The Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken Word

The Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken WordThe Struggle of the Early Period - the Significance of the Spoken Word

The first great meeting on February 24, 1920, in the Festival [Banquet Hall] of the Hofbräuhaus, had not died down in our ears when the preparations for the next were made While up till then it had been considered risky to hold a little meeting once a month or even once every two weeks in a city like Munich, a large mass meeting was now to take place every seven days; in other words, once a week I not need to assure you that there was but one fear that constantly tormented us: would the people come and would they listen to us?-though I personally, even then, had the unshakable conviction that once they were there, the people would stay and follow the speech In this period the Festsaal of the Munich Hofbräuhaus assumed an almost sacred significance for us National Socialists Every week a meeting, almost always in this room, and each time the hall better filled and the people more devoted Beginning with the 'War Guilt,' which at that time nobody bothered about, and the 'Peace Treaties,' nearly everything was taken up that seemed agitationally expedient or ideologically necessary Especially to the peace treaties themselves the greatest attention was given What prophecies the young movement kept making to the great masses! And nearly all of which have now been realized! Today it is easy to speak or write about these things But in those days a public mass meeting, attended, not by bourgeois shopkeepers, but by incited proletarians, and dealing with the topic, 'The Peace Treaty of Versailles,' was taken as an attack on the Republic and a sign of a reactionary if not monarchistic attitude At the very first sentence containing a criticism of Versailles, you had the stereotyped cry flung at you: 'What about BrestLitovsk?' 'And Brest-Litovsk?' The masses roared this again and again, until gradually they grew hoarse or the speaker finally gave up his attempt to convince them You felt like dashing your head against the wall in despair over such people! They did not want to hear or understand that Versailles was a shame and a disgrace, and not even that this dictated peace was an unprecedented pillaging of our people The destructive work of the Marxists and the poison of enemy propaganda had deprived the people of any sense And yet we had not even the right to complain! For how immeasurably great was the blame on another side! What had the bourgeoisie done to put a halt to this frightful disintegration, to oppose it and open the way to truth by a better and more thorough enlightenment? Nothing, and again nothing In those days I saw them nowhere, all the great folkish apostles of today Perhaps they spoke in little clubs, at tea tables, or in circles of like-minded people, but where they should have been, among the wolves, they did not venture ; except if there was a chance to howl with the pack But to me it was clear in those days that for the small basic nucleus which for the present constituted the movement, the question of war guilt had to be cleared up, and cleared up in the sense of historic truth That our movement should transmit to the broadest masses knowledge of the peace treaty was the premise for the future success of the movement At that time, when they all still regarded this peace as a success of democracy, we had to form a front against it and engrave ourselves forever in the minds of men as an enemy of this treaty, so that later, when the harsh reality of this treacherous frippery would be revealed in its naked hate, the recollection of our position at that time would win us confidence Even then I always came out in favor of taking a position in important questions of principle against all public opinion when it assumed a false attitude - disregarding all considerations of popularity, hatred, or struggle The NSDAP should not become a constable of public opinion, but must dominate it It must not become a servant of the masses, but their master! There exists, of course, and especially for every movement that is still weak, a great temptation, in moments when a more powerful enemy has succeeded in driving the people to a mad decision or to a false attitude through his arts of seduction, to go along and join the shouting, particularly when there are a few reasons - even if they are merely illusory - which, from the standpoint of the young movement itself, might argue for this course Human cowardice will seek such reasons so vigorously that it almost always finds something which would give a semblance of justification, even from one's 'own standpoint,' for participating in such a crime I have several times experienced such cases, in which supreme energy was necessary to keep the ship of the movement from drifting with the artificially aroused general current or rather from being driven by it The last time was when our infernal press, to which the existence of the German people is Hecuba, succeeded in puffing up the South Tyrol question to an importance which will be catastrophic for the German people Without considering whom they were serving thereby, many socalled ' national' men and parties and organizations, solely from cowardice in the face of Jew-incited public opinion, joined the general outcry and senselessly helped to support the fight against a system which we Germans, precisely in this present-day situation, must feel to be the sole ray of light in this degenerating world While the international world Jew slowly but surely strangles us, our so-called patriots shouted against a man and a system which dared, in one corner of the earth at least, to free themselves from the Jewish-Masonic embrace and oppose a nationalistic resistance to this international world poisoning It was, however, too alluring for weak characters simply to set their sails by the wind and capitulate to the clamor of public opinion And a capitulation it was! Men are such base liars that they may not admit it, even to themselves, but it remains the truth that only cowardice and fear of the popular sentiment stirred up by the Jews impelled them to join in All other explanations are miserable evasions devised by the petty sinner conscious of his guilt And so it was necessary to shake the movement with an iron fist to preserve it from ruin by this tendency To attempt such a shift at a moment when public opinion, fanned by every driving force, was burning only in one direction is indeed not very popular at the moment and sometimes puts the venturesome leader in almost mortal peril But not a few men in history have at such moments been stoned for an action for which posterity, at a later date, had every cause to thank them on its knees It is with this that a movement must reckon and not with the momentary approval of the present It may be that in such hours the individual feels afraid; but he must not forget that after every such hour salvation comes at length, and that a movement that wants to renew a world must serve, not the moment, but the future In this connection it can be established that the greatest and most enduring successes in history tend for the most part to be those which in their beginnings found the least understanding because they stood in the sharpest conflict with general public opinion, with its ideas and its will Even then, on the first day of our public appearance, we had a chance to experience this Truly we did not 'curry favor with the masses,' but everywhere opposed the lunacy of these people Nearly always it came about that in these years I faced an assemblage of people who believed the opposite of what I wanted to say, and wanted the opposite of what I believed Then it was the work of two hours to lift two or three thousand people out of a previous conviction, blow by blow to shatter the foundation of their previous opinions, and finally to lead them across to our convictions and our philosophy of life In those days I learned something important in a short time, to strike the weapon of reply out of the enemy's hands myself We soon noticed that our opponents, especially their discussion speakers, stepped forward with a definite 'repertory' in which constantly recurring objections to our assertions were raised, so that the uniformity of this procedure pointed to a conscious unified schooling And that was indeed the case Here we had an opportunity to become acquainted with the incredible discipline of our adversaries' propaganda, and it is still my pride today to have found the means, not only to render this propaganda ineffective but in the end to strike its makers with their own weapon Two years later I was a master of this art In every single speech it was important to realize clearly in advance the presumable content and form of the objections to be expected in the discussion, and to pull every one of them apart in the speech itself Here it was expedient to cite the possible objections ourselves at the outset and demonstrate their untenability; thus, the listener, even if he had come stuffed full of the objections he had been taught, but otherwise with an honest heart, was more easily won over when we disposed of the doubts that had been imprinted on his memory The stuff that had been drummed into him was automatically refuted and his attention drawn more and more to the speech This is the reason why, right after my first lecture on the 'Peace Treaty of Versailles,' which I had delivered to the troops while still a so-called 'educator,' I changed the lecture and now spoke of the 'Peace Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles.' For after a short time, in fact, in the course of the discussion about this first speech of mine, I was able to ascertain that the people really knew nothing at all about the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but that the adroit propaganda of their parties had succeeded in representing this very treaty as one of the most shameful acts of rape in the world The persistence with which this lie was presented over and over to the great masses accounted for the fact that millions of Germans regarded the peace treaty of Versailles as nothing more than just retribution for the crime committed by us at Brest-Litovsk, thus viewing any real struggle against Versailles as an injustice and sometimes remaining in the sincerest moral indignation And this among other things was why the shameless and monstrous word 'reparations' was able to make itself at home in Germany This vile hypocrisy really seemed to millions of our incited national comrades an accomplishment of higher justice Dreadful, but it was so The best proof of this was offered by the propaganda I initiated against the peace treaty of Versailles, which I introduced by some enlightenment regarding the treaty of BrestLitovsk I contrasted the two peace treaties, compared them point for point, showed the actual boundless humanity of the one treaty compared to the inhuman cruelty of the second, and the result was telling At that time I spoke on this theme at meetings of two thousand people, and often I was struck by the glances of three thousand six hundred hostile eyes And three hours later I had before me a surging mass full of the holiest indignation and boundless wrath Again a great lie had been torn out of the hearts and brains of a crowd numbering thousands, and a truth implanted in its place I considered these two lectures on 'The True Causes of the World War' and on 'The Peace Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles,' the most important of all, and so I repeated and repeated them dozens of times, always renewing the form, until, on this point at least, a certain clear and unified conception became current among the people from among whom the movement gathered its first members For myself, moreover, the meetings had the advantage that I gradually transformed myself into a speaker for mass meetings, that I became practiced in the pathos and the gestures which a great hall, with its thousands of people, demands At that time, except - as already emphasized - in small circles, I saw no enlightenment in this direction from the parties which today have their mouths so full of words and act as if they had brought about the change in public opinion When a so-called 'national politician' somewhere delivered a speech along these lines, it was only to circles who for the most part already shared his conviction, and for whom his utterances represented at most an intensification of their own opinions This was not the important thing at that time; the important thing was to win by enlightenment and propaganda those people who, by virtue of their education and opinions, still stood on hostile ground The leaflet, too, was put into the service of this enlightenment While still in the army, I had written a leaflet comparing the peace treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles, and it was distributed in large editions Later I took over stocks of it for the party, and here again the effect was good The first meetings, in general, were distinguished by the fact that the tables were covered with all sorts of leaflets, newspapers, pamphlets, etc But the chief emphasis was laid on the spoken word And actually it alone - for general psychological reasons - is able to bring about really great changes I have already stated in the first volume that all great, world-shaking events have been brought about, not by written matter, but by the spoken word This led to a lengthy discussion in a part of the press, where, of course, such an assertion was sharply attacked, particularly by our bourgeois wiseacres But the very reason why this occurred confutes the doubters For the bourgeois intelligentsia protest against such a view only because they themselves obviously lack the power and ability to influence the masses by the spoken word, since they have thrown themselves more and more into purely literary activity and renounced the real agitational activity of the spoken word Such habits necessarily lead in time to what distinguishes our bourgeoisie today; that is, to the loss of the psychological instinct for mass effect and mass influence While the speaker gets a continuous correction of his speech from the crowd he is addressing, since he can always see in the faces of his listeners to what extent they can follow his arguments with understanding and whether the impression and the effect of his words lead to the desired goal - the writer does not know his readers at all Therefore, to begin with, he will not aim at a definite mass before his eyes, but will keep his arguments entirely general By this to a certain degree he loses psychological subtlety and in consequence suppleness And so, by and large, a brilliant speaker will be able to write better than a brilliant writer can speak, unless he continuously practices this art On top of this there is the fact that the mass of people as such is lazy; that they remain inertly in the spirit of their old habits and, left to themselves, will take up a piece of written matter only reluctantly if it is not in agreement with what they themselves believe and does not bring them what they had hoped for Therefore, an article with a definite tendency is for the most part read only by people who can already be reckoned to this tendency At most a leaflet or a poster can, by its brevity, count on getting a moment's attention from someone who thinks differently The picture in all its forms up to the film has greater possibilities Here a man needs to use his brains even less; it suffices to look, or at most to read extremely brief texts, and thus many will more readily accept a pictorial presentation than read an article of any length The picture brings them in a much briefer time, I might almost say at one stroke, the enlightenment which they obtain from written matter only after arduous reading The essential point, however, is that a piece of literature never knows into what hands it will fall, and yet must retain its definite form In general the effect will be the greater, the more this form corresponds to the intellectual level and nature of those very people who will be its readers A book that is destined for the broad masses must, therefore, attempt from the very beginning to have an effect, both in style and elevation, different from a work intended for higher intellectual classes Only by this kind of adaptability does written matter approach the spoken word To my mind, the speaker can treat the same theme as the book; he will, if he is a brilliant popular orator, not be likely to repeat the same reproach and the same substance twice in the same form He will always let himself be borne by the great masses in such a way that instinctively the very words come to his lips that he needs to speak to the hearts of his audience And if he errs, even in the slightest, he has the living correction before him As I have said, he can read from the facial expression of his audience whether, firstly, they understand what he is saying, whether, secondly, they can follow the speech as a whole, and to what extent, thirdly, he has convinced them of the soundness of what he has said If - firstly - he sees that they not understand him, he will become so primitive and clear in his explanations that even the last member of his audience has to understand him; if he feels - secondly - that they cannot follow him, he will construct his ideas so cautiously and slowly that even the weakest member of the audience is not left behind, and he will - thirdly - if he suspects that they not seem convinced of the soundness of his argument, repeat it over and over in constantly new examples He himself will utter their objections, which he senses though unspoken, and go on confuting them and exploding them, until at length even the last group of an opposition, by its very bearing and facial expression, enables him to recognize its capitulation to his arguments Here again it is not seldom a question of overcoming prejudices which are not based on reason, but, for the most part unconsciously, are supported only by sentiment To overcome this barrier of instinctive aversion, of emotional hatred, of prejudiced rejection, is a thousand times harder than to correct a faulty or erroneous scientific opinion False concepts and poor knowledge can be eliminated by instruction, the resistance of the emotions never Here only an appeal to these mysterious powers themselves can be effective; and the writer can hardly ever accomplish this, but almost exclusively the orator The most striking proof of this is furnished by the fact that, despite a bourgeois press that is often very skillfully gotten up, flooding our people with editions running into millions, this press could not prevent the masses from becoming the sharpest enemy of its own bourgeois world The whole newspaper flood and all the books that are turned out year after year by the intellectuals slide off the millions of the lower classes like water from oiled leather This can prove only two things: either the unsoundness of the content of this whole literary production of our bourgeois world or the impossibility of reaching the heart of the broad masses solely by written matter Especially, indeed, when this written matter demonstrates so unpsychological an attitude as is here the case Let no one reply (as a big German national newspaper in Berlin tried to do) that Marxism itself, by its writings, especially by the effect of the great basic work of Karl Marx, provides proof counter to this assertion Seldom has anyone made a more superficial attempt to support an erroneous view What gave Marxism its astonishing power over the great masses is by no means the formal written work of the Jewish intellectual world, but rather the enormous oratorical propaganda wave which took possession of the great masses in the course of the years Of a hundred thousand German workers, not a hundred on the average know this work, which has always been studied by a thousand times more intellectuals and especially Jews than by real adherents of this movement from the great lower classes And this work was not written for the great masses, but exclusively for the intellectual leadership of that Jewish machine for world conquest; it was stoked subsequently with an entirely different fuel: the press For that is what distinguishes the Marxist press from our bourgeois press The Marxist press is written by agitators, and the bourgeois press would like to carry on agitation by means of writers The Social Democratic yellow journalist, who almost always goes from the meeting hall to the newspaper office, knows his public like no one else But the bourgeois scribbler who comes out of his study to confront the great masses is nauseated by their very fumes and faces them helplessly with the written word What has won the millions of workers for Marxism is less the literary style of the Marxist church fathers than the indefatigable and truly enormous propaganda work of tens of thousands of untiring agitators, from the great agitator down to the small tradeunion official and the shop steward and discussion speaker; this work consisted of the hundreds of thousands of meetings at which, standing on the table in smoky taverns, these people's orators hammered at the masses and thus were able to acquire a marvelous knowledge of this human material which really put them in a position to choose the best weapons for attacking the fortress of public opinion And it consisted, furthermore, in the gigantic mass demonstrations, these parades of hundreds of thousands of men, which burned into the small, wretched individual the proud conviction that, paltry worm as he was, he was nevertheless a part of a great dragon,1 beneath whose burning breath the hated bourgeois world would some day go up in fire and flame and the proletarian dictatorship would celebrate its ultimate final victory Such propaganda produced the people who were ready and prepared to read a Social Democratic press, however, a press which itself in turn is not written, but which is spoken For, while in the bourgeois camp professors and scholars, theoreticians and writers of all sorts, occasionally attempt to speak, in the Marxist movement the speakers occasionally try to write And precisely the Jew, who is especially to be considered in this connection, will, in general, thanks to his lying dialectical skill and suppleness, even as a writer be more of an agitational orator than a literary creator That is the reason why the bourgeois newspaper world (quite aside from the fact that it, too, is mostly Jewified and therefore has no interest in really instructing the great masses) cannot exert the slightest influence on the opinion of the broadest sections of our people 'Als kleiner Wurm dennoch Glied eines grosser Drachens za sein.' How hard it is to upset emotional prejudices, moods, sentiments, etc., and to replace them by others, on how many scarcely calculable influences and conditions success depends, the sensitive speaker can judge by the fact that even the time of day in which the lecture takes place can have a decisive influence on the effect The same lecture, the same speaker, the same theme, have an entirely different effect at ten o'clock in the morning, at three o'clock in the afternoon, or at night I myself as a beginner organized meetings for the morning, and especially remember a rally which we held in the Munich Kindl Keller as a protest 'against the oppression of German territories.' At that time it was Munich's largest hall and it seemed a very great venture In order to make attendance particularly easy for the adherents of the movement and all the others who came, I set the meeting for a Sunday morning at ten o'clock The result was depressing, yet at the same time extremely instructive: the hall was full, the impression really overpowering, but the mood ice cold; no one became warm, and I myself as a speaker felt profoundly unhappy at being unable to create any bond, not even the slightest contact, between myself and my audience I thought I had not spoken worse than usual; but the effect seemed to be practically nil Utterly dissatisfied, though richer by one experience, I left the meeting Tests of the same sort that I later undertook led to the same result This should surprise no one Go to a theater performance and witness a play at three o'clock in the afternoon and the same play with the same actors at eight at night, and you will be amazed at the difference in effect and impression A man with fine feelings and the power to achieve clarity with regard to this mood will be able to establish at once that the impression made by the performance at three in the afternoon is not as great as that: made in the evening The same applies even to a movie This is important because in the theater it might be said that perhaps the actor does not take as much pains in the afternoon as at night But a film is no different in the afternoon than at nine in the evening No, the time itself exerts a definite effect, just as the hall does on me There are halls which leave people cold for reasons that are hard to discern, but which somehow oppose the most violent resistance to any creation of mood Traditional memories and ideas that are present in a man can also decisively determine an impression Thus, a performance of Parsifal in Bayreuth will always have a different effect than anywhere else in the world The mysterious magic of the house on the Festspielhügel in the old city of the margraves cannot be replaced or even compensated for by externals In all these cases we have to with an encroachment upon man's freedom of will This applies most, of course, to meetings attended by people with a contrary attitude of will, who must now be won over to a new will In the morning and even during the day people's will power seems to struggle with the greatest energy against an attempt to force upon them a strange will and a strange opinion At night, however, they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will For, in truth, every such meeting represents a wrestling bout between two opposing forces The superior oratorical art of a dominating preacher will succeed more easily in winning to the new will people who have themselves experienced a weakening of their force of resistance in the most natural way than those who are still in full possession of their mental tension and will The same purpose, after all, is served by the artificially made and yet mysterious twilight in Catholic churches, the burning lamps, incense, censers, etc In this wrestling bout of the speaker with the adversaries he wants to convert, he will gradually achieve that wonderful sensitivity to the psychological requirements of propaganda, which the writer almost always lacks Hence the written word in its limited effect will in general serve more to retain, to reinforce, to deepen, a point of view or opinion that is already present Really great historical changes are not induced by the written word, but at most accompanied by it Let no one believe that the French Revolution would ever have come about through philosophical theories if it had not found an army of agitators led by demagogues in the grand style, who whipped up the passions of the people tormented to begin with, until at last there occurred that terrible volcanic eruption which held all Europe rigid with fear And likewise the greatest revolutionary upheaval of the most recent period, the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia, was brought about, not by Lenin's writings, but by the hate-fomenting oratorical activity of countless of the greatest and the smallest apostles of agitation The illiterate common people were not, forsooth, fired with enthusiasm for the Communist Revolution by the theoretical reading of Karl Marx, but solely by the glittering heaven which thousands of agitators, themselves, to be sure, all in the service of an idea, talked into the people And that has always been so and will eternally remain so It is entirely in keeping with the stubborn unworldliness of our German intelligentsia to believe that the writer must necessarily be mentally superior to the speaker This conception is illustrated in the most precious way by a criticism appearing in the above-mentioned national newspaper, in which it is stated that one is so often disappointed to see the speech of a recognized great orator suddenly in print This reminds me of another criticism which came into my hands in the course of the War; it painfully subjected the speeches of Lloyd George, who at that time was still munitions minister, to the magnifying glass, only to arrive at the brilliant discovery that these speeches were scientifically inferior products and hackneyed to boot Later, in the form of a little volume, these speeches came into my own hands, and I had to laugh aloud that an average German knight of the ink-pot should possess no understanding for these psychological masterpieces in the art of mass propaganda This man judged these speeches solely according to the impression they left on his own base nature, while the great English demagogue had set out solely to exert the greatest possible effect on the mass of his listeners, and in the broadest sense on the entire English lower class Regarded from this standpoint, the speeches of this Englishman were the most wonderful performances, for they testified to a positively amazing knowledge of the soul of the broad masses of the people And their effect was truly powerful Compare to it the helpless stammering of a Bethmann-Hollweg These speeches, to be sure, were apparently wittier, but in reality they only showed this man's inability to speak to his people, which he simply did not know Nevertheless, the average sparrow brain of a German scribbler, equipped, it goes without saying, with a high scientific education, manages to judge the intelligence of the English minister by the impression which a speech aimed at mass effect makes on his own brain, calcified with sheer science, and to compare it with that of a German statesman whose brilliant chatter naturally finds more receptive soil in him Lloyd George proved that he was not only the equal in genius of a Bethmann-Hollweg, but was a thousand times his superior, precisely by the fact that in his speeches he found that form and that expression which opened to him the heart of his people and in the end made this people serve his will completely Precisely in the primitiveness of his language, the primordiality of its forms of expression, and the use of easily intelligible examples of the simplest sort lies the proof of the towering political ability of this Englishman For I must not measure the speech of a statesman to his people by the impression which it leaves in a university professor, but by the effect it exerts on the people And this alone gives the standard for the speaker's genius The amazing development of our movement, which only a few years ago was founded out of the void and today is considered worthy to be sharply persecuted by all the inner and outer enemies of our people, must be attributed to the constant consideration and application of these realizations Important as the movement's literature may be, it will in our present position be more important for the equal and uniform training of the upper and lower leaders than for the winning of the hostile masses Only in the rarest cases will a convinced Social Democrat or a fanatical Communist condescend to acquire a National Socialist pamphlet, let alone a book, to read it and from it gain an insight into our conception of life or to study the critique of his own Even a newspaper will be read but very seldom if it does not bear the party stamp Besides, this would be of little use; for the general aspect of a single copy of a newspaper is so chopped up and so divided in its effect that looking at it once cannot be expected to have any influence on the reader We may and must expect no one, for whom pennies count, to subscribe steadily to an opposing newspaper merely from the urge for objective enlightenment Scarcely one out of ten thousand will this Only a man who has already been won to the movement will steadily read the party organ, and he will read it as a running news service of his movement The case is quite different with the 'spoken' leaflet! The man in the street will far sooner take it into his hands, especially if he gets it for nothing, and all the more if the headlines plastically treat a topic which at the moment is in everyone's mouth By a more or less thorough perusal, it may be possible by such a leaflet to call his attention to new viewpoints and attitudes, even in fact to a new movement But even this, in the most favorable case, will provide only a slight impetus, never an accomplished fact For the leaflet, too, can only suggest or point to something, and its effect will only appear in combination with a subsequent more thoroughgoing instruction and enlightenment of its readers And this is and remains the mass meeting The mass meeting is also necessary for the reason that in it the individual, who at first while becoming a supporter of a young movement, feels lonely and easily succumbs to the fear of being alone, for the first time gets the picture of a larger community, which in most people has a strengthening, encouraging effect The same man, within a company or a battalion, surrounded by all his comrades, would set out on an attack with a lighter heart than if left entirely on his own In the crowd he always feels somewhat sheltered, even if a thousand reasons actually argue against it But the community of the great demonstration not only strengthens the individual, it also unites and helps to create an esprit de corps The man who is exposed to grave tribulations, as the first advocate of a new doctrine in his factory or workshop, absolutely needs that strengthening which lies in the conviction of being a member and fighter in a great comprehensive body And he obtains an impression of this body for the first time in the mass demonstration When from his little workshop or big factory, in which he feels very small, he steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him, when, as a seeker,2 he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm, when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm to him the rightness of the new doctrine and for the first time arouse doubt in the truth of his previous conviction - then he himself has succumbed to the magic influence of what we designate as 'mass suggestion.' The will, the longing, and also the power of thousands are accumulated in every individual The man who enters such a meeting doubting and wavering leaves it inwardly reinforced: he has become a link in the community {Als Suchender.' A Wagnerian phrase, which Hitler was apparently determined to use at all costs The National Socialist movement must never forget this and in particular it must never let itself be influenced by those bourgeois simpletons who know everything better, but who nevertheless have gambled away a great state including their own existence and the rule of their class Oh, yes, they are very, very clever, they know everything, understand everything - only one thing they did not understand, how to prevent the German people from falling into the arms of Marxism In this they miserably and wretchedly failed, so that their present conceit is only arrogance,3 which in the form of pride, as everyone knows, always thrives on the same tree as stupidity If today these people attribute no special value to the spoken word, they so, it must be added, only because, thank the Lord, they have become thoroughly convinced by now of the ineffectualness of their own speechmaking 3 'so dass ihre jetzige Eingebildetheit nur Dünkel ist.' ... primitiveness of his language, the primordiality of its forms of expression, and the use of easily intelligible examples of the simplest sort lies the proof of the towering political ability of this... always see in the faces of his listeners to what extent they can follow his arguments with understanding and whether the impression and the effect of his words lead to the desired goal - the writer... art On top of this there is the fact that the mass of people as such is lazy; that they remain inertly in the spirit of their old habits and, left to themselves, will take up a piece of written