Film clips of the enthusiastic crowds greeting the new gods embodied in the figures of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, or their successors even today bear witness to the fact that many people upon meeting their leaders truly experienced the ecstasy of religious rapture and were prepared to do anything the new gods commanded — work oneself to death, go to one’s own death, or put someone else to death.
Often fear lurked behind this ecstasy, but of course it was never very far from some sort of religious faith.
Totalitarian ideologies demanded devotion from their followers, absolute obedience in carrying out their (often absurd) commandments. They demanded that people believe the image of reality precisely in the form submitted to them. Millions of Germans believed so fervently in the villainy of Jews that they permitted their slaughter. Plenty enthusiastically made this perverted idea a reality. In the same way, many Germans believed they were destined for world domination and were willing to sacrifice their lives to the new divinity in the name of this horrible but suprapersonal goal.
The Communists accepted that entire groups of inhabitants had to be suppressed or killed if a new and better society was to be created. Absolute and uncritical faith was necessary to believe that the recently celebrated members of the party leadership were subsequently revealed to be traitors and must therefore be forcibly removed from the world of the living.
The faith of some was so strong that they were not willing to renounce it. They could not turn away from their villainous god even when standing upon the scaffold. When Hitler with the help of Himmler’s SS suppressed a nonexistent conspiracy by the SA, the SS men led the alleged conspirators before the firing squad. Before dying they managed to shout out their elementary slogan, “Heil Hitler” (while the execution squad received the order, “Heil Hitler, fire!”). Many Communists sentenced to death during the trials, which took place upon Stalin’s orders, died while crying out, “Long live Stalin!” They could not imagine that their god, in order to elevate himself, had demanded their death, and they did not have the fortitude to admit that the entirety of their faith had been an error, for which they had sacrificed their lives. It is probable that at least some of those who stood across from those carrying out the execution also invoked Stalin’s name. It is even possible that several of those who were to die the very next moment believed that they were serving a magnificent goal to which society was allegedly drawing near. Paradoxically, fanatically believing hangmen and victims stood face-to-face, each convinced that everything he had lived through and everything he was undergoing served a great and laudable objective.
Many German citizens, almost to the final moment, believed in the megalomaniac who had driven them to death and to the very end glorified his name in the same way they glorified the name of God. Even after the defeat of Nazism, even after the disclosure of the crimes of the Stalinist regime, many refused to admit that their faith had been misplaced and even villainous. They remained true to their faith because without it their lives would have fallen into even greater meaninglessness.
Totalitarian ideologies built on faith collapsed, but the need for faith remained. Even where traditional churches retreat into the background, people look for some kind of replacement for traditional faith. They believe in astrology, in people from outer space, in the miraculous power of a faith healer, in alternative medicine, in karma, in clairvoyance.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, the strongest faith is evoked by that which faith has always denied: reason, science, and technology. At least in our part of the world, people began to believe in their own redemptive abilities, their own wisdom. Science should be able to reveal and explain the past and predict the future, ensure prosperity for everyone who tries hard enough, overcome illness and finally even death. Lately scientists have begun to experiment with decoding the human genome. More and more we hear in the popular press ebullient cries that man stands on the threshold of immortality.
People have once again begun to believe in the paradise that science will bring them from heaven.
Whenever people begin to believe in the attainability of paradise, they usually enter upon a path leading to hell.
Dictators and Dictatorship
The governments of two especially cruel dictatorships affected my life directly, but during the same time a Fascist dictatorship ruled in Italy; at the end of the 1930s democracy was suppressed in Spain; a totalitarian, or at least undemocratic, regime came to power in Poland, Hungary, and Romania. And outside Europe? Dictatorships persist today: in Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, and a number of Muslim countries in both Asia and Africa.
With the benefit of hindsight, people continue to wonder how, in a country with such a tradition of learning and culture as Germany, citizens could voluntarily entrust their fates to the hands of Adolf Hitler and the riffraff that surrounded him. One could say the same thing, of course, about the country in which Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy wrote.
Usually certain obvious arguments are adduced for a blossoming of such reckless dictatorships: the humiliation of defeat, the collapse of the economy and resulting world economic crisis (which in Germany deprived almost half its working-age citizens of work), the inability to resolve social questions, military traditions, even a fascination with self-sacrifice and death in Germany and conversely the ruminations and popular debates concerning a better society in Russia. But it is obvious that there was something more general and overarching.
Considerations of national character, culture, or people’s behavior usually substitute the image of society for the image of the elite. Cultured Germans knew Goethe and Schiller (probably not all had read them), perhaps also Hegel and Kant (probably not all had studied them). Certainly some of the educated were acquainted with the German myth of the Nibelungs and might have considered that the meaning of German fate lay thus in self-sacrifice. It’s safe to assume, however, that most citizens in these categories did not consider that most Germans were not knowledgeable about the great German minds, just as in semi-educated Russia most muzhiks had not heard of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Chernyshevsky, Berdyayev, or Plekhanov, let alone cogitated over their works and allowed themselves be inspired to action.
Who were the people of the twentieth century? How did our lives differ from the lives of our forefathers?
The twentieth century brought unprecedented technological progress, new revolutionary developments in communication, the automobile, the radio, and the smashing of the atom, as well as new forms of entertainment, which was dominated by the recording of pictures and sound. New heroes were proclaimed. Celebrities of the entertainment industry — film stars, athletes, and singers — replaced the spiritual elite. The twentieth century brought ruin to many traditional values: Religious faith flagged; the village community faded in significance, as did the feudal nobility; and the family started to fall apart. A spiritual emptiness suddenly opened up before humanity. The atmosphere of precipitous development compelled people to ask how they could fill this void. Movement, change, upheaval, the cult of the new — these were most clearly expressed in art. The modern began to disdain tradition, while everything new seemed to be a revolutionary contribution and was showered with praise. What had until recently been considered a virtue, for instance, communicability, clarity, or even an idea, was snowed under by the ridicule of those who saw themselves as adjudicators of art. An abyss opened up between those who considered themselves the creators and everyone else. The tragedy was that “everyone else” made up the great majority. This majority, now deprived of certainties that until recently had provided them with faith — the traditional arrangement of society and generally recognized values (even if most of those values were mistaken) — found themselves untethered. The overturning of traditional values was exacerbated by serious societal crises, the most serious of which was the world war at the beginning of the century, the largest and bloodiest thus far in history, both in extent and in its use of new, lethal weapons. The war, however, ended with the defeat of the militaristic and undemocratic regimes. In their stead, in the place of defeated monarchies, new democratic republics began to establish themselves. For a brief moment, the promised rule of the people aroused brash and grandiose hopes of a way to escape the void. Yet these hopes went unfilled, and the people were overwhelmed with disappointment. The poverty they had longed to escape persisted and, moreover, they found nothing suprapersonal, nothing absolute to cling to, nothing before which they could bow down in religious devotion.