Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Higher stubbornness? I’d recast the impulse behind it this way: No, dammit, whatever I decide about the relationship between God and evil, between God and Jewish suffering, however unsatisfied I might be by other attempts to explain it, however much I might resent God’s apparent silence or absence in the death camps, however much I reject the notion of some “larger plan” in which God required the murder of millions of children to accomplish some inscrutable end, however much I reject all the consolations and rationalizations of theodicy’s attempt to explain Hitler, I refuse to allow Hitler the power, refuse to allow Hitler to be the catalyst, the defining issue over which I will reject the God my ancestors have lived with and died for, for better or worse, for three thousand years. Reject God for any other reason, for nonexistence, for silence, for death, but not for Hitler, don’t give Hitler that power, that posthumous victory.

  I’d come to Jerusalem saturated with the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question of post-Holocaust theodicy, the arguments that put God in the dock after Hitler and Auschwitz. I was drawn to Yehuda Bauer’s cleansing and logical syllogistic dismissal of God as Satan or nebbish because it offered at least a resolution of a tormentingly unresolved issue. But finally I found myself won over not by Fackenheim’s theodicy but by what I sensed, beneath the sophisticated Hegelian ratiocinations about radical evil, as a kind of sheer orneriness—the stubborn refusal to let Hitler be the judge in the trial of God.

  The 614th commandment as an article of faith: “That was the only way for me . . . and still is,” Fackenheim told me, “to avoid the hopeless dilemma between not facing up to the Holocaust and having Judaism destroyed.” Not facing up to the Holocaust: that is, not exempting God from questions of ultimate responsibility left unresolved by attempts to explain Hitler in human terms. Not having Judaism destroyed: not finding God guilty, at least not in the first degree, not abandoning God or the Jewish way of worshiping him because of Hitler’s evil.

  Fackenheim’s 614th commandment is then, if not a plea bargain, a limiting instruction to the jury: God can be found culpably negligent, but capital punishment is ruled out. “There has to be another possibility” than the death or execution of God, Fackenheim told me. “If you face up to the Holocaust and say, ‘Oh, it’s just another catastrophe’—that is a blasphemy to the victims.” The alternative, however, is blasphemy to the God so many of the victims worshiped: “If you face up to it and the result is that Judaism is destroyed”—because facing up to it might mean God is Satan—“then it’s a posthumous victory for Hitler.”

  Some, like Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, suggest there is a third answer that combines continued love for the Jewish people, for Judaism in that sense, with rejection of the God who abandoned them to Hitler. But for Fackenheim, there was no middle way. “That was the first thing I said” at the 1967 symposium, Fackenheim told me. Before anything, he ruled out the ultimate guilty verdict on God, because it would make God Hitler’s final victim. Issuing that limiting instruction resolved a personal spiritual crisis for him: “The moment I said what I said—making that decision—the sickness left me,” he said.

  Fackenheim stepped back from the brink, from where the logic of his critique of explanation was taking him. In George Steiner we see someone who, out of either intellectual courage or recklessness, steps over it.

  CHAPTER 17

  George Steiner: Singling out the Jewish “Invention of Conscience”

  In which a character named A.H. escapes from its famous literary creator—who is accused of “playing with fire”

  It is, in a certain sense, a Frankenstein story: about a frightening creation that escaped from its creator. The creator is George Steiner, one of the foremost men of letters in the English-speaking world. His creation: a fictive character called “A.H.,” who is transparently Adolf Hitler.

  George Steiner’s Hitler began life as a figure in a literary fantasy, a sophisticated “survival myth” parable about a Hitler who’d escaped the bunker in 1945, and who—thirty years later—is finally tracked down, put on trial, and forced to defend himself, to explain himself.

  But something disturbing has happened with the Hitler in Steiner’s fable: He explained himself far too well. He did more than escape the bunker, it seemed to some—he escaped Steiner.

  Even some of Steiner’s most thoughtful supporters in the bitter controversy over Steiner’s Hitler novel, The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H., believe that in some way “A.H.” escaped him.

  “It scared the hell out of me,” Steiner himself told me, recalling the first time he came face-to-face with a living embodiment of the Hitler figure he’d created. The occasion was the opening of the London stage production of his novel. It was the first time Steiner saw his Hitler character in the flesh. Until then, his Hitler character was just the barest of initials on a page. Now, suddenly, “A.H.” was a charismatic, full-bodied, full-blooded figure bestriding the stage, mesmerizing an audience with words of self-justification Steiner put in his mouth. It was the first time he heard the applause.

  The dispute over the nature of that applause is a deeply disturbing one to Steiner, who has both an enormous scrupulosity about—and an enormous distrust of—the power of language, of the Word.

  Toward the close of our conversation in Steiner’s Cambridge University study, I read him a quotation from an account in the London Observer of the play and the fierce controversy that surrounded the production—the pickets outside, the applause within. The Observer critic said the audience appeared to be applauding Hitler’s speech in the play, the final epic soliloquy of self-justification Steiner had crafted for his Hitler character; the words that close the play.

  “Oh no!” said Steiner, horrified. “Oh no, no, no, no, no,” he insisted five times. The applause was not for what Hitler said, he told me, but for the play as a whole, which ends a moment after Hitler’s speech. In other words, they were applauding him—or the actors—not Hitler.

  Even assuming Steiner is correct about who the applause was for, he concedes he knows that the Hitler character he created might be dangerous, even on the page. He was aware of it, he told me, from the moment he put his pen down at the end of a three-day sleepless “fever dream” of composition. He was aware he’d created an entity that needed to be controlled rather than unleashed indiscriminately upon the world.

  “The moment I finished it,” Steiner told me, “I pledged to myself that neither in Hebrew nor in German would I allow it to be translated. I’m not going to have the Germans hear that in their own language.”

  “Was it because you fear Hitler’s speech could escape from its context?” I asked him.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, “and it could be used. There have been pirated attempts in German, but they’ve been stopped,” he said. They’ve been stopped, but it’s out there in circulation, however unauthorized: Steiner’s Hitler speaking German to Germans, explaining himself, excusing himself, blaming the Jews for everything including himself.

  The notion of a German edition of his Hitler is troubling to Steiner, but it doesn’t seem to trouble him as much as seeing his Hitler in the flesh. And even more than the sight, it was the voice: hearing his voice from the stage, “scared the hell” out of him. There is something more dangerously potent to him about the voice, the word made flesh, than the word on the page alone. Perhaps it is because Steiner’s lifelong horrified fascination with Hitler began—at age five—with the sound of Hitler’s voice.

  The story of how one of the foremost Jewish intellectuals of the postwar era brought a Hitler figure to life and how—golemlike, Frankenstein style—this Hitler escaped to haunt him begins with Steiner as a child, sitting in front of the radio, listening to that frightening, terrifying voice.

  “I was born in 1929, so from ’33 on my earliest memories are sitting in the kitchen hearing The Voice [of Hitler] on the radio.”

  The kitchen was in Paris. “My father was from Czechoslovakia. [He met] my mother in Vienna. I was born in Paris. My fa
ther had left Vienna because he believed that Austrian anti-Semitism was going to explode one way or another. He couldn’t have guessed it would be Mr. Schicklgruber that was coming. But he was always astonished that the [Eastern European] pogroms had stopped short of Austria—Austrian anti-Semitism seemed to be irremediable, as it is today.”

  Paris proved to be no refuge. Steiner was eleven when his family had to flee France shortly before the Germans marched in. “By great good luck we were able to get out with the last ship to sail from Genoa,” one heading for the United States.

  What his father felt about Austrian anti-Semitism, Steiner felt about the French variety. “It is very odd, given the Dreyfus Affair, that it [the Holocaust] didn’t happen in France. In some ways, it was ghastly bad luck for Germany that Hitler—it could have happened in France. French anti-Semitism had a kind of systemic power and political profit which it didn’t have in Germany. Had it not been for Hitler’s quote unquote peculiar genius, had there been a French Hitler, he might have had an even quicker ascent to power.”

  “You don’t agree with those who explain Hitler as somehow a product of the German soul?” I asked him.

  “Not at all. Not at all. On the contrary. German distaste about the vulgarity of Hitler’s racism ran very, very deep. The Prussians never bought it, the Bavarians had their own particular case against him. They never bought it. In France you can, at any time, get an explosion of French chauvinism against Jews. The Dreyfus Affairs are French. The first plan to ship Jews to Africa did not originate in Germany.”

  “The Madagascar Plan?”

  “French,” Steiner says.

  If it was not the German soul, Steiner believes, there was something in the German language that peculiarly suited what he called “Hitler’s quote unquote peculiar genius.” He heard it in that voice on the radio: “The overwhelming power was there. And the ease with which he got away with the Rhineland matter suggests a reading of the weakness of the West which was somnambular, that of a man who was a political genius.”

  That word “somnambular,” suggesting a paradoxical state of unconscious consciousness—a mind both spellbound and spellbinding, Caligari-like—is a recurrent one in Steiner’s description of Hitler. A Hitler who is a kind of medium for the evil genius of the German language itself. He speaks of Hitler’s language being like “antimatter” to ordinary language.

  “Yes, yes, that’s what my novel tries to show, among other things. It is antimatter. He is one of the greatest masters of the language. As are [Martin] Luther’s pamphlets asking that all Jews be burned. German language has—all languages can have it—but in the German language, Hitler drew on a kind of rhetorical power which, in a way that is perhaps a little bit peculiar to German, allies highly abstract concepts with political, physical violence in a most unusual way. . . . And [Hitler] was easily a genius at that, absolutely no doubt about it.”

  The essence of the genius, Steiner insists, is not so much in the written word, but the embodied voice. “It’s a hard thing to describe, but the voice itself was mesmeric,” he says, recalling the radio addresses. It was specifically the physicality rather than the metaphysicality that mesmerized, he told me. “The physique is—the amazing thing is that the body comes through on the radio. I can’t put it any other way. You feel you’re following the gestures. [Marshall] McLuhan has a famous thesis that it [Hitler’s charisma] wouldn’t have worked on TV. I think that’s balderdash. Hitler would have been the ultimate master on TV—all you need to look at is the Riefenstahl films of the rallies to see how he mastered every image, every gesture.”

  The fascination and the distrust of speech, the love and hate for the power and terror of language, has been at the very heart of Steiner’s remarkable career as literary prodigy and prodigal. After earning degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard and spending a stint at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, he made a decision to return to England and the Continent; he held dual professorships at Cambridge and the University of Geneva. The return was not casual, it was the fulfillment of a paternal injunction.

  “It was my father’s central resolution that I go back to Europe,” he told me. “Because—although there were wonderful opportunities in America—for my father, for me not to have come back would have meant that Hitler had won his boast that Europe would be Judenrein [Jew-free]. And that he couldn’t bear.”

  There is something in this that echoes Emil Fackenheim’s injunction to post-Holocaust Jews, his commandment that Thou shalt not grant Hitler any posthumous victories. But there is also something very idiosyncratic in the way Steiner formulates it: “for me not to have come back” would be decisive—almost as if Hitler’s posthumous victory or defeat would have been decided not by whether Europe was Jew-free but whether or not it was Steiner-free.

  It’s the kind of casual hubris that has made Steiner such a controversial figure, an intellectual provocateur who both dazzles and outrages. An admiring introduction to a book of essays about Steiner’s work speaks of his “greatness. . . . The shocking massiveness of his learning . . . the prodigiousness of his competence in the major Western languages, the speculative power of his . . . reflections, the brilliance of his textual commentary; the piercing eloquence of his prose . . . [an] oeuvre that, in its puissant majesty, is virtually without parallel.” But this same commentator nonetheless acknowledges that “an enormous amount of ill will toward him is harbored within the Anglo-American university community” because “he can seem too vehement, hortatory, overbearing; he raises his voice in public. . . . Conventional academicians cannot forgive his polymathic virtuosity.”

  How much Steiner’s Jewishness enters into the resentment he engenders is a difficult question. The suspicion of some that his Jewishness had in the past denied him the honors in the Oxbridge academic community that his accomplishments should have commanded may be matched by the Oxbridge community’s resentment of the implicit imputation of genteel anti-Semitism to it.

  But it cannot be gainsaid that Steiner’s speculations are often designed to be not just vehement and hortatory but profoundly provocative. Such is certainly the case with his assault on language—and civilization itself—for its guilty implication in the Hitler horror, an assault that became the central theme of his work with the publication in 1967 of Language and Silence and then in 1975 of After Babel, the nonfiction predecessor to his notorious Hitler novel.

  Both works raised the question of the potential diabolism within language itself and implicitly addressed the relationship between Hitler and language: Did the evil of the Holocaust come into being because of Hitler’s power to manipulate language to bad ends, or was there something perverse—something demonic and Hitlerian—in the very essence of the language and the civilization built upon it? Something that expressed itself through Hitler. Steiner famously challenged the notion that language and culture were “civilizing” factors with his image of a death-camp guard reading great German literature and listening to great German music and then proceeding to go out and stoke the great German crematoria.

  This issue can be found at the heart of some of Steiner’s most daring and provocative speculations. Consider the suggestion he made to me about the way the language of Kafka might not only have foreshadowed but somehow created Hitler.

  I’d been struck by something Steiner had written about Kafka’s Metamorphosis: that the word “Ungeziefer”—the word Kafka used in 1922 to describe the kind of insect poor Gregor Samsa found himself transformed into—was the very same word Hitler used to characterize Jews in his earliest speeches: vermin. Were you the first to point this out? I asked Steiner.

  “Yes, that’s in my very earliest work,” he said. “That’s in Language and Silence. And it seemed to be—and I still don’t know the answer to this—such is the exactitude of Kafka’s foresight in ‘The Penal Colony’ and The Metamorphosis, such is the authority, that it raises a ghastly question: Are prophecies self-fulfilling? I have no answer to that.”

>   “That’s an interesting idea. Do you mean—?”

  “At a certain level, does a prophecy start engendering that which it has foreseen?” he asks.

  “Just by its presence in the world? You can’t say Hitler read Kafka, obviously.”

  “No, of course not, he never heard of it. But it was there. It was suddenly there as a possibility.”

  “Kafka as a source of Hitler?”

  “As a source of the concentration-camp world, of the world of the bureaucracy of murder. In Kafka’s case, we’re dealing with the single most powerful act of prophecy ever. Karl Kraus is the other. Karl Kraus [the Viennese literary satirist] says in 1909, ‘Soon in Europe they will make gloves out of human skin.’ That’s 1909! And Kraus, another Jew on the margin, saw it absolutely clearly, coming out of the Vienna situation.”

  But with Kafka, Steiner is going further than asserting the kind of prophetic foresight he attributes to Karl Kraus. With Kafka, he’s coming close to an almost black-magic view of the dark power of words: that they have a spell-like power to bring into being that which had been inconceivable before they were uttered—something more radical than a prophetic relationship, a causal one. I don’t think he believes, literally, that Kafka made Hitler possible; I think he’s pressing a metaphoric correspondence to its limits, and the explicit parallels between Kafka’s “Penal Colony” world and the death-camp universe have been persuasively challenged by Lawrence Langer. But it is Steiner’s need to see them is what is most of interest. It is testimony to his awe and distrust of the power of language. It reflects his profoundly ambivalent attitude toward European civilization in relation to Hitler: Was Hitler a culmination of dark forces within European civilization or an aberration from its values? I believe this is what is behind Steiner’s touching preoccupation with Hitler’s recess schedule in junior high school and his obsession with the lost works of Viennese street photographers.