Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In a sense, Herr H. and I were using each other: He hoped that I would promote his “solution” to the Geli Raubal case (which, in fact, because of my skepticism over the “diary,” I did not). And he had proved useful to me in getting access to certain Hitler landmarks in Vienna. He had, for instance, established a relationship with the director of the Männerheim, the still-functioning men’s shelter Hitler had called home for three long years of his lost period in Vienna, when his artistic ambitions had been crushed and he’d been reduced to scraping together pennies by selling his stilted postcard renditions of “scenic views” of Vienna landmarks.

  That despondent and disillusioned period in the men’s shelter was a crucial one in Hitler’s development, one that saw the destruction and loss of his romantic artistic illusions. Some believe it was the interlude when other, more sinister illusions took their place. Many have argued that it was in some encounter there in the Männerheim or in some moment of embittered introspection, some vision there, that triggered Hitler’s metamorphosis from struggling artist and harmless bohemian to the grim hater he became.

  The evidence on the question of a transformation at the men’s shelter is mixed, corrupted in part by several con-artist inmates who tried to cash in on Hitler’s later fame by claiming they’d been his soul mates there. I’d read all the Männerheim accounts but had been surprised to learn that it still was open, still served the same function it had eight decades ago. It was still home to vagrants and the barely working poor, the able-bodied homeless, the refugees, the restless and vagabonds who’d drifted in or had been driven to Vienna from all corners of Europe.

  And so, one gray November morning, I found myself wandering through the halls of the Männerheim, trying to get a sense of the way it looked and felt to the youthful Hitler. Very little has changed, the director told me. He meant very little of the architecture, but it was true of more than that. There’s a famous disputed photo taken of the interior of the Männerheim during the period when Hitler was in residence. It shows a dark-clad figure seated in front of a window off the kitchen area, staring out the window into the void. Some have said it’s Hitler. It’s probably not, but it could have been. Touring the ground floor, I came upon a figure seated in that same position staring out into the same hopeless void, wearing a black wool sweater and a black knitted watch cap, smoking a pipe and staring vacantly into space. A refugee, the director said, a fellow who’d fled from Macedonia after the political breakup of the Balkans, his home destroyed in the ethnic strife that ensued. In a pessimistic frame of mind (as who could not help but be in this place), one could imagine the same brew of bitter hatred secreting itself inside this man as it had in Hitler. As the director said, very little has changed.

  After assisting me in gaining entrance to the Männerheim, Herr H. disclosed he had a favor he wanted to ask me, a dream he wanted me to help fulfill. He knew I was planning to leave Vienna for Munich by train; he offered instead to drive me to Munich with a stop at the Obersalzberg—if I could help make it possible for him to stay in the guesthouse Bormann had built in Hitler’s compound, the place where, Bormann had promised, every citizen of the Reich would be able to spend “a night close to the Führer.”

  The reason he hadn’t accomplished it before—the reason he thought I could help—was that after the war the Bormann guesthouse had been taken over by American army authorities. They’d dynamited Hitler’s personal residence to destroy its possible future as a shrine for neo-Nazis. But it was felt the guesthouse was not itself imbued with the kind of numinous evil Hitler’s own house had been. Instead, it was transformed into a kind of mountain-resort facility for American servicemen and their families stationed in Germany. Herr H. was under the impression that it was open to all American citizens and their guests as well, and so he asked me to make a reservation for me and him and his Israeli girlfriend at the Hotel General Walker, as the place was now called.

  I know why Herr H. wanted to spend “a night close to the Führer,” but I wondered what his Israeli girlfriend Miriam’s attitude was. She seemed as normal a young woman as any of her generation; born in Austria, raised in Israel from age five to twenty, now returned to Vienna, where she was an apartment-rental agent. On the way to Munich from the Obersalzberg, when Herr H. stopped to gas up his BMW at a roadside stop in the heart of Bavaria, as lederhosen-clad villagers in peaked Alpine hats decorated with colorful turkey feathers picnicked outside the buffet, I asked Miriam what it felt like spending time with Herr H. in an apartment filled with Hitler and SS memorabilia.

  She was enthusiastic about the opportunity it represented—an opportunity to learn about Hitler: “In Israel, you know, it was almost forbidden to talk ever of Hitler,” she said. “It is too awful. But I want to understand, and through knowing H. I have learned very much.”

  It was hard to argue with the impulse she was expressing, although one might quarrel with the method. But, in a sense, she was pursuing the same quest as Herr H. and one not too dissimilar from mine. In mapping the labyrinthine thickets of Hitler explanations, in trying to disentangle the historical Hitler from the meanings projected upon him, from the adhesions of spurious facts and theories, I was, in my own way, trying to get “close to the Führer.”

  And so we set out from Vienna on a gloomy November Sunday afternoon, stopping for an early dinner on the way, crossing the border into Germany around dusk. It was after dark when we started up the Obersalzberg slopes and found ourselves diverted onto that icily treacherous back road; it was pitch black when we found ourselves turned away from the Hotel General Walker.

  The cavernous reception hall was filled with a throng of buzz-cut GIs, their wives and babies wearing the Bart Simpson T-shirts that were all the rage that year. The clerk had my reservation and all seemed in order till she asked me for my army identification. No one had mentioned that on the phone, I said. It seemed they must have assumed I was in the service because—contrary to Herr H.’s information—the Hotel General Walker was not open to all Americans but only to military personnel. No amount of complaining about how we’d driven three hours just to spend the night sufficed: There was no room at the inn for us.

  Outside in the cold, clear air of the mountain night, Herr H. pointed up to the Eagle’s Nest, nestled in the snowy crevices just below the peak. “It’s closed for the winter,” he said. At first I thought he planned on us hiking up the mountainside to take shelter in that inaccessible shrine, but it turned out he had a more congenial—to him at least—backup plan in mind.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We can always stay at the Gestapo Cottage.”

  The Gestapo Cottage. The place felt only slightly less sinister than it sounded. It was a compact little inn not far down the mountain from the Hotel General Walker, a place that had been built before Hitler began building his private preserve, a little inn known as far back as the twenties as Zum Turken because of the Turkish nationality of its original owners. In the thirties, to the great credit of the owners, their clear lack of Nazi sympathies caused Bormann to seize it from them and turn it into a dormitory residence for Hitler’s Gestapo bodyguards. After the war it was returned to the ownership of the original family, whose descendants run it now, although to the likes of Herr H. it remains always “the Gestapo Cottage.”

  Despite the proprietor family’s lack of sympathy, the place, because of its location, attracts those obsessed with and sympathetic to the era, who want to stay in a place that has changed less than any other Hitler landmark except perhaps the Männerheim. By the registration desk, one can find books filled with cheerful photographs of a relaxed, genial Hitler taken at various sites on the mountaintop: Hitler with his beloved dog Blondi (the one he killed with cyanide when he was testing the poison he would take himself); Hitler with blond children; Hitler with Eva Braun; Hitler posing with Alpine-garbed Nazi visitors; Hitler hiking through the wildflowers; Hitler relaxed in front of the breathtakingly picturesque crags. Hitler, in other words, in slippers. And in the Ge
stapo Cottage’s cozy common room, where we had a beer before retiring, there is still a picture on the wall of Eva Braun, one that could well have been put there to brighten up the off-duty hours of the Gestapo bodyguards while she and Hitler were still alive.

  The Gestapo Cottage was closed for the season, but the proprietors were only too happy to accommodate such a faithful repeat visitor as Herr H. They opened up the otherwise empty guest floor to make two rooms available to us. Despite their hospitality, it was not exactly a place in which I could get a comfortable night’s rest. Alone in my room in the nearly empty Gestapo Cottage, I couldn’t sleep, thinking about the previous occupants of the room, about the spectral seated figure in the Männerheim I’d seen earlier that day.

  It was possible, if one allowed one’s imagination free rein, to feel, here on Hitler’s mountain, the presence of Hitler’s evil almost literally thickening the night air. And to a much greater sense than I would care to admit, I did feel something almost palpable, however irrational that may sound. But giving in to it that night was a kind of turning point for the inquiry I was pursuing, one that dramatized to me the perils in the attempt to get “close to the Führer” and helped clarify for me what I was really seeking.

  The most obvious peril was the kind that Herr H. embodied, the way a quest for closeness can devolve into a kind of comfortably engrossing intimacy, one that can metamorphose into the gargantuan nearsightedness of the Hitler mit Schlippern gemütlichkeit vision of the Führer.

  But there was another kind of peril in the path I’d been pursuing, in immersing myself in the literature on the subject, in spending time with those who’d made explaining Hitler their lifework: getting too close to the Führer, so close that the magnitude of his evil became a distorting lens that makes any human perspective impossible. So close that the temptation, the inevitable tendency, is to begin looking at all history in terms of how it led to Hitler and the death camps. And a concomitant temptation to examine all human nature for the sources, the wellsprings of Hitler; to view all evil in relation to Hitler’s evil. A process that eventually can end up turning Hitler into a kind of graven image—a defining, if not ruling, principle of all being.

  One also has to question if, as a Jew, as someone who could have been one of his victims, one can look at the subject with any perspective. The tendency is to want to see one’s own tragedy as something universal and ultimate—as all mankind’s, all history’s, all human nature’s ultimate tragedy.

  The German psychiatrist Helm Stierlin reports in the introduction to his psychohistorical study of Hitler that he was impelled to embark on the project, in part at least, by a question his eight-year-old child asked him: Was Hitler the most evil man that ever lived? It’s a child’s question, but still an important one because it raises the question of how we measure, judge evil: by quantity, by body count, or by the quality of consciousness with which the deed is executed, the malevolence of the intentionality, the conscious awareness of wrongdoing? It’s the kind of question I’d been asking ever since H. R. Trevor-Roper had surprised me by declaring his belief that Hitler had no conscious awareness of doing wrong: that he was “convinced of his own rectitude.”

  One question I formulated that sleepless night on the Obersalzberg, and in the crystalline light of the following morning when the late autumn sun had burned through the fog, was a different one, although it addressed similar issues to that raised by Trevor-Roper and by Stierlin’s child, issues that sophisticated post-Holocaust philosophers and theologians had been wrestling with for half a century: Do we have to redefine our conventional, centuries-old notions of evil to take into account the nature of Hitler; or do we have to redefine our notion of Hitler to account for him in terms of our previous notions of evil?

  To put it another way, to use a familiar Jewish formulation: Why is this evil different from all other evils—if it is? Are we too close to know? These are questions I’d been asking, in one form or another, in my encounters with historians such as Bullock and Trevor-Roper, thinkers such as George Steiner and Emil Fackenheim, in talking to psychoanalysts, psychohistorians, and other explainers. They are questions that I found a despairing and disappointing number of times to have been begged, evaded, or glossed over.

  “Well, if he isn’t evil, then who is?” Lord Bullock harrumphed, as if that answered the question—when, in fact, it just opened it up.

  Ultimately, however, I did find one philosopher who did not beg the question, did not claim it to be irrelevant or impossible to parse, who did not claim to have a final answer, but who wrestled with it with what I thought was scrupulous honesty, and who seemed to be suggesting a provocative new way of answering it. It came as a surprise to me, having read fairly extensively in the philosophical literature on the question of evil, both in the abstract and in relation to Hitler, to have found someone with something new to say. But I began to sense something both new and important being suggested in an understated, just short of explicit, way in a work called Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide by Berel Lang, the chairman of the philosophy department at the State University of New York’s Albany campus. And, in a more explicit way, in a preliminary essay Lang drew my attention to called “The History of Evil and the Future of the Holocaust.”

  It was a surprise, once I began to understand the implications of Lang’s argument, that it had not caused more of a stir when he first published it, although I have a feeling its implications are only beginning to be assessed and debated. Certainly, Lang’s book attracted favorable notice when it appeared. He was a fairly prominent writer and thinker on these questions, he’d chaired prestigious symposia and authored two previous books on the subject. And his newest work, Act and Idea, had attracted praise. Saul Friedländer, one of the most highly regarded thinkers on the question, called it “one of the most important attempts made to face the philosophic implications of the Nazi genocide,” and Cynthia Ozick credited Lang with “an intellectual and technical force equal to that of Primo Levi.”

  But I fear the power and import of Lang’s breakthrough might have been lost on some of his readers because of the reticent nature of Lang’s style: In his prose, as well as in his person, he’s self-effacing to the point of self-erasing. In part, it’s a scholar’s modesty and scrupulosity; in part, it’s personal modesty, a reluctance to make claims for his own originality—so much so that I was not sure, until I drew it out from him in person, just how original his argument was.

  Still, when we’d settled down in the comfortable living room of his West Hartford, Connecticut, home, even Lang expressed some surprise that many who reviewed and discussed his book had failed to react to his novel argument on the consciousness-of-evil question.

  “I wondered about that, too,” Lang told me.

  He speculated that the attention of reviewers—because the audience for the book was primarily philosophers rather than historians—had been drawn to a later section of Act and Idea on Kant (“Genocide and Kant’s Enlightenment”). That chapter was Lang’s contribution to the debate over where to place the “philosophical blame” for Hitler and whether the sources of Nazi totalitarianism and racism might be more attributable to the Enlightenment rather than the Old Regime it rebelled against.

  But, in fact, it is in the opening two sections of Lang’s book, “Intending Genocide” and “The Knowledge of Evil and Good,” that I believe Lang has made an even more profound and controversial contribution to the debate over the nature of Hitler’s evil. Lang takes the problem Hitler poses to the language of evil, the problem raised by Bullock—if not Hitler, then who can we call evil?—very seriously. “It’s absolutely essential,” he told me, to find a way to fit Hitler into the framework of evil—or reassess whether that framework has any useful value. Finding a way is essential, but that does not guarantee it’s possible.

  And so, in his book, he takes on the two obstacles raised against calling Hitler consciously evil, ones that might be called the dysfunction objection and the rectitude objectio
n. Of the first he says, “If everything is explained by some dysfunction, the one-ball theory—whichever one of them, or you put them all together, then of course—why would Hitler be responsible or accountable? What’s evil about [a dysfunction]? It’s grounds for a defense of insanity: ‘It’s out of my control. And if it’s out of my control, then you can’t blame me for doing it.’”

  But even more problematic, Lang believes, is the argument from rectitude, the argument Trevor-Roper encapsulated by saying Hitler could not be considered consciously evil because he was “convinced of his own rectitude.” It’s an argument that dates back more than 2,000 years to Socrates’ insistence in the Protagoras that people do wrong only if they have a defect that prevents them from knowing right or are deluded into mistakenly thinking they are doing right when actually doing wrong. Two millennia of argument have not found a way around the rectitude problem, sometimes called “the Socratic paradox.” Even the most searching state-of-the-art philosophical discourse on the question of evil ends up resorting to literature rather than history when it seeks to hold up examples of people who do evil despite knowing it’s so. Iago, Milton’s Satan, Claggart (the persecutor of Melville’s Billy Budd)—they are repeat performers in almost all such discussions, and while everyone would like to add Hitler to that list, precious few humans actually fit the description of knowing or believing they were doing evil and yet doing it anyway. Even the Marquis de Sade believed he was ultimately involved in a liberating project, not an evil one; political torturers claim to be acting out of ideology or theology. The problem is an embarrassing one for the philosophical profession, since it seems to have argued itself out of what so many people intuitively know or feel, and so almost argued itself out of history. But Lang feels we can’t avoid or ignore the problem: We must revise our notion of Hitler or revise our notion of evil.