Party Time: The Temporal Revolution of the Third Reich

There awakens within him a doubly strong yearning for a Leader to take him tenderly and lightly by the hand, to set things in order and show him the way; ...the Leader who will build the house anew that the dead may come to life again, and who himself has risen again from the multitude of the dead; the Healer who by his own actions will give meaning to the incomprehensible events of the age, so that Time can begin anew.

Thus Hermann Broch described the contemporary German in his novel The Sleepwalkers, published in 1932, as a figure who had lost his bearings in the midst of loneliness and despair. Broch gives a vivid account of the psychological distress and disorientation of interwar Germany to which Nazism offered itself as a panacea. He situated the immediate crisis of Weimar within a protracted decay of values which had set in since the Renaissance, smashing the unified world view of medieval Christianity into a myriad conflicting ways of seeing the world.