Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

Rosenbaum opened this thoughtful and literate review of the supposed "explanations" for Hitler with a gripping account of a winter journey to Hitler's birthplace in the Austrian hinterland, to glean what can be gleaned from the - largely obliterated - traces of his family and early life. There is effective use of the dangerous iciness of the mountain roads as a metaphor for some of the people and places he encountered there: cold to the bone, dangerous, and frozen in time. That set-piece opening led to a consideration of some of the "explanations" of Hitler's madness and evil: that Hitler had been abused as a child, that he was genitally deformed, or even that he was born normal but traumatised when his genitals were mutilated by - of all things - a goat. These and some of the other speculations that have been offered - that Hitler was homosexual, that he had caught syphilis from a Jewish prostitute, that he was brainwashed into megalomania by a doctor experimenting with new psychological techniques, and so on - led Rosenbaum to a fascinating discussion of what is involved in even attempting to "explain Hitler". Rosenbaum noted that many of the attempts at explaining Hitler tend, deliberately or not, to reduce the focus on his evil. To understand is to forgive, at least a little, and risks reducing Hitler to a victim, whether of other people or of circumstances. Worse, many of the proffered explanations put the blame on Jews, for example Weisenthal's notion of the (probably imaginary) Jewish prostitute who gave Hitler the clap. Rosenbaum then examined some of the people who have made a career, or a business, of "explaining Hitler", beginning with engaging portraits of the old school historians Trevor-Roper and Bullock, two wise and wily old dons from an intellectual and academic world that has since largely - regrettably - vanished. This was followed by portraits of Claude Lanzmann, who came to feel he owned the Holocaust, and of David Irving, who tried to minimise it and deny Hitler's guilt, whose treatment is less affectionate. For these sections alone, and for the fascinating material on those journalists, Hitler's contemporaries, who tried to warn Germany and the world what Hitler was, and paid for their courage with their lives, this book deserves classic status. But the book loses momentum and coherence somewhere past the half-way point. The editing is partly at fault, but worse, Rosenbaum's critical reasoning and crap-detecting seem to flag. He settles, finally, for Lucy Davidowicz's idea that Hitler had planned the Holocaust as early as 1918, based on isolated lines from Hitler speeches, such as, "they [the Jews] are not laughing now." It was a pity to see Rosenbaum apply critical reading for most of the book only to let his guard down completely for something as flimsy as this. The words Davidowicz cited do not say what she claims they say. Previously Rosenbaum had challenged people who backed their claims with rhetoric rath

This book examines the various schools of thought regarding Hitler and the Holocaust and the author did a wonderful job of researching and interviewing many of the scholars on the topic who have in turn influenced our understanding and perceptions of what happened and why. The questions may ultimately not have definitive answers but reading this and having Rosenbaum guide us through the various viewpoints is a worthwhile exercise in intellectual and philosophical investigation. The question of whether Hitler was essential to the Holocaust or if in his absence someone else would have set the same events into motion is one example of an unanswerable question that gets considered. The questions surrounding the origins of Hitler's anti-semitism are also explored in detail. There are scholars quoted who adamantly believe that any attempt to understand is misguided because understanding Hitler's motivations is considered by them to be the first step toward rationalization and diminishing the horror of the Holocaust to just a human crime on a larger scale. This is not a biography of Hitler although many critical episodes in his life are referenced. Instead this is a fascinating look at how different perspectives on the nature of Hitler's evil have developed and how in the end there is no comprehensive answer as to the how and why of the suffering he unleashed. THere is a quote used from Primo Levi's book Survival in Auschwitz. Levi suffering from thirst reaches for an icycle. An SS guard knocks it away and Levi asks "why ?' The response.."there is no why here". I think that story captures some of the spirit of Rosenbaum's book.

A highly stimulating series of perspectives in the attempts to 'explain Hitler', at the end of which we still, no doubt,are without the explanation, a point made by the author with his epigram of Emile Fackenheim at the beginning of the book. One might note the danger of being distracted by details, when the probably impossible-to-obtain explanation is both ordinary yet unknowable, as we gaze on a crime scene, assessing clues. There is a danger of becoming metaphysical in the wrong way, notwithstanding the need to consider the nature of radical evil. There are a series of obvious explanations, none of which can be confirmed, but which emanate from the occult stench and dark muddled rumours of this episode of history, and many leadup and synchronous episodes completely disconnected with the historical context, which also includes 'explaining Nietzsche', not easy to do. That genre of explanation tends uniformly toward the crackpot and doesn't explain anything either, but that aspect of the evidence is always missing (and was surpressed at Nuremberg)This is a very informative account, dealing with the whole history, starting with Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock, to Goldhagen. Especially gripping was the account of the journalists of the Munich Post battling Hitler from the early twenties in the gangster world from which he emerged, to the final accession to power, when they were all wiped out.

The author states that the purpose of this book is to 'disentangle the historical Hitler from the meanings projected upon him' [p. 205] and to find out what made Hitler *Hitler*. He succeeds admirably on both counts.Rosenbaum neatly untangles the gnarled web of myth and fiction surrounding Hitler's supposed Jewish grandfather and the sexual activities and possible suicide of Hitler's half-niece and paramour Geli Raubal. He then moves on to a dispassionate and carefully considered survey of the major explainers of the Hitler phenomenon, from Hugh Trevor Roper and Alan Bullock to George Steiner and Daniel Goldhagen, not omitting the likes of David Irving along the way.Was Hitler convinced of the rectitude of what he was doing, or was he an actor, a mountebank who came to believe in his own lies and impersonations? Was he one in a long line of demonic figures, from Caligula and Genghis Khan to Stalin, or was he a unique eruption of pure unadulterated evil? Was he a human being like us (Hitler within), or was he somehow different, because of a missing testicle, conflicted identity, self-hatred, or some other tragic flaw? Does the Holocaust mean that God does not exist, or else is powerless? Did Hitler, then, defeat God?These are some of the questions that Rosenbaum and the Hitler explainers that he covers grapple with. Rosenbaum held extensive interviews with most of the people whose ideas he presents, and he gives each their due consideration. As he modestly admits in the preface to the book, Rosenbaum is a consumer of scholarship rather than a scholar, but in *Explaining Hitler* he has produced a book that should be the envy of any true scholar.

ALthough not the most tightly written book around, Ron Rosenbaum has nonetheless produced one of the best books ever written about Hilter and about those who try to understand Hitler. I admire Rosenbaum for making it clear at several points that he has a point of view that he is not trying to hide, and yet I found him overall to be quite objective in his discussions about what other's think. He is a little harder than necessary on poor Hugh Trevor-Roper, but perhaps not without reason. Overall, this remains a marvelous cultural history, with the added bonus of a great detail of interesting information about Hitler.I found Rosenbaum's portraits of those pursuing an explanation for Hitler, and those who say that there should be no attempt to try to undestand or explain the man, to have been uniformly intersting. Particularly disturbing were the chapters on the pitiful Hitler-as-a-nice-guy David Irving, and the awesomely awful, supremely arrogant and fascist Claude Lanzmann (can this man have any credibility left?). Perhaps most disturbing are the Steiner and Hyam Maccoby sections. Rosenbaum's section on Steiner led me to read his controversial The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. I came away from that satisfied that Steiner is not a self-hating Jew who was trying to blame the Shoah on Jews. Rather, he wrote a thought-provoking book that has been used in ways that he naively did not (and does not) recognize could be done. Maccoby I find even more despicable than David Irving; what a hateful, narrow-minded, terribly sad person. Finally, the section of Goldhagen was quite illuminating, not only for its dissection of the weaknesses of Goldhagen's book, but, more imporantly, for the incredible hyprocisy displayed by some in the academic community--the font of freedom of ideas--who savaged Goldhagen.No one need agree with the above characterizations. One of the wonderful things about Rosenbaum's book is that the author does two things--he gives plenty of information to let one reach one's own conclusions and also inspires one to seek out the works of those he writes about. (In addition to the Steiner book, I ordered Trevor-Roper's The Last Ten Days, Primo Levi's book on Auschwitz, and Berel Lang's Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide.) The reader will also come away from the book with a much better understanding of Hitler, and what the central questions are about Hitler that seem to beg answering. This is a thought-provoking, richly detailed book, that will profit all who read it. Rosenbaum is to be commended for his courage in tackling this subject, and for the relentlessly objective eye that he brings to the subject. This book, along with Ian Kershaw's first volume of his Hitler biography, are the absolute best places to start if the reader wants to learn about Hitler and his impact on the latter half of the last century.