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Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil Want to buy the books discussed in this article? Any titles not yet published may be pre-ordered. A L S O +T O D A Y
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THE ARTIST OF DEATH | PAGE 1, 2, 3
But did Hitler really believe in his own ideology? The question of which came first, ideology or criminality, is central to Rosenbaum's book. And it is closely related to an even more primal question: Did Hitler do evil knowing it was evil, like Iago or Milton's Satan, or did he think that what he was doing was "right"? Indeed, do the categories of "evil" and "right" even apply to Hitler's thought-world -- or was he a "moral cretin"? In search of answers to these irreducible ethical questions -- which, as Rosenbaum points out, have been debated by philosophers since at least the time of Plato, who argued in the "Protagoras" that no man consciously does wrong -- Rosenbaum visits two of the towering figures in Hitler explanation, eminent British historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock, authors respectively of "Last Days of Hitler" and "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny." On the question of conscious evil, Trevor-Roper has no doubt: "Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude." Much of "Explaining Hitler" can be seen as Rosenbaum's attempt to refute this argument and replace it with a vision of a Hitler who did evil knowing it was evil. Since one of Rosenbaum's guiding theses is that in cases where decisive evidence is lacking, historians, including himself, tend to come up with interpretations that reflect who they are, it is no criticism to say that Rosenbaum's rejection of Trevor-Roper's interpretation seems to be based on moral grounds as much as on the evidence. For if Hitler really believed he was doing the right thing, then in some sense he would be less guilty -- and this is something that Rosenbaum cannot tolerate. He offers the example of the grotesque first Menendez murder trial, in which the brothers were initially acquitted because they supposedly "believed" that their parents were going to kill them. "By that logic, if Hitler had survived to be put on trial for murder in California, say, he might theoretically have been able to argue that he was 'honestly convinced' the Jews were trying to destroy him," Rosenbaum writes. Rosenbaum suggests that Trevor-Roper has his own understandable reasons for needing to believe in Hitler's sincerity. "Hitler explanations offer contradictory comforts. For [theologian] Emil Fackenheim, it is important to believe that Hitler was insincere and opportunistic precisely because he doesn't want to exempt Hitler from the gravest degree of responsibility, from conscious, premeditated knowing evil. Perhaps for Trevor-Roper, that degree of knowing evil, evil without the fig leaf of rectitude, is inconceivable or unbearable to contemplate." The argument Rosenbaum makes against Trevor-Roper is powerful, if not entirely decisive. He points out that in the "Table Talk" transcripts, records of Hitler's late-night ramblings, the Führer tells SS chief Heinrich Himmler and his top accomplice, Reinhard Heydrich, an obvious and chilling lie, denying that he was killing Jews when in fact all three men knew that the Final Solution was in full swing. "One can imagine the glances that Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich must have exchanged during the orchestration of this elaborate charade for the stenographer, perhaps even the silent laughter." For Rosenbaum, "This is not the language of a man 'convinced of his own rectitude' in exterminating Jews. This is the language of a man so convinced of his own criminality that he must deny that the crime is happening." Yet, as Rosenbaum himself acknowledges later, "There's nothing intrinsic in the fact of concealment to make it a necessary conclusion that concealment came from shame as opposed to, let's say, 'idealistic' prudence." Hitler, by this logic, might have been aware that the world didn't think slaughtering the Jews was a good thing, even though in his heart he knew it was -- a variant of the "the masses are not yet ready to understand our (Cultural Revolution, Armenian genocide, Rwandan butchery, American slavery, Bosnian atrocities, etc.)" line -- and therefore concealed it. Rosenbaum's encounter with Bullock deepens the argument -- and reveals that Bullock had changed his mind in a fascinating way about Hitler. In his still-standard 1952 biography, "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny," Bullock had argued that Hitler was a mere mountebank, an adventurer devoid of conviction, interested in power for its own sake. It was a pragmatic, deflating vision of Hitler that stood at the opposite pole from Trevor-Roper's messianic, almost possessed Führer. (So powerful was Trevor-Roper's portrait that some thought it glorified Hitler: The Zionist terror group the Stern Gang actually issued the historian a death threat.) Now, however, Bullock had come to see Hitler as "double-minded" -- not just as a cynical actor, but as "the great actor who believed in the part." He cites a passage from Nietzsche: "In the very act of deception ... they are overcome by their belief in themselves, and it is this belief which then speaks so persuasively." In a dark dialectic, calculation becomes sincerity -- but cynicism comes first. Like Bullock, Rosenbaum thinks that Hitler masked his real feelings, perhaps even transformed them so that they were palatable to him. But rather than seeing cynicism transformed into sincerity, he sees primitive hatred transformed into, or masked by, ironic knowingness -- a mask revealed by "the way he would come to make artful little knowing jests about it, virtually chuckle over the magnitude of his hatred." This "mirthful knowingness," for Rosenbaum, is the true signature of Hitler's unfathomable evil, his ticket to the lowest circle of hell. Rosenbaum's encounter with one of the most thought-provoking figures in the book, philosopher Berel Lang, takes the analysis still further. For Lang, "Hitler and his cronies raised the consciousness of evil to a veritable art: created ... the art of evil." Lang believes that it was "the role of the imagination in the elaboration of their acts," the "sense of irony" manifest in things like the sign "Arbeit macht Frie" ("Work Will Make You Free") over the gate to Auschwitz -- "it's like a joke, it is a joke" -- that indicate "an artistic consciousness" in evil. Which is to say that Hitler and his cronies did what they did not in spite of the fact that they knew it was wrong, but because they knew it was wrong. If there is one image of Hitler that Rosenbaum wants to leave us with, it is the image of him laughing -- or perhaps smiling silently -- at the thought of his victims. In a brilliant excursus on the late Lucy Dawidowicz, he invokes three remarkable passages she cites in which Hitler repeatedly refers to the "laughter" of the Jews. "Of those who laughed then, countless ones no longer laugh today," Hitler said, "and those who still laugh now will perhaps in a while also no longer do so." Rosenbaum comments that this speech "is a confirmation of Berel Lang's thesis that it is in the savoring of the slaughter as an aesthetic experience, in the perpetrator's relishing its piquant artful ironies, that the highest degree of conscious evil discloses itself." If in "Explaining Hitler" Rosenbaum at some level is putting Hitler on trial, it is a powerful closing argument for total moral condemnation. But should one even attempt to explain Hitler? In one of the most shocking chapters in the book, Rosenbaum confronts someone who not only believes that all Holocaust explanation is "obscenity as such," but who imperiously censors those who venture such explanations. If there is an intellectual villain here, it is Claude Lanzmann, director of the acclaimed nine-hour documentary "Shoah." Rosenbaum approaches Lanzmann respectfully, only to be treated with a high-handed disdain that approaches intellectual fascism. As Rosenbaum portrays him, Lanzmann, egged on by his Lacanian acolytes -- lickspittles is more like it -- clearly regards himself as the sole keeper of the sacred flame, and has ruled from on high that all attempts at explanation of a horror so absolute as the Holocaust are morally obscene, since they might somehow exculpate or lead to understanding of the perpetrators. One might accept or at least understand this stark taboo in the abstract. But Rosenbaum recounts a damning scene in which Lanzmann, who is not a Holocaust survivor, publicly humiliates and browbeats an actual Holocaust survivor, Dr. Louis Micheels. There could be no more devastating portrait of hubris, abstract rage and Parisian intellectual arrogance. As he abruptly terminates his interview with Rosenbaum, Lanzmann instructs him to read an essay he had written called "Hier Ist Kein Warum" ("Here There Is No Why"). The title is taken from a line in Primo Levi's memoir, "Survival in Auschwitz." On his first day in camp, Levi, tormented by thirst, tries to break off an icicle hanging outside the window. The guard brutally snatches it way from him. "'Warum?' I asked him in my poor German. 'Hier ist kein warum' (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove." Rosenbaum writes that he is still astonished that Lanzmann could have put this line to the use that he did. And he gives Micheels, a humble and soft-spoken man, the last word. The world of Auschwitz, Micheels tells Rosenbaum, "was inhabited by creatures that had little if anything in common with what we consider human beings ... In that world, I agree, 'ist kein warum.' However, in the civilized world to which so few of us, including Primo Levi, returned, there should be -- da sollte ein warum sein. Without an attempt, no matter how difficult and complex, at understanding, that very world, where truth is most important, could be lost again." "'Da sollte ein warum sein,'" Rosenbaum translates. "There must be a
why." His own book, which unblinkingly confronts the hardest of the hard
questions our century has faced, is an important part of the answer that
will never be given, yet that we must try to give.
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