Explaining Hitler the Search for the Origins of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum - Hitler and the Historians

Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum

Fascinating Survey

Debates concerning the historical and moral significance of Adolf Hitler have gone on since the beginning of his rise to power in Germany. In the decades after his bunker suicide, those debates elevated to arguments over the very nature and existence of evil. An integral part of the arguments has been the ongoing attempt to understand the why of Hitler. In this engaging work of literary journalism, Ron Rosenbaum travels the world to converse with some of the historians, philosophers, filmmakers, and others who have attempted to make sense of Hitlers actions, to find a root cause for the Holocaust. Rosenbaum methodically examines the evidence for and against all the major hypotheses concerning the ori gin of Hitlers character. He sifts through all the rumors--including his alleged Jewish ancestry and what biographer Alan Bullock refers to as the oneball business--and the attempts to derive some psychological cause from them. Various Hitlers emerge: Hitler as con man and brutal gangster, Hitler the unspeakable pervert, Hitler the ladies man, Hitler as modernist artist working in the medium of evil.... But Rosenbaums portrayals of those who would define Hitler are as fascinating as the shifting perspectives on the führer. Here we see the brave journalists of the Munich Post who attempted to reveal Hitlers evil to the world as early as the 1920s. We witness Shoah director Claude Lanzmanns imperious attempts to stifle analysis of Hitler and the Holocaust, branding such historical inquiries as obscene. We see the effects, on a frazzled Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, of the controversy surrounding the publication of his Hitlers Willing Executioners. We see the interior crises of Hitler apologist David Irving and philosopher-novelist George Steiner, among others, as they struggle with the ramifications of their work and thought. And, best of all, we have Rosenbaum to serve as an informed, intimate, and on occasion witty guide. In White Noise, Don DeLillo depicted the satirical academic discipline of Hitler studies; Ron Rosenbaum breathes a life into the field that no fiction can match. --Ron Hogan

Rosenbaum opened this thoughtful and literate review of the supposed explanations for Hitler with a gripping account of a winter journey to Hitlers birthplace in the Austrian hinterland, to glean what can be gleaned from the - largely obliterated - traces of his family and early life. There is effective use of the dangerous iciness of the mountain roads as a metaphor for some of the people and places he encountered there: cold to the bone, dangerous, and frozen in time. That set-piece opening led to a consideration of some of the explanations of Hitlers madness and evil: that Hitler had been abused as a child, that he was genitally deformed, or even that he was born normal but traumatised when his genitals were mutilated by - of all things - a goat. These and some of the other speculations that have been offered - that Hitler was homosexual, that he had caught syphilis from a Jewish prostitute, that he was brainwashed into megalomania by a doctor experimenting with new psychological techniques, and so on - led Rosenbaum to a fascinating discussion of what is involved in even attempting to explain Hitler. Rosenbaum noted that many of the attempts at explaining Hitler tend, deliberately or not, to reduce the focus on his evil. To understand is to forgive, at least a little, and risks reducing Hitler to a victim, whether of other people or of circumstances. Worse, many of the proffered explanations put the blame on Jews, for example Weisenthals notion of the (probably imaginary) Jewish prostitute who gave Hitler the clap. Rosenbaum then examined some of the people who have made a career, or a business, of explaining Hitler, beginning with engaging portraits of the old school historians Trevor-Roper and Bullock, two wise and wily old dons from an intellectual and academic world that has since largely - regrettably - vanished. This was followed by portraits of Claude Lanzmann, who came to feel he owned the Holocaust, and of David Irving, who tried to minimise it and deny Hitlers guilt, whose treatment is less affec tionate. For these sections alone, and for the fascinating material on those journalists, Hitlers contemporaries, who tried to warn Germany and the world what Hitler was, and paid for their courage with their lives, this book deserves classic status. But the book loses momentum and coherence somewhere past the halfway point. The editing is partly at fault, but worse, Rosenbaums critical reasoning and crap-detecting seem to flag. He settles, finally, for Lucy Davidowiczs idea that Hitler had planned the Holocaust as early as 1918, based on isolated lines from Hitler speeches, such as, they [the Jews] are not laughing now. It was a pity to see Rosenbaum apply critical reading for most of the book only to let his guard down completely for something as flimsy as this. The words Davidowicz cited do not say what she claims they say.

Previously Rosenbaum had challenged people who backed their claims with rhetoric rather than evidence, insisting on precision on what words were said, what they meant, who said them, and when. Davidowiczs claims are not only contradicted by almost all recent work on the Holocaust (as an atrocity that evolved over time and took its final form after the war had commenced), they are not even supported by her own citations. And Davidowiczs explanation would explain nothing even if it were true. She offered a fanciful and unconvincing answer to the question when?, but the real question is not when but why? However Rosenbaums earlier chapters more than justify buying and keeping this book. The most reasonable conclusion, taking Rosenbaum into account, is that we will never know the cause of Hitlers madness and evil, but this is not the real issue. Ultimately Hitler was a squalid psychopath, in the same broad category as, say, Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer. He was intelligent, with the ability to charm and impress people when he needed, and murderously mad. Any alternative-history version of Hitlers life would probably have finished with him as a mass murderer: but he should have been another lone killer with a grisly basement and victims numbering in the tens, or fewer, not a head of state with victims in the tens of millions. So although why? is the right question, we should perhaps not direct it at Hitler, but at the forces that put him in a position of power. That means looking at the political, military and business figures, who were basically sane, and evil only on a normal human scale, who actually did the deals that made Hitler the German Chancellor against the wishes of the majority of the German electorate. And even after Hitler was in power, there was a long period after it was quite clear - crystal clear - what he was, when it was still possible to remove him, had the will been there. That group, who nurtured a rootless psychopath and put him into power for their own varied purposes, and who kept him there until he destroyed them too: perhaps its the people like Papen, Hugenberg, Hindenberg and others, who have not yet received their share of historical scrutiny, or of humanitys hatred, ridicule and contempt. I suspect that this group is the best place to look for meaningful answers, not only to the question, how?, but also to that most anguished of questions: why? (People sometimes defame democracy by claiming that Hitler came to power by democratic means. In fact the Nazis never won an election, and had lost ground in the election before Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Hitler was installed into power in a betrayal of the voters, and thereafter there were no elections.) Though Explaining Hitler ends disappointingly, it still offers some fascinating portraits of heroes and villains, historians and pseudohistorians, and a great deal of interesting and insightful writing. Though I

dont always agree with his conclusions, it is never less than a pleasure to read Rosenbaum thinking aloud. Strongly recommended. Laon

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