The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [423]
As Brinton traced in his book, we can see how a remarkably similar basic pattern shaped the revolutions which took place in England in the 1640s and Russia in 1917. In each case, after a long Anticipation Stage, those who saw themselves in the shadows cast by the excessive power of a King/Father-figure eventually rose up to challenge him. In each case, as the existing order was overthrown, there was a Dream Stage when it seemed as though sufficient restraints had been placed on kingly power and liberty had been won. But in each case the demands of the revolutionaries then became more extreme. In England, the victory of the parliamentary forces in the Civil War led to the desire for a completely new type of political order. In Russia, Kerensky's moderate parliamentary government was overthrown by Lenin's Bolsheviks. In each case the unconscious logic of the fantasy led eventually to the murder of the King/Father, and in the name of liberty the new regime then rapidly evolved into a tyranny far more oppressive and dictatorial than the one it had replaced. Eventually, after Cromwell's premature death, the English people welcomed back their monarchy in an explosion of rejoicing. In Russia, after the nightmare of civil war and the rise of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin came to a premature death: but only to be succeeded by Stalin, under whose even darker tyranny the revolution was to continue to `eat its own children' for decades to come.5
Perhaps the most vivid historical example of the way events in real life are unconsciously shaped by this archetypal pattern was that supreme defining drama of the twentieth century, the Second World War (it was no accident, as we have noted, that this was to inspire more fictional stories than any other event in history). More specifically, we can see the pattern of that drama in terms of the rise and fall of its central actor, Adolf Hitler.
If we look at the rise and fall of Nazi Germany as an archetypal story, then the role of Hitler is that of a Tempter. The blow the German people had suffered to their collective national ego through their humiliating defeat in the First World War, followed by years of weak, unmasculine government under the Weimar Republic, led them to see their once proud, militaristic nation as having been reduced to a state of impotence and economic depression. Hitler emerged as the visionary and orator who could awaken Germany's dark, resentful nationalist energies. With his election as leader of the nation in 1933, the Anticipation Stage found its Focus. This launched the Dream Stage of Nazi rule which was to develop through the rest of the 1930s. Inspired by its `dream leader, the fantasy grew in confidence round projections of the masculine values of power and order, constantly extending its appetites as it began to take over one neighbouring country after another. When in 1939 his invasion of Poland led other countries for the first time to threaten resistance to his demands, this led to war. But in 1940 the Dream Stage reached its height, when his armies were able to march into Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France almost unopposed. A first momentary check on his ambitions was the emergence of Churchill and the failure of his plan to invade England. But it was in the nature of Hitler's dream-state that this merely fired up his fantasy to yet greater heights, as when in 1941 he invaded, firstly, Yugoslavia and Greece, and finally,