Ron Rosenbaum in conversation with Walter Schaber, “one of the last living survivors of the Weimar press wars.”

“What you have to remember, what people forget about that time, is that everyone was searching for a Heiland.”

“A Heiland?”

“Yes — healer, holy man. It was a time when you had healers, seers, prophets emerging all over the countryside. There were seers here, prophets there, all over.” He spoke of a certain Louis Hausser, a former champagne maker who set himself up as a prophet and called upon Germans to do penance for their sins, to heal themselves, to avert apocalyptic retribution. He spoke of a Joseph Wiesenberg in Berlin. “He claimed to heal people by laying hard white cheese on them,” and despite such dubious claims attracted a fanatic following of believers. “And then there was Hanussen the mystic and astrologer, who was in Munich with Hitler. They were all around, these people promising the messiah, all of them together created a mood from which Hitler could arise. An apocalyptic mood all over Germany. One Heiland after another, and after all the small Heilands came the big Heiland, Hitler.”

“You’re saying, then, that there was a pervasive appetite for some kind of apocalyptic figure, some kind of healer/messiah/saviour, a longing that  paved the way to accept Hitler, however strange and outlandish he seemed — in fact, because he was strange as he was?”

Yes, Schaber said, the very things that led conventional politicians and statesmen to underestimate and dismiss Hitler as outlandish and unsuitable, a hopeless outsider — that nicht natürlich strangeness, that alienness — were the very things that constituted the subterranean power of his appeal. Hitler’s other stigmata of strangeness, the apocalyptic fits, the trances, the occult, somnambulistic, mystic ravings, then — while they may have alienated some rational citizens — were perfectly attuned for the wider, deeper longing for a figure of higher irrationality, a Heiland, to rescue Germany. People who’d lost faith in conventional politics were looking for a political faith healer.

Something about this aspect of my conversation with Walter Schaber stayed with me for some time after I’d left Washington Heights. Something about the way he spoke of the longing for a Heiland led me to consider further the root in German of the word “Heiland,” holy man, healer: Heil. To consider further the deeper purpose behind the ritualized incantation of “Heil Hitler,” the all-purpose greeting, bond of solidarity, mass chant in the Hitler movement. To consider whether it might not have been designed deliberately to evoke the longing for a Heiland, for a healer, a holy man. Was that effect a deliberate creation, an example of Hitler’s conscious genius for manipulating mass psychology, or a fortuitous reflection of the preexistent unconscious longing for a Heiland it tapped into — or both? Was there always a deeper level than salutation, mere hailing, in the incantation “Heil Hitler”? A sense in which the speaker, the chanter, was imploring, urging the Führer: Heal Hitler. Heal Us Hitler. Heal Germany, Hitler. Less a salutation than a prayer.

When I asked Schaber for his reaction, as someone who lived through the awful period when “Heil Hitler” grew from the tribute of misfit sociopathic sycophants of a barbaric crank to a massive roar of near-religious national assent, he was skeptical at first. It struck him as a novel idea, “Heil Hitler” as “Heal, Hitler,” but after considering it, he told me, “I think there may be something to it.”

Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum