281: ADOLF THE ANCIENT HISTORIAN
Bit of a change here, though classically underpinned.
Idea inspired by Julian Barnes’s latest (at the time of writing) novel Elizabeth Finch (2022). The middle part is devoted to Julian the Apostate, last pagan emperor of Rome. Near the end, the narrator quotes these two passages from Hitler’s Table Talk (21+25 Oct 1941):
“I didn’t know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgement with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians”.
“The book that contains the reflections of the Emperor Julian should be circulated in millions. What wonderful intelligence, what discernment, all the wisdom of antiquity. It is extraordinary.”
Tirades against Christianity were a constant in Hitler’s disquisitions. One sometimes feels as though one were reading Edward Gibbon, especially such pronouncements as “In the ancient world the relation between men and gods was founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance”, a lead-in to anti-Christian fulminations.
What a pity we have no such table talk of Roman emperors, save for some inklings in Suetonius and Tacitus. We’d have some, had the emperors’ own writings survived.
The nearest we can come is via the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161180), often nicknamed ‘The Golden Book’, best thought of as his Commonplace Book, very popular throughout the Byzantine period and supposedly the favourite book of Bill Clinton who cannot have read very carefully its stern moral messages.
The two Roman books whose loss I most regret would have enriched us here, namely the Memoirs of the dictator Sulla and Nero’s mother Agrippina.
In what follows, I am drawing on Bob Carruthers’s Hitler’s Personal Conversations (Pen & Sword Books, Barnsley, 2018). His Introduction clarifies the tangle of sources for Adolf’s musings, himself drawing on those preserved by Martin Bormann. See also (e.g.) Heinz Linge, With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Valet (English tr. by Geoffrey Brooks. London/New York, 2009).
There is much controversy over the sources and transmission of these conversations. The Wikipedia entry usefully details all this. Basically, what we have are Hitlerian monologues from 5 July 1941 to 1942, plus desultory records down to 1944.
In what follows, I present some of Hitler’s pronouncements on ancient history and Christianity in both himself verbatim and paraphrases of the longer monologues. I gratefully use Carruthers’s translations from the German. Here and there I append a few comments. For spatial reasons, I restrict myself to 1941. It is worth noting that his ancient references rather dwindle in the 1943-44 monologues. Perhaps, as the German situation worsened, Hitler did not want to think about the decline and fall of the ancient Roman Reich?
These conversations rather resemble Plato’s Dialogues, in which Socrates does all the talking, his listeners restricted to the occasional “Yes, O Socrates”. Hitler’s listeners rarely get a word in, always prefaced by “Mein Führer”.
It should be emphasised that Hitler’s Table Talk is miles away from the demented frothings of Mein Kampf. Albert Speer (post-war, of course) was most unfair in calling it “rambling nonsense”. He has many interesting thoughts on diverse topics, sometimes prophetic, for example on the need to curtail the use of coal and concern for the environment.
Before beginning, there is one other matter which provides a context for Hitler’s excursions into antiquity. Namely, the Nazi obsession with Tacitus’s Germania, their bible. Himmler was especially caught up with this. He sent a special SS force to the Italian estate of Aurelio Balleani to seize
the Codex Aesinas, discovered there in 1902, thought to be a copy of the original
Germania manuscript. They did not find it, Balleani having transferred the treasure to another estate. It is now in Rome. Hitler was sufficiently interested to ask Mussolini to give Germany the manuscript. Il Duce initially agreed, but backed down in the face of public protests.
For the full story, see Christopher Krebs,
A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’ Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York, 2012). Also, both online, Adam Kirschs’s ‘Ideas are Viruses’ and Kacper Walczak’s ‘Himmler and Germania, respectively on the SLATE and IMPERIUM ROMANUM websites.
5 July 1941: “The Fascist movement is a spontaneous return to the traditions of ancient Rome.” True, in the sense that the term ‘Fascist’ derives from the rods and axes (fasces) carried by Roman officials as a mark of office.
11-12 July 1941: “The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of worlddomination… the result of the collapse of the Roman Empire was a night that lasted for centuries.” He continues for some time in the same vein.
On this same occasion, Hitler reflects that “On tasting the soup of the people of Schleswig-Holstein, it occurred to me that the gruel of the Spartans cannot have been very different.” This alludes to the notorious Spartan ‘Black Broth’, a concoction of boiled pork and blood, flavoured with salt and vinegar. In spite of many ancient mentions, no precise recipe survives – various websites offer modern re-creations. An Athenian visitor tried a spoonful and immediately spluttered that he now understood why Spartan warriors were not afraid of death.
21-22 July 1941: Walking with Mussolini, Hitler felt “I could easily compare his profile with one of the Roman busts and realised he was one of the Caesars” – exactly what Il Duce thought of himself. A little later: “The Roman Empire is a great political creation, the greatest of all.” There follows a long comparison between the Pantheon in Rome and the one in Paris, to the latter’s inferiority.
8-10 August 1941: “I’ve just heard that the armies of ancient times had recourse to meat only in times of scarcity, that the feeding of the Roman armies was almost entirely based on cereals.” In Heinz Linge’s version, Hitler laughed as he recalled when “Roman soldiers were compelled by hunger to eat meat” – this being an exact translation of Tacitus, Annals 14. 24. Many modern vegetarians, notably FT’s Mat Coward, are embarrassed by this unwanted connection (so, too, are non-smokers) and are reluctant to believe it. But, the evidence of this Table Talk and other sources is overwhelming. There is really no cause to get one’s knickers in a twist. The young Hitler did eat meat, the adult one was a fanatic vegetarian.
14 October 1941: In a long disquisition on religion, replete with anti-Christian tirades, Hitler observes “the ancient world was divided between the systems of philosophy and the worship of idols”, a generalisation that contains some truth.
19 October 1941: ‘The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.” Twaddle, of course; Adolf is wearing very rosy-coloured spectacles here.
21 October 1941: Adolf is here at his maddest, claiming Jesus was not a Jew but the product of sex between a whore and a Roman soldier. A great deal follows about Paul’s supposed determination to destroy the Roman Empire, plus a lurch into Rome’s being so influenced by the Germans that they became enamoured of fairhaired women, leading to Roman women hastening to dye their hair – Olay!
25 October 1941: After claiming that Christians destroyed ancient libraries
– a garbled reference to their many denunciations of ‘immoral’ pagan literature and destruction of particular books, Adolf continues: “I don’t believe at all in the truth of certain mental pictures that many people have of the Roman Emperors. I’m sure that Nero didn’t set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that.”
Suetonius and Dio Cassius unequivocally blame Nero for the arson. Tacitus left it an open question between imperial guilt and accident – fires were common in the city. Hitler would have been much taken by the notion of JH Bishop in his Nero: The Man and the Legend (1964) – I heard him expound it in a lecture, we then being colleagues at the same Australian university – that the fire started by accident, then Christians who believed it to be God’s doing began to spread the fire, these being seen and arrested by the Praetorian Guard.
Spatial considerations apart, there is another reason why Hitler’s exculpation of Nero makes the perfect ending. There is a possible/probable subtext here, namely the 1933 Reichstag fire, blamed on the Communists but widely thought to have been perpetrated by the Nazis themselves. Thus, Hitler in acquitting Nero may be acquitting himself.