Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “I am the first to ask that we comb every photograph [of Vienna]—it hasn’t been done yet—to see whether by chance we have him [Hitler] on a tramway or street with Freud and Mahler. Now, remember, he also goes to the same school as Wittgenstein.”

  Steiner is so obsessed with this connection that he’s researched the recess hours of that school at Linz. Hitler and Wittgenstein were “two years apart at school, but I have looked into this. At eleven or eleven-fifteen, as in all European schools, there’s recreation—you go out in the yard and play. There’s no doubt they were in the same yard. And I find it almost impossible to believe that on the Ringstrasse [in Vienna] he didn’t cross the men I’ve named [Freud and Mahler], Of course he did. And it is conceivable that a street photographer—you know, with their big tripods and the thing over their heads. . . . It’s conceivable, one captured them together.”

  I wondered what could be the source—the point—of Steiner’s peculiar fascination with the possibility that Hitler, Freud, Mahler, and Wittgenstein could be found on the same piece of photo paper or in the same recess yard. On reflection, I believe it has something to do with Steiner’s uneasy wavering between the poles of that key divide in Hitler-explanation literature: the divide between the aberrationist and culminationist camps.

  On the one hand, Steiner can call Hitler “a singularity,” an aberrant freak of human nature with a “peculiar genius,” but in Steiner’s theoretical works, he comes across as a culminationist, taking the darker view that Hitler was a product, the culmination of the dark side of European civilization, of the cursedness of language which underlies and shapes that civilization. In this view, the evil is in the Word itself; Hitler is merely the somnambular medium that gave voice to it.

  Thus Steiner’s obsession with finding a photo that captures Hitler with such avatars of European thought as Wittgenstein and Freud: Seeing a Hitler who emerged from the same photo emulsion as these paragons of European and Jewish civilization would then symbolize, fix in silver nitrate Steiner’s vision of a Hitler who emerged from the same underlying matrix of culture that produced that civilization’s highest achievements. Thus, the one is inseparable from the other; the fabric of the civilization that produced Wittgenstein is implicated nonetheless in the causation of Hitler. And so, when we imbibe the distillation of civilization’s finest fruits, we are inevitably also drinking from a poisoned chalice.

  His preoccupation with the photo-emulsion image of Hitler, Steiner disclosed to me, was the source of what became his most notorious and controversial work, the novel in which he addressed the Hitler mystery most directly. A 1919 photograph of Hitler set him off, he says.

  “That’s the center of the novel,” he says, “that photograph.” It’s a real, albeit obscure photo, he says, that shows “Hitler standing in the pouring rain like a beggar. It’s 1919, I believe, when he was a discharged corporal without a penny and nobody’s even stopping as they hurry by on a Munich street corner. And a year later, a hundred people [stop], a few years later ten thousand and then ten million, and this is something which I come back to and back to in my thinking. It is a terrifying proof of the omnipotence of the Word. Even if it is an anti-Word.”

  The notion of an anti-word comes from the same speculative vein in Steiner as the notion of Hitler’s language as antimatter, fusing, perhaps too casually, concepts from ancient cabalistic legends and up-to-the-minute quantum physics. This was the sort of feverish speculation that gave rise, Steiner told me, to the “fever dream” in which he gave birth to the Hitler novel and the Hitler character, his Frankenstein creation.

  “I was in Geneva, and it actually took only three days and nights. It was a single—total rush [in which he wrote] two things, Lieber’s speech [an attempt to capture the hideous pathos of the death-camp victims in maimed and fragmented sentences] and the speech of A.H.,” as his Hitler character is referred to in the text of the novel. “Matter and antimatter.”

  Why then? I asked him. Was there anything about the circumstances of his life that brought forth the fever dream of creation at that point?

  “Possibly—a naïve guess,” he says with surprising candor. “It could be that it was the point at which it became evident that my wife and children would be staying in our new home in Cambridge. She has an appointment [a professorship in history] here. And that we would have to explore the very difficult separate lives. And that may have triggered certain intensities. I wouldn’t know, but it came in one extremely simple—it wrote itself. It wrote itself and then had its very complicated destiny.”

  Before getting into that complicated destiny, by which Steiner means the fierce attacks on it and the Frankenstein-like escape of his Hitler character, let’s look more closely at what Steiner actually wrote in that three-day fever dream. Fever, in fact—in one form or another—infects the novel. Set in the feverish heat of the steamy, swampy rain forest, where almost all its characters become progressively infected with malaria and other, worse forms of fever, it is a trek through the jungle that becomes a trek back into the fever dream of twentieth-century history.

  The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. is a philosophical novel that makes use of a pulp-fiction premise: Hitler is alive in South America. Hitler escaped the bunker, as the survival myth has it. He’s been living comfortably in South America but when he hears that a search team of Israeli Nazi-hunters is on his trail, he flees to the depths of the rain forest.

  The novel opens with the Nazi-hunter team catching up to him there, taking prisoner the frail, gray ninety-year-old the Führer has become, signaling their team leader back in civilization, in San Cristóbal, that they’re beginning the trek back out. But Hitler’s too weak to walk, and his captors become too weakened with fever to carry him. Deep in a malarial swamp, eaten alive by infectious insects, they realize they’ll never succeed in making it all the way back, in bringing him to justice. And so they decide that before they all die, they’ll put Hitler on trial right there in the jungle.

  Meanwhile, their radio signal has been intercepted by various intelligence operatives of the Western powers who fought Hitler. In London, Sir Leslie Ryder, a caricature of Hugh Trevor-Roper, is alarmed by the political problems a Hitler trial would cause. Curiously, Steiner has chosen to put into his Trevor-Roper figure’s mouth the characterization of Hitler favored by Trevor-Roper’s archrival Alan Bullock. Sir Leslie specifically calls Hitler a “mountebank,” the very word Trevor-Roper reviles as the symbol of what he believes was Bullock’s original misapprehension of Hitler. Sir Leslie derides Hitler as “actor to the end—that’s the secret of him,” the Hitler-as-cynic characterization favored by Emil Fackenheim and Bullock but rejected by Trevor-Roper, who sees Hitler as unfeignedly possessed. Sir Leslie then wonders if the man found in the rain forest is the real Hitler or, in a fiendishly ironic trick of fate, the look-alike double Hitler was alleged to have used on occasion for security purposes—“the shadow, the mask of him,” the Hitler actor rather than the actor Hitler.

  On the other hand, Emmanuel Lieber, the commander of the Israeli team who is waiting at the San Cristóbal base camp for their return, has no doubt it is the real Hitler they have. But he expresses less triumph than dread, dread of Hitler’s diabolical antimatter language. He radios his team to tell them whatever they do, don’t talk to him, don’t listen to him. “Gag him if necessary, or stop your ears as did the sailor. If he is allowed speech he will trick you and escape.”

  Don’t let him speak, Lieber repeats, citing the prophecy of a medieval Jewish sage: “There shall come upon the earth in the time of night a man surpassing eloquent. All that is God’s . . . must have its counterpart, its backside of evil and negation. So it is with the Word, with the gift of speech.”

  But weakened by disease, near death, and fearing that if they all die, Hitler will never face justice, the team in the jungle decides to disobey Lieber’s warning, to put Hitler on trial, to allow him to speak in his own defense.

  That speech, Hitler’s own H
itler explanation, constitutes almost all of the final section of the novel. He speaks, this Hitler, with all the feverishly insidious fluency that Lieber had warned against, speaks with a force and a slippery fluidity that a summary can’t convey, but the overriding theme is that whatever he was, whatever he became, he learned from the Jews—they, not he, are to blame for what he became and did.

  It’s a theme that expresses itself in three variations. First, he insists he learned his racism, his notion of the Master Race, from the Jewish idea of the Chosen People. He even points the finger at a specific Jew, a fellow flop-house denizen in Vienna named Jacob Grill who, he claims, read him Chosen People passages from the Bible that he merely adapted by substituting Aryan for Hebrew superiority: “My racism was a parody of yours,” he tells his Jewish captors, “a hungry imitation.”

  Second, he claims that in seeking to exterminate the Jews, he was not imposing his will upon the world but expressing, carrying out the wishes of the rest of the world—with its willing collaboration. It was not just the Germans but the whole world who wanted to erase the Jews because “the Jew invented conscience and left man a guilty serf,” forever tortured by expectations he cannot meet. Expectations Hitler summarizes as the threefold “blackmail of transcendence”: the Ten Commandments of Moses, the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus, and the demands for social justice of Karl Marx—three Jews who tormented mankind with the demands of conscience, love, and justice.

  “What were our camps compared with that?” Hitler asks the jury in the jungle. “Ask of man more than he is, hold before his tired eyes an image of altruism, of compassion, of self-denial which only the saint or the madman can touch, and you stretch him on the rack. Till his soul bursts. What can be crueler than the Jew’s addiction to the ideal?” With Moses, Jesus, and Marx, “Three times the Jew has pressed on us the blackmail of transcendence. Three times he has infected our blood and brains with the bacillus of perfection.”

  Steiner’s Hitler denies, then, that he is some “singular demon of your rhetorical fantasies.” He is not an aberration: “You have made of me some kind of mad devil, the quintessence of evil, hell embodied.” No, he says, he is rather a culmination of human wishes: How else “could millions of ordinary men and women have found in me the mirror, the plain mirror of their needs and appetites?” The slaughter could not have happened without their active and passive complicity: “It was . . . an ugly time. But I did not create its ugliness, and I was not the worst.” Here, he indulges in an excursion into exculpation through comparative evil, measuring himself against the slaughter of the Congolese by the Belgians (twenty million, he says), against the Boer War inventors of the concentration camp, and finally, against Stalin: “Our terrors were a village carnival compared with his.”

  Hitler’s final argument is that he was, in fact, serving as an instrument of the will of the Jewish God. He was not the destroyer of the Jews but, in fact, their savior, because his war on them made possible the fulfillment of the messianic dream of the return to Israel. In fact, his most outrageous claim is that he, Hitler, might in fact be the promised Messiah.

  Finally, Hitler gives his summation. “Gentlemen of the tribunal: I took my doctrines from you. I fought the blackmail of the ideal with which you have hounded mankind. My crimes were matched and surpassed by those of others. The Reich begat Israel. These are my last words.”

  His last words: Part of the problem with this astonishing speech—and I should stress it’s only one cause of the rage with which many reacted to it—is that these are not only Hitler’s last words but virtually the last words in the entire novel.

  There is one final full paragraph appended in which a rain-forest tribesman who has been a silent witness to the trial of Hitler leaps up, intending “to cry out, ‘Proved!’” The tribesman had not understood the words Hitler spoke, Steiner writes, but their “brazen pulse carried all before it.” In fact, the tribesman’s cry never escapes from his mouth, so the last sounded word is in fact Hitler’s. But assuming the tribesman did utter it, there’s an ambiguity here: What is “proved,” Hitler’s case for himself or the case against him? In any event, Hitler’s speech is followed not by any refutation, just the sound of helicopters descending on the clearing in which the trial has taken place. Are the copters there, as has been hinted, to silence Hitler, to execute him before he can become a terrible inconvenience to the former Allies by reminding them of their complicity in his rise, their complacency despite their knowledge of the death-camp slaughter? Or have they come to convey Hitler back where his dangerously insidious words, his antimatter language, will once again have the power to seduce and destroy? The novel ends in mid-sentence with the helicopters descending. The only thing clear is that with the conclusion of the novel, the trial of Adolf Hitler had ended—and the trial of George Steiner had begun.

  The charges against Steiner were manifold and stinging, ranging from the artistic to the personal: First, it was said he’d allowed Hitler to have the last word. That long, insidious, subversive, and disturbing speech at the end of the novel is allowed to go unrefuted. While some of Steiner’s defenders twisted themselves into exegetical knots trying to prove that the Hitler speech, like the speech of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, subverted, refuted itself—self-deconstructed, pulled the rug out from under its own rhetoric, if you looked closely at it—their efforts in this direction were undermined by Steiner’s enigmatic silence on where he stood in regard to the Hitler speech. In fact, before speaking with him, I hadn’t been able to find any published instance in which he made explicit his actual attitude toward the words he put in Hitler’s mouth, much less adopted that defense.

  Despite the attacks on him and his work, which escalated into public picketing when the novel became a stage play, he would not use the defense of irony, that he’d intended Hitler’s speech to be self-subverting. And to some, even if he had, it wouldn’t have been enough. To give Hitler even a semblance of cogency, of sophistication, was “playing with fire,” as Steiner’s most penetrating critic, Hyam Maccoby, put it: In a world historically receptive to any anti-Semitic argument, however crude, to put in Hitler’s mouth a powerful rationale for blaming the Jews, however ironically intended, was feeding the same fires that sent Jews up the chimneys of the death camps.

  The sharpest attacks of all insinuated that Steiner was not merely putting words in Hitler’s mouth but making Hitler his mouthpiece—that Steiner’s Hitler was saying things about the Jews that Steiner himself believed. For a time after the publication of the book, this argument was carried on in small intellectual publications and Jewish journals. But when Steiner permitted the novel to be staged, when the actor Alec McCowen gave full-blooded persuasive voice to Steiner’s Hitler’s words, when audiences seemed to some to applaud Hitler and Jewish pickets chanted outside the theater, it became a public nightmare for Steiner. A Frankenstein nightmare: Some part of him clearly wondered whether he had in fact given birth anew to a posthumous Hitler that would haunt him, haunt Jews forever after—giving Hitler not just a posthumous victory but a posthumous life. Some part of him must have feared that the fantasy in the novel—a Hitler who had escaped—had come true, although Hitler hadn’t escaped until Steiner freed him, gave him voice again. A perverse fulfillment of the warning of one of his characters: “If he is allowed speech he will trick you and escape.”

  I could sense Steiner’s deep unease over the issue in his anguished denial that the audience at the London production had applauded Hitler and not his play. His quintuple “no, no, no, no, no.”

  And yet I found to my surprise he was willing to answer my questions about his Hitler quite frankly, more revealingly I believe than he ever had before. I put the question very directly: Can’t the unanswered Hitler speech, the novel itself, be interpreted as blaming the Jews for Hitler’s crimes against them?

  At first, he seemed to be distancing himself from that possibility with the it’s-only-a-character-speaking ploy. “It can be interpreted that Hitler
would have defended himself this way. . . . Suppose he hadn’t shot himself. He’s put in a glass box. And suppose his demonic power had been unleashed?”

  In other words, Steiner was merely trying to extrapolate the reality of Hitler rather than put his own persuasive words into his mouth or endorse those words in any way. His use of the word “demonic” suggested to me that he might, in fact, be deploying the “Milton’s Satan” defense of his Hitler speech. William Blake had argued provocatively that the dazzling heroic rhetoric Milton puts in Satan’s mouth in Book I of Paradise Lost (when a speech by Lucifer rallies his fellow fallen angels with romantic rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny) proved that Milton himself was “of the Devil’s party.” But the thrust of the twentieth-century critical response to Satan’s speech was to attempt to prove that Milton had ingeniously devised Satan’s rhetoric in such a way that, examined closely, it betrayed its own diabolical meretriciousness; that the reader was designed to first be seduced, to be “surprised by sin” (the title of an excellent early study of the question by Stanley Fish), only then to realize how the glittering surface of Satan’s rhetoric had ensnared him. And—shocked by the nearness of his own fall—to emerge chastened and ever more alert to the danger of taking at face value the words of the Devil.

  But when I gave Steiner the opportunity to avail himself of this defense, he refused the easy way out. The questions Hitler raises in his speech are valid, he told me. “I think it calls for answers,” he said. “Hitler’s speech calls for answers,” he repeats. And he means answers from Jews.

  Consider the argument he puts in his Hitler’s mouth that the Jewish concept of the Chosen People is the origin of the Master Race idea. Steiner defends the comparison: “The thousand-year reich, the nonmixing of races, it’s all, if you want, a hideous travesty of the Judaic. But a travesty can only exist because of that which it imitates.”