The Pittsburgh Press (May 14, 1941)
I DARE SAY —
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The compulsion
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By Florence Fisher Parry
The very thing that Hitler forgot to include in his colossal plan, has risen to haunt and – who knows? – ultimately destroy him.
The human element – the missing link in his chain that was to enslave the world. The capacity of endurance that resides in every mortal mind and heart. The limitations and the reaches of the human soul.
For whatever compulsion directed Rudolf Hess’ flight to the British Isles, it was born of strain. It came out of the terrible need of ESCAPE. Escape into reality. Perhaps escape into fantastic UNreality. Escape into melodrama, nightmare dream. But ESCAPE from what had become too much for the human mind to encompass.
Consider these dreamers of Germany. Consider Hitler and Hess. They were the two supreme dreamers, compared with the aesthetics and other-world concept of power, the others were opportunists.
Early together, they had repudiated the world’s concept of civilization. Early they had repudiated Nature’s plan. Their relationship was known to be abnormal. Hess was Hitler’s second ego. They were as one.
Göring may have been Hitler’s named successor, but Hess was his double, his mentor, his willing slave-companion, privy to his most secret strengths and weaknesses, as completely under Hitler’s spell as any craven mistress to her lover’s.
These two regarded themselves as supermen, beyond the reaches or demands of natural living.
Abnormals are like this, even the little ones; they glory in their apartness from normal creatures, they regard themselves as a superior breed, independent even of the constancies which normal persons impose upon themselves. Imagine, then, the imagined superiority of these two men taking from each other the very substance of each other’s monstrous dreams!
Der Tag
The dream they shared had been fomenting for years and years. They had come up together, they had written Mein Kampf together; they had suffered ignominy together, they had tasted from a single cup the first drugging draught of power.
Slowly and with infinite preparation, they had shaped their dream into a machine. They had used the little “normal” people of Germany to forge that machine. The little normal people of any nation are slow to recognize lunacy, they need its familiar symptoms to warn them.
Only the youths of Germany – the boys who themselves were going through the torturous bewilderment of adolescence with all its terrible urgencies and dislocations – only the youths glimpsed the dream that burned in the fanatical eyes of these two leaders and themselves soon adopted the same acceptance of abnormality, disdaining the fixed conventions of civilized living.
But after Göring, Hess; Hess who could best perpetuate the fanaticism of the dream.
That day, Hitler himself was not so sure that the dream would hold. IF I die, he said, IF Göring dies, he said. But if he had had to name, on that day, the one who, and ONLY who, his second self, he would have named Hess.
Since that day, these two men have seen their dream run away with them. Like some horrible sorcery, it has evoked cataclysm beyond their most fanatical imaginings. They cannot stop it. It will spend itself, it will destroy itself. They know that now, for it is out of hand. It is ruling them, not they, it, it has taken charge. No longer can they say: So this shall be; so that shall be. The dream, the dream commands them.
Saved?
Can you see these two men, cheated of their command over their dream? Seeing it become too monstrous to control? Knowing that they could no longer invent anything to match its cataclysmic impetus?
Hitler says:
I shall let loose bacteria upon the British Isles.
But bacteria heeds no boundary, and he sees the people of his own land and conquered lands sicken and die too.
He says:
I shall make slaves of the peoples of the earth.
But he knows now that, when slaves outnumber their masters and the ratio becomes unproportioned, they turn upon their masters and destroy them.
Wherever he looks, the boundaries fall back, of conquest and of time. And final victory is nowhere to be had.
No specter less than this could take Hess upon his strange adventure. The Dream has caught up with him, he is fleeing it; he is fleeing from the Lunacy of his dream. All about him hemming him in, closer, closer the consequences of the Dream have been converging upon him. A terrible claustrophobia has been possessing him.
Let me wake up, let me get off here, these have been the “Voices;” these have been the “Hallucinations,” that have driven Hess from the melodrama of his nightmare.
I believe that this man suffered a compulsion to touch earth again. To lurch back into mortal sanity. To feel again the contract of human beings quite unfanatically engaged in living and dying and defending those they love.
Or has the lunatic dream progressed so far that, waking from it now in robust Scotland, sanity itself would seem to be, to this unhappy man, abnormal? And he would find himself still further lost in his illusory world?