authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation.
At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state,
the family; this makes it capable of later subordination of the general authoritarian
system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the
anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety^8.Today, through the efforts of such social analysts as Erich Fromm, Theodor
Adorno, and Richard Hofstadter, we have become very familiar with the notion that to
understand political movements one must grasp the psychological structure of the people
connected with them. But when Reich wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascismin 1933 (almost
ten years before Fromm’s Escape from Freedom^9 , almost twenty years before The Authoritarian
Personality^10 ), his ideas were exceedingly original.
But how did Reich’s ideas apply specifically to the rise of Nazism? Reich’s stress on
the submissiveness of the average person might lead one to expect that the German voter
would support a conservative, authoritarian government, but not necessarily the emotional
frenzy Hitler represented. However, in Reich’s analysis, the average German was not simply
“armored.” In addition to the economic misery that mobilized the workers, there were also
strong emotional desires, longings that emerged in distorted form. These impulses were
intensified by the increased permissiveness of the 1920s.
The Germans, then, were caught—to follow Reich’s analysis—by their simultane-
ous desire for freedom and their fear of it. Calls for a more exciting life as well as appeals
to “law and order” struck deep resonances. And it was precisely here that Hitler demonstrat-
ed his genius as a mass psychologist. His opponents criticized him for his contradictions; but
as the historian Konrad Heiden remarked,it was Hitler’s “art of contradiction which made
him the greatest and most successful propagandist of his time.”^11
In no other sphere did Hitler play so skillfully on the contradictions within the aver-
age German as with his family ideology. Hitler idealized the German family, calling for its
preservation against “cultural Bolshevism.” (The Soviet and German Communists were
identified with the break-up ofthe family and “free love,” a position the Russians had
already retreated from and one the German Communists never endorsed.) Hitler promised
the subjugation of woman to man, the enforcement of her economic dependence, and
strong measures against both the birth control movement and abortion.
As Reich noted, however, at the same time that Hitler supported traditional family
life he also endorsed many of the demands of the young against the old. He attracted youths
in large numbers from parental homes and collectivized their existence. Indeed, “Aryan”
youths were encouraged to have children, inside or outside marriage, if they believed that
they were begetting them to improve the race. And the Nazi emphasis on “Mother
Germany”and “Father Hitler” permitted many Germans to transfer familial feelings to the
mystique of the super-nation—the Fatherland.
Hitler’s racial policies at once mobilized the average person’s sexual fears and pro-
vided him with a convenient scapegoat. Again and again, Hitler harped on the Jew and the
13 : The Sex-political Furor: 1930-1934 159