HISTORY
Hitler Created a Fictional Persona To Recast Himself as Germany’s Savior
In 1923, Adolf Hitler wrote an embellished autobiography to convince Germans he was their natural leader

Thomas Weber, Zócalo Public Square
January 10, 2018

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Hitler used shameless self-promotion and alternative facts to cast himself as a national hero. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In the summer of 1923, Adolf Hitler realized he had a problem. Germany was in the midst of an extreme economic crisis that inspired widespread feelings of disaffection, worries about national and personal decline, a wave of anti-globalism, and the political turmoil that the 34-year-old Nazi leader had been longing for. ... But for Hitler, this air of imminent national revolution had come too soon—because no one yet realized that he should be Germany’s natural leader. ... This was his own fault. For years, he had steadfastly refused to be photographed and had not given anything about himself away in his speeches. Instead, he had relied solely on the power of his voice to create a following for himself. And while his carefully choreographed speeches had been sufficient to turn him into the enfant terrible of Bavarian politics, Hitler concluded that his chances of becoming the face, or at least a face, of the national revolution were close to nil if people did not even know what he looked like. ... So he went to the opposite extreme—producing picture postcards of himself and distributing them widely.

Hitler’s radical recasting of his public image in 1923 went further than that—and said a great deal about the kind of leader he was aspiring to become. A garden-variety demagogue might have simply created an outsized image for himself, an inadvertent sort of cartoon. Hitler did something more sophisticated. He made the case for a new kind of leader, and created a semi-fictional alternative version of himself that would fit his own job description. ... To sell the idea that he was Germany’s savior-in-waiting, and to boost his profile outside of Bavaria, he wrote a very short autobiography to be published together with a selection of his speeches. In the autobiography, he told the story of how his experiences as a young man provided him with revelations about the nature of politics that would allow him to save Germany from misery and make it safe for all times.

But publishing such a self-aggrandizing portrait would have repelled Germany’s traditional conservatives, so Hitler searched for a writer with impeccable conservative credentials willing to pretend to have written the book. Doing so would come with a double payoff: Hitler’s shameless act of self-promotion would be concealed, while the impression would be created that he already was in receipt of widespread support among traditional conservatives. ... This led Hitler to Victor von Koerber, a blue-eyed and blond young military hero and writer. A North-German aristocrat, von Koerber was attracted by the promise of a new conservatism fused with the youthful idealism of National Socialism. ... The book—published under the title Adolf Hitler, sein Leben, seine Reden (Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches)—was banned soon after publication, limiting its intended impact. Yet the book sheds light on how Hitler—in a moment rife for demagoguery—managed to rise to the top against all odds.

Hitler often paid lip service to the myth—which tends to be believed by historians to the present day—that he was only “a drummer” who was doing the bidding of others and had no ambitions to lead Germany into the future. But in the book, he put into the mouth of Koerber his own determination that he was “the leader of the most radically honest national movement […] who is ready as well as prepared to lead the German struggle for liberation.” ... Hiding behind Koerber’s name, Hitler could get away with pronouncing himself Germany’s “messiah.” His autobiography-in-disguise repeatedly uses biblical language, arguing that the book should “become the new bible of today as well as the ‘Book of the German People.’” It also directly compares Hitler to Jesus, likening the purported moment of his politicization in Pasewalk to Jesus’s resurrection:

“This man, destined to eternal night, who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul; one of the most wretched from among this crowd of broken heroes: this man’s eyes shall be opened! Calm shall be restored to his convulsed features. In the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendor, new life!”

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