July 19, 1998

The Enigma of the Century

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Whatever anyone thinks about Hitler, someone else thinks a different thing.

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Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'Explaining Hitler' (June 30, 1998)

First Chapter: 'Explaining Hitler'

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By MICHAEL R. MARRUS

EXPLAINING HITLER The Search for the Origins of His Evil. By Ron Rosenbaum. 444 pp. New York: Random House. $30.

hroughout his life, wherever he went, Adolf Hitler was always a Mysterious Stranger,'' Ron Rosenbaum notes at the beginning of this remarkable, if in the end dissatisfying, book. ''Unnatural'' was what some of Hitler's German contemporaries thought about him, promoting, even before he came to power, the suspicion that there was something alien and sinister about him: that he had some perverse sexual proclivity, that there was something in his origins he wanted desperately to hide, that he might have killed his half niece, Geli Raubal, in a fit of jealousy in 1931 -- ''Adolf Hitler's Chappaquiddick,'' as Rosenbaum calls it.

''Does Hitler have Mongolian blood?'' the anti-Hitler satirist Fritz Gerlich gleefully asked in a leading Munich newspaper in 1932, posing the ultimate challenge of abnormality to the racist rabble-rouser. Hitler certainly did not look like an Aryan, Gerlich explained. He had a distinctly Mongolian nose, and perceptibly lacked a true Aryan soul. (Hitler and his cronies were not oblivious of such wicked satire: Nazi thugs raided Gerlich's office shortly after they took power and hauled him off to Dachau, where he was murdered in June 1934. To notify his wife, they sent her his blood-spattered spectacles.)

Rummaging through more than half a century of interpretations in ''Explaining Hitler,'' Rosenbaum, a novelist and journalist, explores the persisting efforts to comprehend the origins of the man's evil -- what made Hitler Hitler. The major positions were staked out years ago, Rosenbaum reminds us. To the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hitler was a man transfixed by his own fanatical beliefs -- horrifyingly but passionately ''sincere,'' in the sense that he genuinely believed that Germany had to dominate other nations, and that the Jews were implacable enemies of the Aryans and had to be ruthlessly destroyed. To the Hitler biographer Alan Bullock, on the other hand, Hitler was a cynical manipulator, shrewdly calculating in a hate-filled, power-hungry way -- ''a human-scale schemer,'' as Rosenbaum sums it up, ''an astute and able politician, not a monster of madness or an evil genius of theological dimensions who burst the bounds of previous frameworks of explanation.''

For most Hitler explainers, the great quest has been to find the source of his anti-Semitic obsession, his fanatical commitment to turning the power of the Nazi state against the Jews and wipe them off the face of the earth. Many have searched in vain for a documentary key -- ''the lost safe-deposit syndrome,'' in Rosenbaum's words. To some, including a handful whose motives are as suspect as their conclusions are perverse, the origins lie with Jews -- either buried in Hitler's family history or part of some dreadful encounter he had in his youth. Working with scraps of evidence, commentators have hypothesized that Hitler's father, Alois, may have been the result of an illegitimate union between Maria Schicklgruber and a mysterious Jew. According to such accounts -- endorsed by none other than the former Nazi ruler of Poland, Hans Frank, before his execution in 1946 -- Hitler may have been driven all his life by an insane hatred of his half-Jewish father and the ''shame'' of himself having Jewish blood.

Only slightly less farfetched have been elaborate constructions built around the story of the painful death from breast cancer in 1907 of Hitler's mother, Klara, cared for by a Jewish physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch. While Hitler professed at the time to be grateful to Bloch for his ministrations, one theory has it that Bloch clumsily botched his treatment, that Hitler emerged traumatized from the experience and that his buried feelings emerged years later in a hate-filled eruption that ultimately led to the murder of European Jews. Rosenbaum guides his readers through some dizzying interpretive battles on this question, in which contestants, using Bloch's medical casebook, fight over whether he indeed mistreated Klara, and then over-charged her for the service. (Did the doctor -- some 90 years ago! -- use too much iodoform gauze? Did he buy the large economy size? And did he use all that he bought? Were the Hitlers fairly charged for what was used?)

Marion Ettlinger/ Random House

Ron Rosenbaum

Drawing on his considerable skills as an investigative journalist, Rosenbaum interviews many of the historians and other researchers, professional and amateur, who have looked into these matters. He has a sympathetic ear, a knack for classification and a sharp, critical mind. Combing through the sometimes highly extravagant schools of thought on Hitler's sexuality, for example, he detects a Party of Normality, a Party of Perversion and a Party of Asexuality. Rosenbaum seems closest to the Party of Normality. About the others, he ventures the possibility of ''a kind of perverse wishful thinking -- the wish to believe Hitler 'unnatural' in order to avoid the consequences of thinking he was in any way 'normal.' ''

Much of the book probes this question of ''normality,'' and the dispute between those who believe that Hitler represents some kind of exceptional evil force, perhaps unprecedented in human history, and those who see in him a menacing part of human nature that might be viewed as the Hitler within every one of us. Rosenbaum ponders this question in conversations with such diverse commentators as Yehuda Bauer, David Irving, Berel Lang, Emil Fackenheim, George Steiner, Hyam Maccoby, Milton Himmelfarb and Christopher Browning. There are some revealing moments. Claude Lanzmann, an intellectual bully seemingly opposing any profound comment on Hitler and the Holocaust that is not subsidiary to his great film, ''Shoah,'' appears as a man angrily self-absorbed and hopelessly muddled. Faced with a difficult question, Daniel J. Goldhagen makes a rapid exit, claiming that an interview with Rosenbaum might compete with his book and so violate an agreement with his publisher.

While respectful of most of the Hitler explainers, Rosenbaum appears largely as a skeptic, gently pointing out to his interviewees where evidence is thin or their explanations weak. ''Hitler explanations,'' he finds, ''are cultural self-portraits; the shapes we project onto the inky Rorschach of Hitler's psyche are often cultural self-portraits in the negative. What we talk about when we talk about Hitler is also who we are and who we are not.''

Still, at the end of his book, as if uneasy with this observation, Rosenbaum veers in another direction. He cites the work of Lucy Dawidowicz, ''The War Against the Jews,'' now almost a quarter-century old, praising her vision of Hitler as a man with clearly etched intentions to murder the Jews going back to the early 1920's, but who cleverly disguised these intentions and methodically promoted an impression of hesitation and opportunism. Yet the evidence for Dawidowicz's conclusion is at least as problematic as the evidence of her critics, and certainly as susceptible to the distortions of projection that Rosenbaum correctly sees as pervading the entire subject. After more than 350 pages of lively, engaging, persuasive commentary, Rosenbaum seems to lose his way at the end, embracing a theory because it is ''fascinating'' and ''one of the most powerful and polarizing conjectures,'' rather than because it is the most solidly grounded in what we now know.

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Michael R. Marrus is the dean of graduate studies at the University of Toronto and the author of ''The Holocaust in History.''

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