The Menace of Mediocrity
HANSER, RICHARD
The Menace of Mediocrity The Secretary Martin Bormann: The Man Who Manipulated Hitler By Jochen von Lang Translated by Christina A rmstrong and Peter White Random House. 430pp. $15.95. Reviewed...
...His death warrant might as well have been headed: "To Whom It May Concern...
...Martin Bormann, in short, was the party hack in extenso, in excelsis and, finally, in extremis...
...Like most of the party membership, Bormann was thoroughly commonplace—in looks, mind, background, upbringing, and personality...
...For it brings to mind the classic report of the grammar school pupil who wrote: "This book tells me more about penguins than I want to know...
...By exerting what was called "a revolting officiousness," by combining a blind, snarling loyalty to his boss with a passion for power, he made himself a figure to be reckoned with, and dreaded, in the Byzantine welter of intrigue and suspicion that passed for a political system in the Third Reich...
...But his ascent to power was not so much a rocket-like rise as it was a sweaty trudge: He did not reach the inner circle until May 1941, following the flight of Rudolf Hess (whose secretary he had been), and by then all of Hitler's basic attitudes and policies were irrevocably set...
...Tried and condemned to death in absentia, he created a painfully awkward situation for the Allied authorities: They didn't know where to find him, had no certain address...
...By tenacious infighting, by ruthless and relentless undercutting and back-stabbing, he clawed his way to his capstone position as the Cerebrus at Adolf Hitler's doorway...
...Nevertheless, his probe into Bormann's disappearance has been painstaking and substantial...
...As such, one must grant that he is worth the attention of students of the era...
...Jochen von Lang undertakes to lay this tiresome ghost to rest once and for all, and he succeeds...
...In the matter of unsubstantiated sightings, Bormann outdid the Loch Ness Monster and rivaled the UFO...
...on May2,1945—as the Russians converged on the center of the city, and on him, in the last hours of the European war...
...Von Lang's treatment of his subject is admirable in many respects: It is factual and detached, and it provides yet another view of the inner workings of National Socialism's upper echelons...
...By controlling the traffic in and out, he achieved formidable political and administrative clout...
...When his name first appeared among those indicted at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity, some German journalists looked at each other and asked: "Martin who...
...For the legend of the big Nazi who got away was kept feverishly alive by a succession of penny-dreadful fantasists who turned many a dollar, mark, franc, and lira by "discovering" Bor-manns in all quarters of the globe, preferably Argentina...
...The evidence accumulated by von Lang includes all the standard elements in such determinations: the key dental work, the skull formation, the testimony of experts in forensic medicine, the statements of eyewitnesses...
...He was the quintessential Nazi, in many ways more completely of the breed than his flashier, freakier and more famous colleagues—Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, for instance...
...Instructrive in the abstract, Bormann's career does not make for thrilling reading...
...His account, moreover, substantially agrees with that of James O'Donnell, the respected American correspondent whose recent book, The Bunker, examined the dissolution of Hitler's court with excruciating exactitude...
...The author is a journalist-editor on Der Stem, a not particularly respected Hamburg illustrated weekly that usually carries a naked woman on its cover...
...History would not have been different had Bormann stayed down oh the farm shoveling manure, which is where he started...
...He was a textbook case of the upward mobility that social revolutions provide for the sullen and resentful...
...A variation of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil might be the menace of mediocrity...
...Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler"_ One excuse for writing a book about Martin Bormann is that he was an oxymoron made flesh...
...With the real Martin Bormann missing, some two-dozen spurious ones were turned up over the next quarter century...
...Still, 430 pages on Martin Bormann can be regarded as another example of the penguin syndrome, so prevalent in contemporary publishing...
...And yet within that unalloyed mediocrity lay a horrific potential, a hideous strength—qualities made even more horrifying because, being present in a Bormann, they could also lie dormant in the manager of the local supermarket, the truckdriver on the nearest throughway, or the paterfamilias with the roll of fat on the back of his neck...
...Von Lang's argument that Bormann had a decisive influence on the Fiihrer —stated in the subtitle, "The Man Who Manipulated Hitler"—is therefore slightly disingenuous...
...he used every device of the investigative reporter and offers scrupulous documentation...
...At the height of his power and influence in the Nazi hierarchy, nobody outside his immediate circle knew of him...
...Martin Bormann, then, is not alive and well in Argentina...
...He was distinguished by his dullness and achieved fame through obscurity...
...He concludes that Bormann committed suicide by taking a quick-acting poison on a Berlin street at about 3 a.m...
...What Bormann did do, however, was exploit the situation around Hitler...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 11
