Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Of course, even after his rejection by the academy and his subsequent rejection by the school of architecture, the young Hitler continued to define himself as an artist. Even in the men’s shelter, he continued to hand-paint postcards to sell on the street; in the trenches of the First World War, he tirelessly sketched fellow soldiers and the ravaged wartime landscape. (He was not—as those inclined to ridicule and underestimate him mistakenly like to say—“a house painter.” He might not have been a good painter, his landscapes are clichéd and depopulated, but he was a painter for all that.)

  He was an artist not just in output but in personal temperament as well. In the Munich demimonde he inhabited in the Weimar era, in the salons of the disreputable bohemian aristocrats who cultivated him, Hitler adopted the pose of the temperamental artiste with much talk of Wagner and the need to restore the artistic ideals of Greek classicism. It is the pose that flourished into absurd grandiosity in the endless art-appreciation monologues in the Table Talk, in the conscious artistic design of the Nuremberg rallies, and in the monstrous totalitarian architectural fantasies he planned (and sometimes executed) with Albert Speer.

  As Gordon Craig points out, Thomas Mann was one of the first to recognize that at the heart of Hitler’s appeal to the German people was his presentation of himself as a mythmaking artist rather than as a politician. And finally, at the bitter end, in the depths of the bunker, with Soviet troops and his own suicide just days away, Hitler could not be drawn into practical discussions of his dire situation because he could not be drawn away from contemplation of the scale model of his ultimate architectural fantasy: rebuilding his hometown of Linz into the cultural capital and art repository of the Thousand-Year Reich.

  It was Hitler’s vanity, as well, to surround himself with collaborators who saw themselves as artistic in some form: Heydrich was an accomplished classical violinist, Goebbels a novelist, Göring a predatory art collector, and, of course, there was Speer, Hitler’s aesthetic soul mate. And not without deliberation does Richard Breitman call Himmler the Architect of genocide. In a study of the architecture of Auschwitz, Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt make the case that, to a greater extent than anyone had imagined, Lang’s thesis about the death camps as a conscious work of the art of evil is confirmed by the actual theory and practice of the designers of Auschwitz.

  In fact, in recent years a whole school of thinking about Hitler and the Holocaust has emerged which places its aesthetic and artistic focus at the heart of the matter: artistic consciousness not as a by-product of the Nazi project but as its source. A recent film called The Architecture of Doom by Munich’s Peter Cohen traces the source of Nazi racism in perverted aesthetics (much as Fritz Gerlich suggested in his satire of Hitler’s racial science). Others go further and see Nazi racist consciousness as an outgrowth of the mainstream Western tradition of idealizing aesthetics—a perversion at the heart of Western culture itself, as Yale’s George Hersey argues in The Evolution of Allure. Hersey sees Nazi eugenics as a demonic art that tried to sculpt a racist idea of perfection from the flesh of the genome through primitive biogenetic engineering that entailed euthanasia, eugenics, and mass murder as racial sculpting tools.

  Perhaps the Munich Post journalists were onto something when they chose as a signature epithet of abuse for Hitler the phrase “political counterfeiter.” A counterfeiter, after all, is a forger—an artist of sorts even if an artist of falsity, of fraud. And perhaps the contemporary novelist D. M. Thomas was onto something when he ventured that in certain disturbing respects, Hitler and Kafka were fellow artists, almost psychic twins, both alienated figures on the margins of the German Reich who fashioned a vision, an art, out of despair and dispossession, both possessing imaginations capable of conceiving of a concentration-camp world, although Hitler had the evil dream and the will to bring into being Kafka’s nightmare.

  There’s a passage in Thomas’s novel Pictures at an Exhibition, a passage growing out of his meditation on Kafka and Hitler as twinned artists, in which a character writes to a friend, “I need to know more about Modernism. It seems to me you could consider the death-camps a form of repulsive art. They had a terrible beauty of pragmatic efficiency, with surreal overtones. I mean, the arrival by train, which you normally think of as a homecoming, or else opening up the excitement of a holiday. And the orchestras playing jolly music. The metaphors of purification, the bathhouses and the cleansing-furnace.”

  As we’ll see, the Kafka-Hitler link has become a ground of great contention. But does this way of thinking add anything to our understanding of Hitler and the character of Hitler’s evil? Looking at Hitler through the lens of artist and artistic consciousness does succeed in linking certain of his obsessive preoccupations. Consider the extremity with which Hitler urged a “war of extermination” against degenerate art and the degenerate modernists and Jewish artists who produced it. It’s possible to see his vision of inferior peoples and degenerate races as perverted artistic judgments: Inferior races were the “degenerate art” of biological creation. One could argue that the singular, signature gesture of Nazi evil was a kind of act of demonic connoisseurship: The encounter between Nazi and Jew on the train-arrival platform at Auschwitz was an encounter of “selection,” of a kind of murderous, connoisseurlike discrimination—an almost curatorial ritual. Indeed, the official Auschwitz term for the ritual of choosing between those destined to die instantly and those destined to be worked and tormented to death in a protracted “artistic” fashion had a chilling curatorial ring: the “selections.”

  At the very least, looking at Hitler’s evil through the lens of the artistic consciousness it exhibited helps refute the rectitude objection; there is a conscious relish in the horrific transgressiveness of the dehumanization process—a kind of artistic process in reverse, a decreation, in which humans are reconfigured, resculpted into subhumans—a relish in the process that cannot be defended as a self-sacrificing descent to ruthless methods for an idealistic cause. The methods were the essence, the methods were the madness.

  The creation of a unique art of evil raises another issue on which Lang has some provocative thoughts to offer: the question of whether there is an evolution of evil, a “progression” to previously unknown forms of wickedness in the Nazi era. I asked Lang if he believed it was Hitler’s creation of an art of evil that made the Nazi genocide a new benchmark, a new fact in the history of evil.

  Lang had first broached the idea of a progression in the development, an evolution in the gravity of evil, in a piece entitled “The History of Evil and the Future of the Holocaust,” published in Lessons and Legacies, a collection of essays. In arguing that evil has a history, a development from the first intentional murder (of Abel or whomever) to Hitler’s genocide, Lang had not made use of the artistic metaphor. But in discussing with me whether evil might have further stages to evolve beyond Hitler, he did:

  “I suggested [in the essay] that this may not be the last phase of evil; I would use the artistic analogy. I mean, if one can talk about the future of art, we are speaking of the imagination. I think it does require an act of the imagination, of the immoral imagination, to conceive of genocide as they did. And if one speaks of the imagination, then one feature of it that distinguishes it, really, is the kind of unpredictability of it.”

  “You’re saying, if you could predict the next stage, it really wouldn’t be the next stage,” I suggested.

  Yes, he said, and shifted to the notion of genius. “If there is genius in art, in a Mozart, and there can be genius in morality, a Gandhi, is there not an analogy to artistic genius in the genius of evil? Genius shows us something we’ve never seen before.”

  A kind of evil we’ve never seen before? An evil that transcends Hitler’s? It’s a breathtaking notion. It’s—by definition—beyond imagination. Or has it already made its presence felt?

  I asked Lang if he thought the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, or “Revisionism,” as it’s sometimes called, might be the ingenious
new development in the history of evil. After all, the Revisionists at heart not only are pleased about the Holocaust, they seek to add—in a diabolically inventive way—insult to injury by branding the survivors and victims as liars. They exterminate the exterminated all over again by saying their deaths never existed. In their counterfeit of history, these real deaths were counterfeit. Is there not a demonic art to this—a quantum leap in the imagination of evil—in devising a way to torment the already exterminated?

  Lang resisted the idea. He argued that, since the Revisionists don’t deny that if the Holocaust had occurred it would have been a crime, they are at least implicitly characterizing the notion of killing the Jews as something wrong, something one would want to deny.

  I’d argue that the Revisionists are frankly lying when they say they think that it would have been bad if it had occurred. In fact (as the recent book on the German neo-Nazi movement by Ingo Hasselbach and Tom Reiss, Führer-Ex, demonstrates), in private, among themselves they express great delight it occurred and seek to deny it in public only as a way of tormenting the already tormented survivors by dishonoring the dead. They make dancing on the graves of the dead into an evil choreography, an art.

  Lang suggests an alternate conception of the next step in the evolution of evil, an evil more highly evolved than Hitler’s evil, albeit without the massive body count: the one embodied in the postwar attitude of Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who became a Nazi sycophant for purposes of academic self-advancement during the war.

  “Heidegger,” says Lang, who’d been studying his life and work for his book, Heidegger’s Silence, “knew it happened and he didn’t care. His silence—it wasn’t even denial. For him it wasn’t important. It wasn’t important! It wasn’t important,” Lang repeats in an uncharacteristic outburst of impassioned bitterness. “Now if you ask which of them is worse. . . . The Revisionists deny it occurred—if one asks about their motives for denying it, one can say all kinds of things, but at least if it occurred it would have been wrong. But Heidegger knows it occurred, but it’s just not important; it’s not something to distort history to deny—for Heidegger, this is not history to concern oneself with.”

  For Lang, this unconcern with history is worse than falsifying it. Knowing and not caring is worse than the art of denying, forging, and counterfeiting.

  I’d suggest he underestimates how highly evolved an art Revisionism has become. Lang has never met David Irving and tried to grapple directly with the avatar of “scholarly” Revisionism. I have.

  CHAPTER 12

  David Irving: The Big Oops

  In which we explore the mind of Hitler’s “Ambassador to the Afterlife,” witness the “Hitler spell” in action, and meet, once again, Hitler as a newborn babe

  Ringing the bell on the heavily fortified, high-tech-security-equipped entrance to David Irving’s living quarters on Duke Street in London, I couldn’t help recall Alan Bullock’s words on Irving. Bullock had taken great pains to make the point that his return to the polemical fray with a public lecture on Hitler’s role in the Holocaust had not been a direct or ad hominem response to David Irving’s vigorous advocacy of Hitler’s noninvolvement but was, rather, a response to Revisionists and Holocaust deniers in general. He didn’t want to dignify Irving as an opponent, as a representative of a legitimate rival school of historical explanation and interpretation.

  But Bullock is fascinated or at least horrified by the phenomenon of Irving.

  “He’s a real rabble-rouser,” Bullock says. “A real Hitler speaker.”

  “A Hitler speaker?”

  “Aye,” Bullock says, reverting to his native North Country accent in his contempt for David Irving, Hitler explainer turned Hitler defender.

  “Aye, he goes over the top. He goes to Germany and whips it up.”

  Bullock was referring to newspaper reports of David Irving addressing rallies of German sympathizers. I had one of those reports in my possession, a 1991 dispatch by Gitta Sereny, author of Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. She depicts Irving telling a Hamburg audience that in two years “this myth of mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majanek and Treblinka . . . which in fact never took place” will be laid to rest. “Two days later,” Sereny reports, Irving “delivered his message to a mob of tattooed flag-waving youths in the former East German city of Halle. The crowd shouted ‘Sieg Heil’ when he extolled the heroism of ‘that great German martyr, Rudolf Hess.’”

  For all his mystical contemplation of the notion of Jesus embracing Judas, Bullock seems to see Irving as an unforgivable Judas to historical truth. Clearly, he simply despises him. “Strange little rascal,” Bullock said of Irving. We’d been talking about conscious evil. “I do think he was evil. He whips it up, and he knows he’s doing it.”

  Is David Irving evil? If evil is a destination, Bullock believes Irving has already arrived at the station. I’m not sure. I believe I saw him at a moment when he’d reached the last stop before the terminal and was in the process of deciding whether to step off or go the distance.

  Indeed, the decision-making process seemed to be going on before my eyes. It’s rare to see the defining moment of such a process enacted out loud, but that’s what I felt I was watching as I listened to Irving struggle with a fateful dilemma over a manuscript, one he is proud of discovering and yet wants to repudiate, delegitimize. Because it contains within it a refutation of the last two decades of his work. Because it contains that which Irving had long insisted would never be found, did not exist: evidence of Adolf Hitler’s personal order, the long-sought “Führerbefehl,” the directive ordering the extermination of the Jews. It was this manuscript, this decision process that led me to overcome my reservations about speaking to Irving when I was in London to talk to Bullock and Trevor-Roper. I wanted to know if Irving was, as he seemed to indicate in an interview with the Telegraph, seriously considering revising his Revisionist views.

  The manuscript is a purported memoir by Adolf Eichmann, and a foot-thick photocopy of it was sitting on Irving’s desk and weighing heavily on his mind the afternoon I visited him in his study on Duke Street. Also on his desk was a bust of Goebbels and a tiny toy-soldier figure of Hitler.

  Irving’s a tall, florid-faced fellow in country tweeds whose face can twitch when he becomes agitated. Which he often seemed to be in the course of our conversation. Particularly when it came to the dilemma of the Eichmann memoir.

  Irving had established his reputation as a Hitler controversialist with the publication in 1977 of Hitler’s War, a book in which his professed aim was to describe the origin and conduct of the war through Hitler’s eyes, “from behind his desk.” Many acknowledge Irving’s diligence in digging up from German sources a large number of private papers, diaries, and documents long thought lost. “Whatever allegations may be levelled at Irving as a historian—and there have been many—there is no doubting his ability to sniff out original documents,” Robert Harris wrote in his account of the 1983 Hitler-diaries fiasco. Still, most rejected the conclusion Irving had been driving at ever since Hitler’s War: that the absence of any written order from Hitler to pursue the Final Solution proves that he didn’t order it and probably didn’t know about it.

  In taking that position, he was going further—but not much further—than the more extreme functionalists among the German historians in the intentionalist-functionalist debate of the 1980s. The functionalists argue that while Hitler might have known of it, the Holocaust happened almost by spontaneous combustion, that it was the bureaucratic by-product of wartime circumstances and the complicity of Nazi leaders lower than Hitler in the hierarchy—Himmler and Heydrich, Göring and Goebbels along with regional authorities in the occupied eastern territories, acting largely on their own initiatives.

  But in the twenty years since the publication of Hitler’s War, Irving’s views have undergone a shift or several shifts back and forth: from mild dissident to apparent agreement with radical Holocaust deniers, back to a
pparent assent to the fact of mass murder, albeit murder ordered by others than Hitler. On that he’s been consistent. Occasionally no Holocaust, always no Hitler.

  And to an ever-increasing extent, Irving has come out from behind his desk to become a fiery rabble-rousing Führer of the Holocaust-denial movement, addressing adoring rallies in Germany and, not surprisingly, in Argentina. “He really whips it up,” Bullock had said, and indeed, on Irving’s desk is a videocassette whose slipcase is adorned with a graphic picture of Irving whipping it up in front of a crowd of cheering deniers, eerily conjuring up the figure he’s obsessed with.

  In any case, it was at one of those rallies in Argentina that someone handed Irving a time bomb of a manuscript. It was evidently meant as a gift, a tribute from one believer in the cause to its leader, but the gift turned out to be a poisoned apple.

  “The Jewish community in Argentina was foolish enough to denounce me in the national press as being a national socialist agitator,” Irving told me. “Whereupon things got interesting. I was immediately whisked out of my hotel and kept in an army villa because my host said that in Argentina when people call you names like that, they’re not fooling. The beneficial consequence was that at the end of the next meeting a guy came out to me with a brown-paper package. And he said, ‘You’re obviously the correct repository for these papers that we’ve been looking after since 1960 for the Eichmann family.’ See, the Eichmann family panicked when he was kidnapped in the streets. And they took all his private papers which they could find, that had any kind of bearing, put them into brown paper and gave them to a friend. Then he gave them to this man who gave them to me, who gave them to the German government. Who threw me in jail and called me all these things,” Irving adds, getting distracted by more recent events. (He was imprisoned briefly in Munich before being expelled from Germany as a Holocaust denier. A Munich court convicted him in 1992 of “slandering the murdered Jews.”)