George Steiner EXPLAINING HITLER by Ron Rosenbaum (Macmillan)
It may well be that I am not the right reviewer for this book. Ron Rosenbaum places me and my novel, The Portage to San Christobal of AH, among the principal players in his dark tale.
Explaining Hitler, a highly personal study of those who have sought to do so, is not an orderly or stylish work. Pieces of historical-documentary narrative alternate with interviews. The prose is that of often hurried and, at times, febrile reportage. There is sloppiness: “The French existentialist writer Francois Mauriac”, who was, of course, one of Europe’s foremost Roman Catholic novelists and moralists. Much is omitted. Nonetheless, Professor Rosenbaum (he is described as teaching “literary journalism”) has produced a work of importance and fascination.
It is estimated that the number of books and articles on Adolf Hitler will come to rival those on Shakespeare and Napoleon. If anything, the spell is growing, not only among demented skinheads and swastika- tattooed hooligans across Europe and in Russia, but among serious scholars, political theorists and psychologists.
Was Hitler a sadistic lunatic gifted with exceptional luck? Was his a rational ideology pushed to bestial extremity? Was he, on the contrary, a rhetorician of genius, an uncanny clairvoyant into the weakness of his enemies, an artist manqu? Would there have been a World War II and the Holocaust had a bullet found a vital organ in the trenches of 1914-18 – Hitler was, after all, wounded three times – or had one of several attempts of assassination succeeded?
One thing is both certain and appalling. Together with Stalin, Hitler is coming to dominate our perception of 20th-century history in the West. More and more, we are coming to realise how much of his monstrous legacy remains toxic. For all his greatness, Winston Churchill is beginning to look like a consequence of Hitler. Charles de Gaulle, quite obviously, was. And, in a more oblique, mediated sense, so was the nationhood of modern Israel, with its relations, at once seminal and reactive, to the European genocide.
Rosenbaum begins unsteadily. He expends repetitive space on the possible significance in Hitler’s psyche, in the genesis of his Jew-hatred, of the impenetrable imbroglio of his parentage. I myself have asked whether Hitler might not, like Wagner, have imagined and dreaded some taint of Judaism in his own blood.
But there is no shred of reliable evidence, either as to the facts or as to Hitler’s apprehensions. Nor is much gained by endless speculations on the Fhrer’s sexual pathology, speculations fuelled by the suicide in Munich of his attractive niece, Geli Raubal. Rosenbaum’s obsession with this episode, the greatly exaggerated importance he ascribes to the brave journalist Fritz Gerlich, who may or may not have had the key to the affair (and was murdered for his pains), lead to near- absurdity. There could, he opines, be a “smoking gun”, a definitive document, in some Helvetian bank vault. Together, perhaps, with medical attestation of the reich-chancellor’s alleged missing testicle.
The inquiry settles into its absorbing stride when Rosenbaum interviews Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock. He makes of their testimony the organising polarity of the problem. For Trevor-Roper, Hitler was an inspired leader convinced of his own rectitude. The Holocaust represents the realisation of a vision, no doubt insane from any scientific point of view, of purgation, of the elimination of an inferior, venomous race from the European bloodstream. Thus Hitler was “a sincere believer”.
For Bullock, Hitler was in certain respects “a person like you and me”. He suffered “a moral cretinism” but also an infatuation with power all too familiar in the chronicles of despotism. The charismatic powers can be analysed, but not the ultimate motivations. With poignant scruple, Hitler’s most illuminating biographer resigns himself to unknowing. But if he wasn’t evil, says Bullock, “then the word has no meaning”.
The interview with revisionist David Irving confirms that impression of a confused, evasive provocateur, almost childishly entranced by his ability to enlist raucous neo-Nazi support. Here is a man who was once a scholar and who now states that “Anne Frank died of typhus”, which means that “she wasn’t murdered”.
This sort of sick sophistry induces a certain sympathy with the brutal, perhaps megalomaniacal rages of Claude Lansmann, maker of the epic documentary Shoah. There is no excuse for the rudeness, for the psychological aggression which Rosenbaum (and so many others) have suffered at Lansmann’s hands. But in his testimony, Rosenbaum forgets the essential: it is Lansmann who conceived of and filmed Shoah. No one else, I believe, could have. The scars of that achievement have brutalised and lamed his consciousness. They have generated the bullying credo that any attempt at “explaining Hitler” is a crime, a reiteration of Auschwitz.
In an infinitely gentler, courteous, theologically informed vein, this negation is implicit in Emil Fackenheim’s meditations. For him “the mystery remains”. Hitler is a black hole in the human species, an incarnation of absolute evil which raises the possibility – a possibility to be wholly repudiated – that “God is Satan”. Not to repudiate that gnostic-antinomian conjecture would be to “make of God Hitler’s final victim”.
I must leave it to others to evaluate Rosenbaum’s portrayal of my views and of the “Hitler-novel” in which he sees a brilliant but ultimately reprehensible “playing with fire”. Let me correct only one important misreading.
Rosenbaum is not a dialectician, and unrevised interviews are not always a basis for just insight. When arguing that Auschwitz and the Holocaust have “lowered the threshold of mankind” by revealing, by enacting, orders of systematic bestiality unprecedented, I seek to clarify the unspeakable burden on the Jew, a burden not only of insane suffering but of a victimisation ineluctably inwoven in the triumph of the inhuman. This concept may be opaque and halting. It does not, of course, indict the Jew. But I do maintain that there is now “no road back to certain illusions” as to human nature, as to history, as to providential hopes in culture. Our world is a world which comes after.
Rosenbaum’s quest takes him next to Hyam Maccoby who believes (rightly, I think) that the Holocaust was the logical finality in a history of Christian anti-semitism. The book concludes with Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial indictment of the German people as a whole and the late Lucy Davidowicz’s desperate finding that the war was, above all else, a “war against the Jews”, planned by Hitler from the outset of his political career.
Omitted is any look at the important socio- economic hypotheses, by no means all Marxist. There are ranking scholars and political scientists who see in National Socialism and its genocide the consequence of a late capitalism and of mass- consumption technocracy. In that perspective, the Fhrer would have been the agent of impersonal historical forces far exceeding his own role.
More generally, can there by any responsible access to the Hitler phenomenon which does not take Stalin into correlative account? Stalin’s victims outnumber, hideously, those done to ash by Hitler. Quite differently from Hitler, Stalin would appear to have been possessed by a personal blood-lust, by sadism of the grossest kind. As Bullock came to realise, these two titanic gangsters, the master of words and the master of silence, are in tandem. It is Stalin’s parallel shadow which makes so much in the matter of Hitler impenetrable. But whatever your intuitions, it is plain as damnation that they divide between them one of the blackest centuries in human history.
And, as the Russian archives begin to yield their midnight secrets, it is also the Hitler question which will be persistently reopened. For example: did Hitler know of Stalin’s organised starvation of some nine million Ukrainians, and did this knowledge trigger his own belief that such horrors could be orchestrated and got away with?
Rosenbaum’s book is honest, often moving. It demonstrates, yet again, that writers, thinkers, historians who enter these dark waters do so at their peril.