to respond and because they had also subscribed to layers of the mythical narrative since 1914 they invoked it effectively to promote Hindenburg’s re-election. Their backing rested on belief as well as calculation.

If it had exclusively been the ‘weak bracket of opposition to Hitler’ that united Hindenburg’s supporters in 1932, as Andreas Dorpalen, amongst others, argued, they could have chosen any other politician willing to run against the Nazi leader.144 Only Hindenburg’s public image, however, was polyvalent enough in 1932 to unite a heterogeneous political front ranging from conservative monarchists, such as Count Westarp and the young conservative intellectuals of the ‘Conservative Revolution’ to the Catholics of Centre and BVP, and the Social Democrats, as well as trade unionists represented in the ‘Iron Front’. One person’s saviour from Weimar might have been another’s saviour of Weimar—but a saviour nevertheless.

***

As a case in point, many commentators attributed Hindenburg’s victory to his continued mythical veneration. With hindsight, campaign manager Günther Gereke, who would serve as Reich commissioner for job creation in Hitler’s first cabinet, admitted openly to deploying the ‘old Hindenburg myth’ to garner electoral success.145 The Republic had been strengthened, Hitler’s ‘spell’ broken, and much of the Nazis’ nimbus destroyed, many papers were convinced.146 According to the DVP’s Nationalliberale Korrespondenz ‘[i]t was a victory of personality, of this great German name, of just will, and selfless service to the fatherland’.147 With an echo of 1925, the DDP’s Demokratischer Zeitungsdienst praised Hindenburg’s victory as the ‘salvation’ in times of crisis and catastrophe.148

It was not only his supporters, however, who cited the Hindenburg myth as a reason for his victory. Carl von Ossietzky, who, sceptical of the ‘lesser evil’ strategy of the SPD, had backed Ernst Thälmann, equally emphasized the role of personality:149

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