ABSTRACT
One of the most conspicuous aspects of totalitarianism is the intellectual mediocrity of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Rosenberg and other fathers of this phenomenon. Their speeches and works convey a sense of primitivity, one-dimensionality and dogmatism, and their arguments, justifications, concepts and principles do not hold up to serious scientific critique. If this is the case, then how is the conduct of millions upon millions of human beings to be explained? And not only ordinary men and women, but representatives of intellectual institutions followed them as well; how was it that these also assumed their ideas, images and ideals as a standard for the decisive questions of their own plans of life? How might we understand the tragicomic scene in which Knut Hamsun, one of the best-known writers of the twentieth century, turned over his Nobel Prize medallion to Goebbels, because he thought that Goebbels was more worthy than he himself of such an honour?
