Pierre Drieu La Rochelle - Stalin and Hitler

An essay from 1935

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle is an interesting character; I will perhaps do a short “introductory” piece on him in the coming months. For now, here is an essay he wrote in 1935. Originally written in French, this was translated from a German edition. I have been particularly averse to pay-walling new posts but if you enjoy these, please consider a paid subscription - that will allow me to dedicate (and justify) more time to further publications. Thank you!

I was in Nuremberg. I heard Hitler and his lieutenants ranting against Bolshevism. So much indignation over such a word seemed astonishing to me. After all, if you remember your childhood or your youth, this word meant above all: megalomania. In another word: extremism. Besides, the Russian Revolution took place eighteen years ago. Could it have lasted so long in its extremes? How many years did Puritanism last? How many years of Jacobinism? Five years, two years.

Remember this well when I shake my head and scoff at Hitler's confidence in Stalin's integrity (which equals Stalin's gullibility regarding Hitler's unchangeable overall position, as I was able to ascertain shortly thereafter in Moscow). I did not doubt that he was right on some points - for when revolutions retreat, they always leave traces of the highest position of their advance - for example, that the Russian "communists" will never return to private ownership of the means of production.

There remain others, so many other points. A few days later I was in Moscow, in a pleasant location in the theater, watching a fashionable play. I have to think about it and start laughing again when I recall Hitler's words: "Bolshevism is the rejection of the family, the fatherland, property, the army, religion."

I remember well, of course, that he did not run the risk of being too precise in the way he posed his grievances. He accused Bolshevism rather generally and rather imprecisely of destroying a certain spiritual atmosphere and a spirituality inherent in Europe as a whole. To hear this sensitive Austrian politician speak in such a way, in that ancient German city of all places, which for centuries had been the heart of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, did not leave me in doubt that his ambiguous assertions were beyond the scope of resolute thinking. He wanted to say that in Europe there were traditions that went back further and were stronger than in Russia, and that any forms of revolution could only take place in accordance with these traditions. You can leave St. Petersburg to the nettles, but you cannot set fire to Nuremberg. Moscow, on the other hand, can...

Hitler seriously believes that Stalin burned down Moscow, the old Moscow.

While Hitler describes with horror the ancient values of which Moscow is now eternally deprived, I saw all these values blossoming again in the most delicate, youthful cynicism that evening in the "modern" appearing theater.