Glamor Boy of the Year
HANSER, RICHARD
Glamor Boy of the Year The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler By Robert Puyne Praeger. 623 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "Putsch! How Hitler Made Revolution" Actors by the dozen...
...As for characterization, Goering is "froglike," Himmler is "chinless," and Roehm has "pig eyes...
...One Broadway columnist, listing forthcoming films and documentaries about the dictator, has called him "the glamor boy of the year...
...Instead of a living personality, this latest account of the 20th-cen-tury's evil genius offers only bits and pieces, jagged scraps of a jigsaw puzzle that is never assembled...
...Somebody named Trevor Ravenscroft has written a book, due out this month, called The Spear of Destiny, described by the publisher as "a documented apocalyptic-cabalistic version of the rise and fall of Hitler...
...His insights do not go very far in...
...How Hitler Made Revolution" Actors by the dozen are pasting on that little mustache and plastering their forelocks over their brows...
...In cutting rooms on both coasts old Leni Riefcnstahl clips are being spliced together again while sound men dub in the ritual roar of "Sieg Hei...
...When Payne's Hitler raises his voice, he never shouts, or bellows, or roars, or yells (as the real Hitler frequently did), he only "screams...
...One begins to wonder whether the author himself ever saw a photograph of his subject...
...over the ritual crowd shots...
...Moreover, this version of the dictator is always having hysterics and losing control of himself...
...Comedian Spike Mulligan will be featured in Hitler: My Part in His Downfall —a movie that promises to be a barrel of laughs...
...The work, for all its length, is a snapshot, blurred and out of focus...
...One peers and strains and tries to discern the man in the picture—and fails...
...A London newspaper recently spread pictorial evidence of the craze across a whole page, with the headline: adolf, baby, after forty years you're a superstar -again...
...The paperback rights to this hitherto unexplored phase of contemporary history have been sold for a fat, unmystical $200,000...
...One could argue, of course, that the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler, his rise, what he did, what he meant to the world, cannot be related often enough...
...Payne even attempts to give us the German word for "carpet-chewer" but —as with much of the German in the book—gets it wrong...
...Publishers sweat and scramble to get to the stalls first with the newest volume featuring a flaming swastika, or a glowering Fuhrer, or both, on the jacket . . . The phrase sticks in the throat, but there is a "Hitler boom" on...
...By now we are entitled to expect, if not exactly revelations—perhaps there is nothing left to be revealed—at least fresh insights, new perspectives, colors and characterizations that we had not encountered before...
...As we await such fallout from the burgeoning boom, it is something of a relief to come upon Robert Payne's The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, a straight, old-fashioned, no-nonsense treatment of the man who embodies the worst our dreary epoch has conjured up...
...Still, the time is too late for just another brisk trot between Braunau-am-Inn on April 20, 1889 and the Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945...
...Hitler's last days in the Berlin Fuhrerbunker are going to be portrayed on the screen with Sir Alec Guinness in the leading role...
...Nothing freaky, or comical, or way out here—merely the basic story retold...
...Lest we forget, and all that...
...Ultimately the responsibility for the rise of Hitler lies with the German people...
...Payne gives us little along those lines...
...They are on the order of "no man can be trusted with power...
...That any modern biographer could recount the fable about chewing the carpet seems incredible, yet here it is again, on page 306...
...Payne's Hitler would not have been capable of running Himmler's chicken farm in Bavaria, let alone building the mightiest war machine the world had ever seen, and using it to come within a gasp of conquering all Europe...
...It may be cruel to pose a question that could be asked of roughly two-thirds of every publisher's list, but: Is this book necessary...
...He was tall," says Payne (Hitler was 5 feet, 9 inches...
...he was "lean" and "jaunty" and his features were "thin...
...Some curious, not to say unnerving, experiences are in store for us...
...and "Hitler was the arch-destroyer...
...While Payne deserves good marks for simply taking his topic seriously and scorning gimmickry, his study does not make any real advance over ground already covered by Alan Bullock, Hugh Trevor-Roper and others...
...the spear that pierced the side of Christ...
...In it the Fuhrer's career is linked to his mystical obsession with—are you ready...
...If the reader had never seen a picture of Hitler, he would get a very curious idea of what the Fiihrer looked like from the descriptions in this book...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 10
