The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture by Allert Tilman

Author:Allert, Tilman [Allert, Tilman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2009-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Devaluing the Present

How did Germans come to accept the National Socialist regime? Historical approaches to this question generally focus on external conditions, the economic situation in which the Germans found themselves, as well as what Max Weber called their “inner destiny.” Their nation’s defeat in World War I had humiliated them, the ensuing economic crisis damaged them financially, and they had lost confidence in the Weimar Republic and its procedural democracy. People from all classes felt an enormous sense of betrayal and began to long for a savior who would ease their burdens.

Although none of these motivations can be discounted, they don’t help explain how social rules as basic as those governing the greeting could have dissolved to such an extent, and so early in the game, even before ministerial decrees made the use of the Hitler greeting mandatory. Nor do they help answer questions raised by the fact that the “Heil Hitler” ritual was in essence an oath of loyalty to a charismatic leader: How did Germans come to place their trust in a single public figure? Was it even to Hitler himself, the concrete individual, that this trust was directed? What can account for a disconnection of private morality and the public sphere so radical that people came to mistrust nearly all of the values that had previously guided their lives and either isolated themselves from the moral contradictions around them or drowned out the voice of their own conscience in ceaselessly repeated demonstrations of loyalty?

In the case of Hitler and, more specifically, through the incessant invocation of his authority in the act of greeting, Germans so internalized the promise of salvation—of heaven on earth—that they came to feel that loyalty (Gefolgschaft) was their duty, apart from any threat of external sanctions. Allegiance now meant participation in what had become a sacralized reality, and moral scrutiny of one’s own actions became superfluous.

As for charisma, which displayed its power in the Hitler salute, it should not be mistaken for popularity in the usual sense, or even the contagious appeal of the pop idol. Charisma is rather, as Max Weber understood, a “revolutionary force” that unleashes “a change of direction in people’s beliefs and actions as part of a complete reorientation of attitudes toward every individual form of life and indeed the world itself.”1 This reorientation can redefine even those relationships which, by virtue of following their own inner logic, had once been thought inviolable. The Hitler salute—which, as both oath and greeting, combined the solemn with the ordinary, the sacred with the everyday, in a way that went unnoticed—is a prime example of the reorientation that Weber describes. The internalized sense of community, reconceived as a sacred entity, was expected to replace existing social differentiations.

We must therefore turn our attention to various German institutions and the communities they formed. We need to consider their internal ritual structure and the particular ways in which they constituted themselves as collectivities. Accepting or rejecting the Hitler greeting was not purely a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.