Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and, from 1933, Germany. No essay in this collection is about him. One of them is an argument about how badly he had been read. "Wells, Hitler and the World State", dated 1941, is George Orwell's review of Guide to the New World, a set of newspaper articles by the English novelist H. G. Wells. Orwell opens with three quotations and no attribution: German air power largely spent and its first-rate men mostly dead or worn out, and behind "that screaming little defective in Berlin" nothing but a waiting phantom that does not exist to the extent claimed. Then he names the source and lists what had happened since the articles were written. The German army had overrun the Balkans, reconquered Cyrenaica, could march through Turkey or Spain when it suited, and had undertaken the invasion of Russia.

Orwell's own description is one sentence, and he offers it as the fact Wells's argument has to get past. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, he writes, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation had been willing to overwork itself for six years and then fight for two more, while for the commonsense world-view Wells was recommending hardly a human creature would shed a pint of blood. Before anyone can talk about world reconstruction, or even about peace, Orwell says, Hitler has to be eliminated. He extends the charge past Wells to the English intelligentsia generally: for ten years they had kept it up that Hitler was a figure out of comic opera, and only in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that he was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard.

The diagnosis of Wells is that a lifelong habit of thought stands between him and an understanding of Hitler's power. For forty years Wells had written the same antithesis, with science, order, progress and internationalism on one side and war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, poets and horses on the other, and history a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic one. In that scheme Hitler is all the war-lords and witch doctors of history rolled into one, and therefore an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. What breaks the scheme, Orwell argues, is that science and common sense are not the same thing. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England and far more barbarous, and much of what Wells had imagined and worked for is physically there in it: the order, the planning, the state encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, all of it serving ideas Orwell calls appropriate to the Stone Age. He ends by proposing Rudyard Kipling as the corrective, on the grounds that Kipling was not deaf to the evil voices of power and would have understood the appeal of Hitler, and of Stalin too.

Elsewhere in the collection Hitler appears briefly, and almost always as a date. "Charles Dickens" notes that the "Jew joke" was endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler and does not appear in Dickens. "The Art of Donald McGill" records that the anti-Jewish postcard disappeared abruptly soon after Hitler came to power, and describes one card, not McGill's, showing Hitler bending down to pick a flower under the caption "What would you do, chums?". "Boys' Weeklies" quotes a set of comic lyrics printed in the Gem in April 1939, ending with a note to Adolf Hitler that reads "Don't disturb!", which Orwell says is probably that paper's earliest mention of him.