Adolf Hitler also assiduously cultivated the common touch. He, too, saw himself as an ordinary man who had been discovered miraculously by millions of Germans looking for a new kaiser. Hitler characterized his dictatorship as a German expression of the democratic spirit. The centerpiece of this claim was the Nazi practice of paying homage to the Volk (the people). The word Volk in German evokes all sorts of mystical connotations. Borrowing the meaning of the term from the romantics, who had made a cult of the Volk, the Nazis took it to mean the unique racial essence of Germandom (Deutschtum), which distinguished it from all other ethnic groups in the world. Each Volk, they believed, had acquired a unique character as a result of its relationship to its native soil and climate and its shared historical experiences. The unique worship of the Volk and what it symbolized was considered by these völkisch superpatriots as a form of religion that commanded Germans “to love the fatherland more passionately than laws and princes, fathers and mothers, wives and children.”59 A person must shed his individuality and give himself heart and soul to the Volk. Such zealous nationalism had deep roots in German romanticism and in late nineteenth-century racial doctrines, undergirding the fragile national fabric in the imperial period (1870–1918).
This German cult of the people was quite different from the American cult of the people, for it focused on the racial and ethnic characteristics of the German people, rather than on the equal rights enjoyed by the plurality of people who made up the United States. It was the difference between neoromantic nationalism, which celebrated ethnic, racial, and cultural qualities allegedly inhering in specific national groups—Germans, French, Italians, English—and the democratic rights of citizens of different ethnic groups who happened to live in a multiethnic society. In short, it was a clash between the universalist position of the Enlightenment, embodied in the principles of 1776 and 1789—the American and French revolutions, respectively—and the neoromantic appeal to some kind of primeval ethnicity or racial essence, which ranked tribalism higher than universal human rights. This is why the Nazis announced, appropriately on July 14, 1933 (Bastille Day), that the false democratic principles of 1789 had been suspended. Rights were seen to be rooted in each Volk, not in the laws of nature, nature’s god, or rationality.
What Hitler wanted was a populist state (völkischer Staat), to be based, of course, on coercion and terror, but also, and just as importantly, on popular support. Germans were to be forced into compliance with Nazi beliefs and institutions, by terror if necessary, but they were given enough freedom so that many of them supported the regime. Dictatorship was popular. People believed that they were free to do most of the things they had been doing before the Nazi takeover. Many historians have wrongly depicted Nazi Germany as an oppressive prison camp chock-full of sullen and unhappy victims. Looking at the Hitler regime from the outside and with full knowledge of its legacy, it is hard to believe that ordinary Germans who toed the party line—as did most Germans—would give their heart and soul to such a system.
The Nazi regime rested primarily on Adolf Hitler’s popularity, which in turn was based on his charisma and his superb skills in using the new technology of mass persuasion. Robert Gellately has correctly labeled Nazi Germany as a modern mass media society that was in the vanguard of modernity.60 Just because it did not replicate the modernist tendencies of the Western democracies, it was not, as some historians have claimed, a “reactionary modernist” society. Nazi officials were extraordinarily vigilant in monitoring the regime’s popularity, sending out thousands of agents to keep a careful watch on just about every popular expression. The reports we have from such surveillance activities clearly indicate that the regime, and particularly Adolf Hitler, was never in any serious danger of being overthrown by popular uprising. Franklin Roosevelt had always hoped that the German people would stage a popular revolution against the Nazi regime; he thought that if the German people really knew the facts they would not support such a cruel establishment.
How good was the president’s knowledge of Germany? In general terms, it can be said that Roosevelt was better informed about Germany than Hitler was about the United States. Roosevelt had spent six summers (1891–96) in Bad Nauheim, Germany, where his father, who had a heart condition, took his mineral bath cure and entrusted himself to the doctors of the local cardiac clinic. The Roosevelts always stayed at the hotel Villa Britannia, which catered to well-to-do Anglo-Americans. In 1891 Franklin, then nine years of age, began attending the small German elementary school (Volkschule) at Bad Nauheim, where his knowledge of German, which he had already been taught by his private German governess, improved greatly. He got along well with his schoolmates, noting in his diary, “I go to the public school with a lot of mickies … and we have German reading, German dictation, the history of Siegfried, and arithmetic … and I like it very much.”61 His German schoolmaster later remembered the young American boy very well, for he wore a blue sailor’s suit and quickly impressed him as “an unusually bright young fellow. He had such an engaging manner, and he was always so polite that he soon was one of the most popular children in the school.”62
Although Franklin enjoyed going to school in Germany during the summer months of 1891–96, he was often rankled by the superior air of German nationalism. On one occasion Franklin caricatured the German kaiser by drawing mustaches on top of his paper. His German teacher punished him by having him write the sentence “Ich muss brave sein” (I must be good) three hundred times.63 Franklin probably sensed the growing regimentation of German life under the Kaiser; he would later often comment on it. The habit of discipline and obedience, which was second nature to many Germans, seemed insufferable to liberally minded Americans. Germany had too many petty rules and arrogant officials; its people were annoyingly provincial and ethnocentric. What made the Roosevelts especially prickly were officious Germans in uniform who overstepped their authority. Even among the children there was much talk about German superiority over all other nationalities. Americans were often described as a barbarian people who cared only about money.
One of Franklin Roosevelt’s secretaries, Grace Tully, later wrote that the President’s view of Germany was “bound up in his mind with his own trips to Germany,”64 a judgment that is confirmed by the fact that when he talked about Germany or the Germans he would frequently draw upon his personal, prewar visits to Germany. He took swimming lessons near Bad Nauheim and traveled extensively. In the summer of 1896 he went on a bicycle tour with his tutor, and when they got themselves in trouble with the law—for picking cherries from trees, taking their bicycles into railroad stations, and entering Strassburg, a fortified city, at nightfall on their bicycles—young Roosevelt spoke enough German to talk himself out of jail. He did have to pay a five-mark fine for running over a goose, however.65 That summer he bicycled from Bad Nauheim to Baden-Baden, Strassburg, Frankfurt, and Wiesbaden. Upon his return, his parents took him to Bayreuth, where he listened raptly to four Wagnerian operas—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. His mother said that he was “most attentive and rapt during the long acts and always sorry to leave, never for a moment bored or tired.”66 The Wagner cult was at its greatest height at the time. Both Roosevelt and Hitler were introduced to it at the age of fourteen.67
Roosevelt’s later reminiscences of Germany shifted focus with the times. In 1939 he claimed that he was neutral, not really pro-British or pro-French. He said at the time that he did not know Great Britain and France as a boy but he did know Germany. If anything, he added, “I looked upon the Germany that I knew with far more friendliness than I did on Great Britain or France.”68 After returning from Yalta in February 1944, he remarked that he had witnessed the rapid militarization of Germany decades before, giving the impression that even in the pre–World War I era he had recognized that Germany would be the future rival of the United States.69 What he took away from his personal experience, and later