Casting a Wide Net
KATZ, FRED E.
Casting a Wide Net Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil By Ron Rosenbaum Random. 448 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Fred E. Katz Author. "Ordinary People and Extraordinary...
...I am convinced the answers to many of the enigmas examined by Rosenbaum's book lie not with Hitler, but will be found along that alternative avenue of inquiry...
...Some of Trevor-Roper's critics, though, have accused him of falling under Hitler's spell—he remarks on Hitler's hypnotic eyes—and of helping to perpetuate "the overheated gothic, demonic vision that has dominated postwar literature, pulp and film...
...But Irving remained steadfast in his affirmation of Hitler's innocence...
...Within the group there has been both great freedom to invent rationalizations about Hitler and immunity to any conflicting point of view...
...Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil Faced with yet another book about the evil of Adolf Hitler, you may reasonably wonder why we need an addition to the vast body of literature on the Nazi leader...
...The mystery is that these stories failed to have any real impact...
...To his credit, the author has cast a wide net...
...But Bullock is convinced Hitler was aware of the evil and his criminality...
...Lanzmann's view differs sharply from that of Yehuda Bauer, founder and Chairman of the Department of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University...
...Before it was silenced, the paper trumpeted such headlines as "Nazi Party Hands Dripping in Blood" and "Germany under the Hitler Regime: Political Murder and Terror," to cite just two examples, both dating from February 1933, right after the Nazi takeover of power in Germany...
...Ron Rosenbaum set himself a triple task: to survey the major efforts to understand Hitler, to place the interpreters in context, and in the process to arrive at some larger insights about ourselves as human beings—for instance, how we cope with seemingly unexplainable evil...
...A more intimate glimpse of the Nazi leadership is provided by Niklas Frank, son of Hitler crony Hans Frank, who depicts his father as "a conniving, vain, priggish, and piggish predator...
...On one side there is Daniel Goldhagen, whose Hitler's Willing Executioners virtually dismisses Hitler as the unique catalyst for the Holocaust...
...Hitler's ultimate belief in his own myth did have a price...
...In the 1920s and into the early 1930s the Munich Post engaged in a thorough and courageous effort to expose the murderous activities of Hitler and his followers...
...Indeed, one of his virtues is that he is not intrusive...
...They include his reaction to the supposed loss of a testicle, and his strange love for his niece, Geli Raubal, an apparent suicide under suspicious circumstances...
...So we encounter the theologian Emü Fackenheim trying to retain some conception of a viable God amid the horrors of the Holocaust...
...Bullock presents the Nazi leader as an astute politician, an actor who played the role he created so convincingly that he eventually came to believe it...
...On the other side is Lucy Dawidowicz, whose The War Against the Jews argues that Hitler was central to the Holocaust, that he resolved to carry out the mass murder of the Jews as early as 1918 and cunningly concealed his plan...
...If not him, says Goldhagen, someone like him would have come along and led the eruption of "eliminationist" anti-Semitism then simmering in Germany...
...It's the evil of Christendom...
...He didn't actually organize it...
...He has interviewed people throughout Europe, Israel and the United States, and he has read extensively on the subject...
...The mountains of Austria, where he presumed Hitler's ancestry could still be traced, are the author's starting point...
...He believes that despite its magnitude, the Holocaust is not beyond comprehension, even though we have not yet arrived at an adequate understanding of it...
...Having observed that "an increasing number of commentators —theologians, writers as well as historians—argue that ultimately the Holocaust is a mystery, an inexplicable event in human history," he says, they have given up too soon...
...Mercifully, Rosenbaum does not essay a full-scale psychological analysis of the different "explainers...
...At the extreme end of these theories is "Hitler integrated into the explanatory framework of pop victimology—Hitler as a serial killer suffering from low self-esteem...
...According to Maccoby, Hitler merely latched onto aspects of the Christian heritage and brought them to a head...
...That, I confess, was my own instinctive jaundiced reaction to this volume...
...By contrast, while examining the first generation of Hitler explainers—the Munich newspapers of the period of his rise to power—Rosenbaum comes up with what is real news even for many of us who claim to be knowledgeable about the era...
...But after reading Explaining Hitler, I must say it takes you on a journey of considerable enlightenment even if it does not fulfill the promise of its title...
...And Hyman Maccoby's article in Commentary magazine setting forth the deep dark secret he said Jews were fearful of voicing publicly: "Christians say the Holocaust is part of the evil of humanity...
...The reason for this, I think, is its failure to ask the critical core question: How can "normal" people—who are not poisoned by eliminationist anti-Semitism, not pathological, not morally deranged monsters to start with, not following orders under duress—engage in horrendous acts like the Holocaust, sometimes with great zeal...
...Another Briti sh scholar, Alan Bullock, rejects the idea of Hitler as madman...
...In a sense," he writes, "this book is as much about the spectacles, the explanatory lenses through which we look at Hitler, as it is about Hitler...
...Most subsequent attempts to uncover Hitler's nature or motivations were undertaken in the years since World War II...
...He asserts the Nazis "did what they did because they knew it was evil"—that doing evil can somehow be artistic...
...According to Rosenbaum, Irving's stance confirms "the continuing power of the Hitler spell...
...There have been myriad attempts, Rosenbaum notes, to provide a psychological explanation for Hitler's evil...
...Rosenbaum, who went to see Irving, reports that the conversation was fairly cordial...
...I myself have similarly suggested that evil can be a creative experience for the perpetrators, and is often nurtured and rewarded by a distinctive subculture...
...Speculations exist, too, about there being "something sexual" in Hitler's anti-Semitism...
...In her broader analysis, Dawidowicz is of the same persuasion as Milton Himmelfarb...
...One is the British scholar H. R. Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler, who is certain the Führer was "convinced of his own rectitude"—that he fervently believed in his diatribes...
...His contacts with surviving top Nazis have resulted in his entering what he describes as the "magic circle" of Hitler followers, in his adopting their convictions...
...And the British scholar George Steiner's highly controversial novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., in which Hitler mounts a passionate defense of his actions...
...Bauer deplores what he calls "mystification"— that is, the ruling out of explanations as a matter of principle...
...It is Rosenbaum's contribution to listen patiently to diverse, zealously advocated viewpoints and weigh them dispassionately...
...A combative figure, Lanzmann adamantly contends that any attempt to "explain" Hitler's actions is an utter obscenity, because it is the first step toward explaining them away: "All explanation is, de facto, exoneration...
...He lets us hear what was said and feel the intensity of the proponents' vehemence...
...He never went near a concentration camp, he never went near a death camp...
...He had "a counterfeit detachment from the killing process," Bullock argues...
...Objection to Rosenbaum's entire enterprise is registered by Claude Lanzmann, who made the documentary film Shoah, in what was probably the author's most jolting and confrontational interview...
...The drama of the Niklas Frank book is in the conflicted tone," Rosenbaum comments, "the way the son's effort to keep a distance between himself and his loathing for his father (by portraying him as a comic monster) recurrently collapses into pure hatred"—an emotion Rosenbaum describes as "cleansing rage...
...David Irving, a major Hitler apologist who writes and speaks about the "myth of mass murder of Jews in death factories at Auschwitz, Majanek and Treblinka," is a representative of that subculture...
...Nor does he try to match the arrogance of several of them...
...Bullock's book," observes Rosenbaum of the historian's 1952 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, "is more than a biography, it's a valiant effort to bring Hitler into the more comforting or at least more familiar framework of classical historical portraiture...
...He took no actual part in it...
...It isn't the evil of humanity...
...At the same time, Bullock shows...
...Concluding on a divided note is, perhaps, an eloquent summation of the state of Hitler scholarship...
...The danger is that his vile deeds will end up being excused as some kind ofpathology...
...author of a 1984 essay entitled "No Hitler, No Holocaust...
...The book ends with two chapters that present sharply divergent opinions...
...Rosenbaum's achievements notwithstanding, Explain ing Hitler takes us deep into the forest of bewilderment without leading us into liberating daylight...
...It led to the military campaign against the Soviet Union, for example, that had disastrous results for the German forces...
...He left that to [SS chief Heinrich] Himmler and [his deputy Reinhard] Heydrich...
...Unfortunately, the Schicklgrubers did not leave much of a record, only some convoluted historical tall tales...
...The philosopher Berel Lang, author of Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, agrees it is possible to explain without disabling one's capacity for condemnation...
...But it does not resolve the fervid disagreement about his true role, or the profound confusion about the nature of evil...
...Vagueness and melodrama hardly serve to clarify matters, and the mountain air is stifling rather than refreshing...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 8
