REVIEWS

...The American reviewers have dramatized this mistaken simile of the Pact with the Devil...

...We are given a valet's view of a rogue...

...Fifty years after his death, Hitler may be seen as the builder who wanted nothing so much as give Europe a new and big capital...

...But all the conspiring he did engage in was aimed at other advisers of the Fuehrer, especially his Adjutant Bormann...

...Such readers are interested in finding a Nazi who is literate, thoughtful, and repentant...

...thus all human beings may be misled and but for the grace of God there go I. The book appears at a moment when everybody seems to be in the mood to forgive and forget...

...He gives us two reasons for this conversion: the personal impression Hitler had made on him (a leader who gave the German people hope in the midst of despair), and the promise to deliver Germany from the Communist danger...

...A revolution is made not only by those who are activists but also by those who are not bothered by its excesses...

...This last statement should be taken as selfevident since black nationalism, by definition, is not interested in the well-being of Negroes within America...

...people cannot bear the idea that such enormous crimes should have been committed by such ordinary people...

...And it has not been only a black fantasy...

...AMID THE CACOPHONY of both self-congratulation and enraged assault, which marks discussion of student politics, Steven Kelman's book is notable for reason, coherence, and a degree of detachment...

...they have interpreted Speer's story as the tragedy of a mere technician who fulfills a job without asking the reason why...

...Sometimes his frustration with student activists leads him to lash out harshly at all students, and he seems to forget that students are not the major impediment to social change in America...

...As for the "alienated," they were drawn to the action because it attacked the institution they saw as their oppressor...

...He had engaged in political discussions with fellow students and was aware that "in order to become respectable," the Nazis had tuned down their "socialist" rhetoric, the feature most distasteful to Speer's middle-class family...

...he has not sold his soul but has surrendered it to the machinery of destruction...

...Had Hitler announced that he would burn down Jewish synagogues, involve Germany in a war, and kill Jews and political opponents, he would have lost me and probably most of his adherents...

...Thirty years after the revelations of Khrushchev, Stalin will again be revered as the leader who made Russia greater than ever before...

...I have pointed out that at critical points the author deceives himself...

...When the highest generals conspired to make an end of it, he was not among them, though as minister in charge of munitions he knew the war was lost, and though he tells us that by that time he had lost his illusions about Hitler...

...Or the politics of someone like Kelman himself...

...The many memoirs in which valets describe their masters have deprived us of our knowledge that, for better or worse, for good or evil, for effectiveness or failure, historical individuals must be understood and interpreted not merely as humans but also on a level somewhat different from the merely human...

...Why do editors not ask one of Speer's slave laborers to review his book...

...And Speer found all this embarrassing enough so that he concealed his conversion from his parents...

...That all this suffering might not even have significance is apt to drive a normal person crazy...

...Are we already in the mood of forgetting and forgiving...

...it also offers some general opinion about student politics...

...The need to do away with Hitler only occurred to Speer in the last days of the Thousand Year's Realm, when the mad dictator decided to take the German people as a whole down into his doom...

...Indeed, its defining characteristic is the belief that Negroes need a state of their own...

...Hitler himself, called to testify at the trial of some S.A...

...Thus, the careers of men like Martin R. Delaney, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X are filled with inconsistencies that derive from the same source— their desire to better the condition of Negroes is ultimately incompatible with nationalism as a political doctrine...

...taking over buildings and risking backlash from within and without the university is contrary to the goals of all but a minority of ultra-left students...

...If I am not quite as pessimistic as Kelman, it is because I don't entirely agree with his major explanation for the limits of student effectiveness...

...It is a book worth admiring for sentences like this one: "I know that the road to socialism does not pass by way of the destruction of Harvard...

...But they ought to know that it was the American publisher who insisted that Speer must come to grips with the Jewish question...

...any judgment on what black Americans really want...

...Again: how does Speer square this bit of inside information with the fact that Hitler did exterminate people whom he considered of lower race...

...Speer was the only Nuremberg defendant who admitted his guilt and who felt the trial was just...

...BOOKS Since his book was written, developments on some campuses indicate that students are growing sick of New Left jargon...

...As long as Hitler seemed to make the German people great, Speer found him a bore but not mad...

...The great irony, which Draper implies throughout his study, is that the passionate search for historical precedents that is undertaken today by the nationalists can never con firm their beliefs...

...Why should people who might have ended in the gas oven now admire the man who might have sent them there...

...Speer's picture sins in the other direction...

...My own feeling is that despite the THE LIKELIHOOD is that the force of reality will agonizing pressures under which so many have its effect on today's young nationalists as blacks live, Negroes as a whole are too sensible, well...

...Hitler promised to "tear up the Treaty of Versailles...

...Movements for social change, if they are to achieve significant results, must be based on the interests of a particular group or class, yet idealism also plays its part in human progress...

...As Speer shows him to us in many intimate glimpses, he is an artiste manqué whose taste ip styles dates back to the end of the last century...

...the man Speer, a young architect to whom Hitler gave a chance to rebuild whole cities, merely shows the banality of evil...

...Deena Rosenberg Student Politics, Harvard Style PUSH COMES TO SHOVE: THE ESCALATION OF STUDENT PROTEST, by Steven Kelman...

...If Speer was fascinated by Hitler's rhetoric, it was precisely because he felt that here was a man who "with seductive simplicity attacked the complexity of our problems" and projected himself as the hero whose sword would cut through parliamentary inaction...

...There probably are people of Speer's and my generation who wallow in reliving again the experience that took the best years of their lives...

...Intelligent, wry, and well written, Kelman's book emerges as a strong voice for a democratic campus radicalism...

...As Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann have made painfully clear, the pact's meaning is based on Faust's awareness that he wagers the salvation of his soul on the attainment of earthly power...

...In the end, allies in the white community, electing public Negroes are like other Americans in that they officials sympathetic to the Negro cause, fight-desire simply a better life for themselves, "a ing for new laws and programs—will counter-place in the sun," as Malcolm put it, and such act the impulse to indulge in fantasy...

...One imagines Eichmann being pursued in his dreams by devices to make his job more efficient, expediting the liquidation...

...Then he does remember more positive aspects of student participation and praises young people for their idealism...

...His alienation from traditional German middle-class values must have begun at an earlier date: when he forgot what Dr...

...but Hegel added to the well-known proverb about heroes and their valets: this is so not because there are no heroes but because valets are valets...

...The moderates, when they joined the strike, felt they were acting not to wreck the university but to attain certain immediate re forms...

...He has used his enforced leisure in writing this book in which he tries to face himself...

...Norman Hill Black Nationalism — Dead End or Panacea...

...But clearly he is torn between his desire to build an effective movement—effective beyond the narrow confines of the academy—and his disenchantment with current student activity...

...and occasionally his allies were Goering and Goebbels...

...And the banality is amply proven by the gory architecture of the Third Reich, samples of which illustrate the book...

...a vainglorious impostor who rehearses a few measurements of weapons in order to impress a general...

...it makes the Nazis human, all-too-human, perhaps not very edifying specimens of the species but, nevertheless, subjects for a comedy...

...Without doubting the sincerity of the author's contrition, I call to witness my own memory of the time: there were two Nazi dailies on display at Berlin newsstands, with banner headlines proclaiming the brave deeds of their goon squads...

...The nightmare which in 1940-41 seemed so close to becoming reality, that Hitler might win the war, would seem to become bearable if at least he were the Antichrist, and his servants more than ordinary people...

...Nor is it a relief to learn that Hitler himself did not believe in the race theories but merely used them to rationalize his drive for power...

...If Speer, as he claims, trusted the bourgeois nationalists to tame their Nazi allies, why did he join the latter and not the former...

...He may be forgiven for dramatizing himself: there was no pact with the devil, no great sacrifice, only the failure of a scheme that had nothing in it of tragedy...

...Speer was sufficiently close to Hitler and the whole crowd to know their reasons, and up to a certain date he approved of them...

...Reading his memoirs, one simply does not understatnd what fascination Hitler held for his entourage, some of whom were intelligent people, and for a nation that had boasted of its culture...

...THE MEMOIRS of Albert Speer have received favorable, even enthusiastic notices in the English and American press, and the first question to ask is why, after 25 years, anyone still cares to read about the in-fighting among Hitler's top lieutenants, or about his megalomanic building plans, or about the effects of allied bombing on German industrial output...

...How else explain the many socialists who came from upper-class backgrounds...

...Twenty years after his death, Caesar was no longer the tyrant but the great statesman...

...Speer claims that he joined the Nazi party "frivolously" and thought that he acquitted himself of further political obligations by paying the monthly dues, unaware he had made a pact with the devil, which would cost him, all of Germany, and mankind dearly...

...He has atoned by serving a 25-year jail sentence...

...We are prepared to read about a maniac, such as raves in the pages of Rauschning's memoirs, or a leader endowed with a certain instinct for people and situations, as he emerges from the diaries of Goebbels...

...a faithful suitor to Miss Eva Braun...

...I believe him implicitly...

...Since the last part of this statement must be considered sincere and perhaps true for 90 percent of the Nazi membership, its first part gives us an important clue to the question that Speer does not answer: why did the "nonpolitical," normally docile and authority-prone German middle class turn into militant followers of a putschist demagogue...

...The returns portunities for blacks, and Malcolm, towards are far from all in," he writes, "and it would the end of his life, called for electoral political be well to wait another five years before making action as a means to correct unjust conditions...

...THEODORE DRAPER, who has concentrated his considerable talents on many different subjects —from Vietnam and the Middle East to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the American Communist party—has now turned his attention to the subject of black nationalism...

...Breaking past the fanciful monolith of "the students" constructed both by apologists for and enemies of student politics, Kelman describes three broad categories that made up the "confrontation coalition" at Harvard: the radicals, the alienated, and the moderates...

...The founders of the early colonization societies were whites, and today there are white segregationists— reactionaries in some cases, and consciencestriken liberals in others—who would like to wish away the hard reality that America is a multiracial society...

...An atmosphere of free discussion and the interplay of ideas, such as by and large prevails in universities like Harvard, is not helpful to the corporate establishment...

...Their imagination must therefore endow them with meaning...

...New York: The Macmillan Company...

...From his examination of the details, Kelman proceeds to argue that the Harvard action, like a good many others, was based on a confused apprehension of the true interests of students...

...The fact that the vast majority of Negroes has not embraced nationalism, and the outrageous impracticality of the creed itself, have caused even avowed nationalists to compromise their faith...

...a man incapable of making the decision that in war the German people must tighten their belts...

...In modern language: they felt "liberated," and the corresponding word, befreit, was constantly in their mouths...

...Nationalism, therefore, was only a passing phase of Delaney's career, Garveyism became little more than an unsuccessful experiment in black capitalism, Elijah Muhammad has called upon the United States BOOKS government to provide equal employment op-ent black nationalist movement...

...Nothing of the sort with Hitler...

...Between the author's freshman and junior years, most of the Harvard New Leftists abandoned their earlier defense of "participatory democracy" in favor of something like authoritarian elitism...

...The world felt threatened by a nincompoop just lucky enough to meet enemies wishing to be scared...

...Boston: Houghton Miffilin Co...

...He promised to "smash the system...

...The truth is, if we go by my memory and not Speer's, that people under 30 in the last years of the Weimar Republic— years of depression and political con BOOKS fusion—were looking precisely for revolutionary or at least pseudorevolutionary solutions...

...And the cronies around him were not clever organizers, but the most ludicrous gang of thieves...

...On the contrary, history reveals black nationalism to be little more than a gesture of repudiation—a powerful gesture, no doubt, and one that is emotionally appealing to many Negroes...

...287 pp...

...He had heard him and Goebbels speak once, but had not read Mein Kampf...

...One imagines a Stalin, another nonentity who had to play a historical role, pondering over whom else he must send to Siberia or before a firing squad...

...Black nationalism has never taken firm roots among Negroes because it has never been able to produce any results...

...Draper a goal can only be achieved if Negroes enter is entirely correct in pointing out that it is still and influence the mainstream of American too early to assess the real strength of the pres-political life...

...But this is simply not so...

...The virtue of The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism is not only that it provides a historical perspective from which to view the contemporary black nationalist movement, but also that it probes the contradictions and fantasies inherent in the idea of a separate black nation...

...Speer implies that he approved of what he took then for the party's aim—to curb "the excessive influence of Jews upon various spheres of cultural and economic life," and continues calmly asserting that in all his letters he cannot find "any trace of anti-Semitic feelings...

...But ultimately, black nationalism is incapable of pointing a way to the improvement of the Negro's social and economic condition in America...

...He errs...

...By this point, SDS rhetoric had reached an extreme of "revolutionary" self-incitement, and new activities were constantly needed in order to maintain the momentum of fervor built up among its members...

...He thinks the left-wing students may even, involuntarily, turn many Americans to the Right...

...The "Back to Africa" movements have always been more outlets for frustration than actual movements of population, and the deluded few who still believe that a separate black nation can be created in the United States, Draper's chapter on "the land question" should bring back to reality...

...Faustus's famous pact really involved...

...Hitler's mad fantasies become grandiose building plans, and the banal little man with the Chaplin moustache and his banal architect, figures of a tragedy...

...The moderates, by far the largest of the three groups, joined the action largely, suggests Kelman, because of guilt over their own inertia...

...It deals specifically with the Harvard disorders of April 1969, much of it in the form of a diary...

...When the blow-up came at Harvard, the core of New Leftists was joined by the alienated or "oppressed" students, who had little commitment to any politics but were emotionally ready to join with the radicals...

...211 pp...

...Possessed of such political sophistication and confronted with the highly politicized atmosphere at the Berlin Institute for Technology, where he was an assistant, Speer, we are asked to believe, failed to notice that by 1931 Hitler had only two whipping boys: the Treaty of Versailles and the Jews...

...It is no comfort to know that Hitler had no capacity for work, that his conversation was tedious, and that he wasted his time looking at Grade B movies...

...It does honor to him that he tried to take the guilt upon himself and to spare the German people the indictment of collective guilt...

...Speer claims that in 1931, when he joined the Nazi party at the age of 26, he was not aware that Hitler was a "rabid anti-Semite...

...Even the Eichmann whom Hannah Arendt has described as the embodiment of banality is more interesting: at least he is fanatically devoted to his job...

...All his propaganda was based on the promise of authoritarian rule and on contempt of that democracy which he held responsible for Germany's misfortune and the "excessive influence of the Jews...

...5.95...

...Herein lies the pathos of black nationalism, for, as Draper points out, a separate black nation is a fantasy that exists in the minds of Negroes who have been unable to reconcile themselves to their identity as Americans...

...Jr IS PRECISELY HERE that Speer's evidence lets us down...

...Kelman also discusses why the university was singled out as the target of student hostility...

...5.95...

...The simple fact that masses of blacks are too concerned with their own self-interest, to involved in the struggle for equality should reject realistic political strategies for the flamtemper whatever nationalist tendencies exist, boyant and self-destructive activities of such because the need to deal with reality—finding groups as the Black Panthers...

...Analyzing further a tendency toward elitist disdain for democratic procedures among leftist students—an analysis that follows the lines generally put forward by the Young Peoples Socialist League, in which he is a leading figure —Kelman comes to, but cannot resolve, this dilemma: how to reconcile his depressing observations of the Harvard scene with his hope that students can be part of a movement for democratic social change...

...It is simply impossible to believe that it was just failure to do the necessary research which prevented Speer from finding out that Hitler "was committed to a system of authoritarian rule and intended to eliminate democratic processes...

...This desire to dramatize the story is quite understandable...

...Among them the equally human, misled, mistaken and blinded but recuperated Speer, a much wiser man now 25 years later...

...murderers, had sanctioned political assassination...

...Kelman shows in some detail how the three groups were enabled to form a temporary alliance that rocked the university, even though each group felt uneasy with the other two and had little real community of outlook or interest with them...

...After the Cambodian invasion, SDS efforts to turn the students toward attacking the universities were often rebuffed, for many students understood, at least momentarily, that they had to participate seriously in the politics of the country as a whole...

...but this degree of intimacy is below the level of history...

...since Germany had already stopped paying reparations, this could mean only rearmament and reconquest of the lost territories...

...Only then did it dawn on him that he had indeed made a pact with the devil —the devil within himself...

...And, of course, this also explains its futility as a political creed...

...IF SUCH A BOOK is to be helpful at all, it must increase our understanding of the process by which young people come to be alienated from society...

...New York: Viking Press...

...the effort is impressive, and the confession bears the marks of conscious sincerity...

...Or so Speer has convinced himself 40 years after the event...

...The result is the best history of black nationalism in America that has yet been written...

...for all I know about the Nazis, they felt that Hitler was not taking their soul but giving them one...

...Only then did it dawn on Speer that he had served a mad dream...

...The appeal of black nationalism lies in the escape it offers from a difficult world and from the challenge of changing it...

...In retrospect, much that was dirty becomes grandiose, history as lived becomes History as written...

...He is skeptical as to whether any group—in this case, the students— will or can be politically effective in the long run, if its material interests aren't deeply involved...

...Maybe this correction of the heroic-tragic view of History is necessary...

...He was convinced that Hitler was right in occupying Czechoslovakia, in attacking Poland, Holland, Norway, Denmark, France, Russia, the United States...

...His fall, he wishes to believe, was as much an accident as the loss of virginity during a party, and perhaps even less conscious, less pleasurable, and less painful...

...But we are utterly unprepared for the dullard whom Speer introduces to us...

...THE REDISCOVERY OF BLACK NATIONALISM, by Theodore Draper...

...At Speer's Institute, Jewish students and professors were being molested...

...There would be nothing to discuss any BOOKS further, had not the reviewers believed and repeated the "Pact with the Devil" story...

...Speer pleads exactly the opposite: that he was not aware of any wager...