One of the continuing subtexts of the conversations in this book is precisely this struggle, this difficulty so many thinkers have of finding a way to call Hitler evil. It’s not merely a question of words and names; it’s a question about who Hitler really was, what his attitude was toward the crimes he committed.
I was particularly drawn to the struggle of a few rigorous philosophers and theologians to find a way to reclaim Hitler for evil (or “wickedness”). It’s something theologian Emil Fackenheim is concerned with in his critique of explanation; it’s something the philosopher Berel Lang makes a sustained and impressively rigorous case for in his attempt to place Hitler in the context of a “history of evil.”
But it was fascinating to observe the discomfort the notion of calling Hitler consciously evil caused in so many thinkers. I have a notion why that might be, a conjecture that occurred to me when thinking about Trevor-Roper’s crisp, emphatic rejection of the idea that Hitler was consciously evil; that beneath the Socratic logic of the position might be an understandably human, even emotional, rejection—as simply unbearable—of the idea that someone could commit mass murder without a sense of rectitude, however delusional. That Hitler could have done it out of pure personal hatred, knowing exactly what he was doing and how wrong it was. Trevor-Roper’s position on evil can be looked upon as more than a matter of logic, more than a theory about the nature of evil, but as an article of faith about human nature: an unwillingness to conceive of a human nature capable of that degree of conscious wickedness. It was an early indication to me of the way a stance on explanation can serve as consolation.
I don’t pretend in this book to offer definitive answers to such ultimate questions. Rather, I’m interested in the range of solutions that a range of thoughtful explainers offer, focusing in particular on the way they construe Hitler’s subjectivity, his inwardness, his “thought-world,” to make their arguments. “Thought-world” is the useful term Albert Schweitzer employed to describe the object of The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Indeed, if there is a model for my approach, it might be Schweitzer’s work, published nearly a century ago, once widely known, now rather neglected, a fading copy of which I came across in a secondhand bookstore in Jerusalem at the time I was interviewing theologian Emil Fackenheim and historian Yehuda Bauer. Schweitzer’s work helped crystallize what most intrigued me about the controversies over Hitler I’d immersed myself in. It’s a work about the attempts to explain another larger-than-life figure in history, Jesus, whose mythic, apocryphal, and supranatural dimensions have, somewhat like Hitler’s, interpenetrated and obscured the fragmentary, conflicting scraps of evidence about his actual existence.
I have a sense that the mention of Schweitzer will for many readers conjure up the warm and fuzzy veneration for the sainted doctor who abandoned the comforts of Europe to tend to lepers in equatorial Africa. But there is another Albert Schweitzer, the brilliant, caustically critical historian of theology who sparked a worldwide controversy when his landmark book about Jesus explainers was first published in 1906. This Schweitzer, before he became a doctor, was nonetheless a surgical intellect: He was taking a scalpel to a couple of centuries of efforts to explain Jesus by the methods of modern thought, in particular the “scientific” positivism of German Protestant “Higher Criticism.”
Schweitzer’s was by contrast a work of explanatory pessimism, if not despair. He argued that the grail of the “quest of the historical Jesus”—to get beneath Jesus’ transfiguration by nineteen centuries of post hoc dogma, beneath what those who came later made of him, to who he thought he was, his own sense of himself, his thought-world—might be irretrievable now even to the best efforts of historical inquiry. Instead, Schweitzer’s examination of attempts to explain Jesus suggested that such theories revealed less about Jesus than they revealed about his would-be explainers and their culture, the kinds of needs their explanations fulfilled.
What they were often doing, Schweitzer believed, was not explaining Jesus but explaining away some disturbing unresolved elements in his biography, ones that were discomfiting to the modern sensibility—elements, in particular (from what Schweitzer believed were the earliest sources), that made Jesus look too Jewish, too primitive, too apocalyptic, too resistant to easy assimilation to the “rational religion,” the etherealized spirituality of nineteenth-century liberal German Protestantism.
They were, in effect, turning their portraits of Jesus into self-portraits: Jesus as a nineteenth-century liberal German Protestant. I’d argue that Hitler explanations, similarly, are cultural self-portraits; the shapes we project onto the inky Rorschach of Hitler’s psyche are often cultural self-portraits in the negative. What we talk about when we talk about Hitler is also who we are and who we are not.
The Escape from Hitler
Previous examinations of the literature of Hitler explanations have tended to be preliminary brush-clearing operations to make room for the author’s own candidate for explicatory primacy. One brilliant exception is a work by Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, chairman of the Jewish Studies Department of Indiana University, but his book Imagining Hitler focuses primarily on fictional representations of the Führer—on novels, film, pulp mythologizing.
Gordon Craig and John Lukacs have done great services in their thoughtful studies of the rationalizations of postwar German historians, although in his book The Hitler of History Lukacs has an explanatory agenda of his own: discrediting revolution by portraying Hitler as the very model of a modern revolutionary rather than as a “reactionary.”
Both Saul Friedländer and Ian Kershaw have produced important works that emphasize multifactorial rather than single-pointed explanations for Hitler, the complex interrelation between Hitler’s consciousness, his projected image, and the German people’s creation and reception of it. And, more generally, David H. Fischer offers an absolutely invaluable guide in Historians’ Fallacies to the ways in which the longing for certitude, the wish to have some explanation, has led many to press premises beyond the logic of causality.
If there is one thing that distinguishes my effort from previous literature on the subject, it is my desire to examine the nature of those wishes and longings, the subtexts and agendas of Hitler explanations in face-to-face encounters with some of those engaged in the search for Hitler. Not just with historians and biographers but with philosophers, psychologists, and theologians as well. I am concerned less with defining absolutely the (perhaps irretrievable) truth about Hitler as I am with the meanings projected upon the unknowable, the agendas that shape the accounts of those obsessed with it.
In any case, as I proceeded in this fashion, I found myself surprised and struck, prompted to think more deeply about certain questions, by the kinds of observations, conjectures, and self-revelations that emerged in such face-to-face encounters with the explainers—ones often unexpressed in their published work, ones that might have escaped me or not emerged at all if I’d relied only upon their written words.
I’m thinking, for instance, of George Steiner describing with great candor his anxiety that the highly controversial Hitler character he created in his novel The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H., a Hitler who had escaped from the bunker to South America, had, in fact, escaped in some way from him, from Steiner, had taken on a disturbing life beyond his control. There was Hyam Maccoby, Steiner’s intellectual foe, the chronicler of Christian anti-Semitism, explaining why he’s come to believe Christmas is “a sinister festival.”
There was Emil Fackenheim wrestling out loud with the conflicting impulses: to question God—to demand from God an explanation for Hitler’s dreadful success—and to limit such questioning, because to hold God fully accountable (to the point of rejecting faith) might violate Fackenheim’s own commandment against giving Hitler a “posthumous victory.”
There was Alan Bullock, the most scrupulously sober-minded and restrained of Oxford historians, being driven to struggle with the same question—the problem of theodicy, the silence of God—in
the vocabulary of mysticism, in terms of Incompleteness, the incompleteness of our understanding of Hitler and the incompleteness of God’s omnipotence.
Then there was the wonderful Viennese expatriate Gertrud Kurth supplying me with the missing testimony, perhaps the last word, on Hitler’s alleged genital incompleteness—what Bullock calls “the one-ball business”—testimony that seems to pull the rug out from under a number of elaborate psychosexual explanations of Hitler.
I’m thinking as well of the notion of the art of evil that emerged in my conversation with Berel Lang, a conversation that considered the relationship between Hitler’s self-image as an artist and the character of the Nazi regime in which evil became a kind of art. And there was the time when David Irving (whom I witnessed revising aloud his “Revisionism”) conjured up one of the single most chilling images of Hitler’s cold-bloodedness: the moment in the aftermath of the June 1934 Blood Purge when Hitler emerges from a shower and, in effect, brandished his own baby picture, ostentatiously washing off the blood of his victims and declaring himself “clean as a newborn babe.”
I’m thinking also of the way firsthand encounters with the explainers led me to seek out some firsthand experience of certain Hitler sites, the most haunting of which—the one that somehow embodied, in its fragmentary ruined desolation, the state of the art, or at least the state of evidence of Hitler explanations—was a shell-blasted ghost town, the ruins of the Austrian village once called Döllersheim in the hill country near the Czech border, a region local Nazis once proudly boasted of as Hitler’s “ancestral home.”
Döllersheim is the “foul rag and bone shop” of Hitler origin questions, the site of certain curious Hitler-family genealogical ceremonies that were memorialized in the parish register of the Döllersheim church and have been provoking questions and controversies ever since Hitler became a public figure. These questions and controversies may have doomed Döllersheim to its grim fate, blasted out of existence by artillery shells—some claim on Hitler’s express order, some claim by the Russians later on—to erase his past from the map.
If the ruins of Döllersheim are an implicit allegory of the escape of Hitler from explanation—the absence or erasure from the record of a factual foundation upon which to construct an explanation—the edifice of contemporary scholarship on the Holocaust can be said to be founded upon an implicit attempt to escape from Hitler.
It could almost be said that “two cultures” of Hitler discourse have emerged. While the specter of Hitler looms ever larger as an icon and embodiment of ultimate evil in popular culture, on the other hand, in academic and scholarly literature a focus on Hitler (often characterized as a quaintly “Hitler-centric” perspective) has become increasingly unfashionable and déclassé, regarded almost disdainfully as a relic of the much-reproved Great Man Theory of History. Disparaged in favor of purportedly more sophisticated explanatory modes—Great Abstraction theories, the ones that emphasize “deeper” trends in history, society, and ideology.
While the satiric vision of “Hitler studies” in Don DeLillo’s brilliant novel White Noise was one of the inspirations for this book (why not take a look at what passes for “Hitler studies” in the academy?), in actuality the study of Hitler (as opposed to the study of the Holocaust) in the academy is notable more for its absence, for Hitler’s presumed irrelevance, rather than his presence. The disparagement and diminishment of Hitler’s role accords with a phenomenon the historian Michael Howard has observed about explanation in history: Speaking of the efforts to explain the cause of the First World War, Howard noted the tendency to believe that “any event so great must have a cause equally grave or great or deep.” Hitler, that Chaplinesque caricature, is surely not grave or great enough. No one could be.
The preference for great and grave abstraction is an explanatory strategy that can itself serve as a kind of consolation. Great abstractions have an appearance of inevitability and irresistibility that can be consoling: Nothing could have prevented the Holocaust. No one’s to blame for the failure to halt Hitler’s rise. If it hadn’t been Hitler, it would have been “someone like Hitler” serving as an instrument of those inexorable larger forces. The alternative is to believe that a single soul had the power and the will to bring about the war and the Holocaust—that a single individual wanted to; that the human nature we presumably share with Hitler could have produced such a being. A notion that some might find both irrational and possibly unbearable.
One of the first, most perceptive reviews of postwar Hitler literature took note of this flight, this escape from the person of Hitler into impersonal abstraction. In 1948, less than three years after Hitler’s death, Irving Kristol, then a leftist litterateur, later the godfather of neoconservatism, published a remarkably prescient essay in Commentary under the title “What the Nazi Autopsies Show.” By Nazi autopsies, Kristol meant the first wave of postwar, postmortem examinations of Hitler and the Holocaust—the first attempts to explain Hitler in the light of full knowledge of the magnitude of his crimes. Attempts, Kristol says, that shied away from crediting Hitler with full responsibility and tended to view him as a “pawn” of larger forces.
Kristol speaks of the unpleasant shock he felt upon hearing “the distinguished British historian H. R. Trevor-Roper say in an aside that [Hermann] Rauschning’s Revolution of Nihilism—that vulgar and sensational book authored by a former Hitler ally—has turned out to be a more reliable portrait of the Hitler regime” than the more sophisticated “prewar explanations which produced the ‘delusion,’ as Trevor-Roper calls it, that Hitler was only a pawn.”
Kristol makes a point of declaring—in support of Trevor-Roper’s view that Hitler was no pawn but the “sole maker,” prime mover, and final cause of the Final Solution—that “the longer we stare at Nazism, the more our eyes focus on Hitler. . . . Hitler was Nazism” (emphasis added). It’s an observation which might sound obvious to some but which, in fact, was much disparaged before the war and has become even more disparaged in the past two decades with “functionalists,” inevitabilists, and abstractionists arguing Hitler’s relative irrelevance to what went on around him. It’s a tendency that Saul Friedländer, a believer in complex causality, nonetheless argues has “gone too far” in removing Hitler from the picture.
Explanation as Consolation: Billy Goats and Scapegoats
The continuing controversy over the decisiveness or the importance of Hitler’s personal responsibility, his own desire to commit the crimes he committed, is due in part to the doubt that still remains about the origin and nature of that desire. The inaccessibility of the “black box” of Hitler’s inwardness has resulted in a consequent inability to assess how much of that inwardness was shaped or constructed by outer forces—the pressures of bad history and bad ideas—and how much it was the product of internal psychology and will, of (one hesitates to use such an inappropriate, old-fashioned-sounding term) bad character, evil inclination, knowingly wicked choice. In part, it is the egregrious failure of psychological and psychoanalytic explanations of Hitler, which have discredited any effort to locate the origins of Hitler’s evil within him, within his psyche.
Here Schweitzer on Jesus is a particularly useful model. His long-untranslated doctoral dissertation, “The Psychiatric Study of Jesus,” is a fascinating examination of the desperate efforts of fin-de-siècle “scientific psychiatry” to diagnose—at nineteen centuries’ distance—the figure of Jesus as a “psychopath” who suffered from clinical delusions, heard voices, claimed to talk to God and foresee the end of the world. Jesus as, thus, a paranoid schizophrenic whose mystery and beliefs could be reduced to a psychiatric case history. Similarly, the long-distance psychoanalytic study of Hitler relies heavily on certain unprovable, poorly corroborated, questionable “facts”—such as Hitler’s alleged monorchism, a purported “primal scene,” his alleged obsession with his own purported “Jewish blood,” his alleged indulgence in an outré excretory sexual perversion. Hitler’s psychoanalytic explainers co
ntradict each other and give new life to the old phrase “often in error, never in doubt.” Still, if psychoanalytic theories of Hitler are unsatisfying in explaining Hitler, they remind us again of the powerful function of explanation: as consolation, as insulation, protection against having to face not just the inexplicability of horror, but the horror of inexplicability.
Consider, for instance, two particularly revealing explanatory patterns that emerge in the popular and scholarly literature, patterns that involve two remarkable reversals: the tendency to see Hitler as a victim, and the apparent need to find a Jew to blame. Let’s begin with a classic instance of the former: Hitler seen through the lens of contemporary American popular culture, Hitler integrated into the explanatory framework of pop victimology—Hitler as a serial killer suffering from low self-esteem. In November 1991, Unsolved Mysteries, the enormously popular “reality” TV series, devoted a “special edition” to a topic that was something of a departure from their usual fare of Lindbergh-baby and psychic-healer probes: a special edition devoted entirely to the mystery of “Diabolic Minds.” It turned out to be a series of three portraits of possessors of said diabolical minds: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy—and Adolf Hitler.
So there we have it: Hitler as serial killer. An all-time, most prolific one, yes, but basically a kind of workaholic Hannibal Lecter, explicable in the psychobabble of serial-killer pseudoscience as the victim of a dysfunctional family: “He had a stern father and was unable to establish a healthy relationship to his mother,” we are told by Unsolved Mysteries. Had there been more time, problems with Hitler’s “inner child” might have been invoked. But the real “explanation” for Hitler turns out to be that terrifying contemporary plague: low self-esteem. Thus, the segment concluded: “He subjugated and killed millions because he could not overcome his feelings of inferiority.”
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