Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Almost refusing to hear Steiner’s endorsement of the comparison, I kept offering him a way out from behind his Hitler.

  “When Hitler calls himself Sabbatai,” I began, referring to a passage in Steiner’s Hitler’s speech in which he invokes the name of the famous false messiah who deceived masses of Jews worldwide before recanting and converting to Islam, “I thought that was an indication of—I was looking for irony in your view of Hitler.”

  “There is irony!” Steiner says. “Because of the Sabbatai Zvi figure then converting, and there’s mockery there.” But it’s localized irony. He insists the questions his Hitler asks about the implication of the Jews in their fate must be taken seriously. “I have demanded an answer [to these questions] and never got one” from his critics who condemned him for even asking. He insists on his right to ask—and on the need to answer—Hitler’s questions.

  Hitler’s questions or Steiner’s questions? Perhaps the most revealing thing Steiner said came when he reiterated to me the need for answers: “I don’t think I even know how to answer what I say in that last speech,” he told me. It wasn’t until reading over the transcript of the interview that I realized I’d missed the import of that quote: “I don’t . . . know how to answer what I say in that last speech.” Not what Hitler says, what I, George Steiner, say. His Hitler speaks for him. He stands behind his Hitler’s questions: “There were many attacks on that speech,” he says, but they attacked the very notion of raising the questions rather than answering them.

  “And I want it to be answered,” he insists, raising his voice. “Where is the answer? Not just saying you’re being an outrageous cretin for asserting such things. I’m still waiting for answers. I’ve debated its role often, including with Fackenheim. And no answers. He needed to malign me, that I totally misunderstood the sense of God’s election [of the Chosen People]. And I then began quoting the book of Joshua and said to Fackenheim. ‘You really don’t get it. I really want an answer.’”

  Struck by how impassioned he was, I asked him about the final, most outrageous question his Hitler asks: Wasn’t he—Hitler—the Messiah who brought about the fulfillment of the messianic dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine?

  “We can show that the miracle of the recognition of Israel in 1948 is inseparable from the Shoah,” Steiner replied, “so my Hitler says, ‘Who created Israel?’ There wouldn’t have been an Israel without the Shoah.”

  I tried to get a sense of just how closely Steiner stands behind another assertion of his Hitler: that he was only embodying the animus of the world against the Jews, exterminating the Jews for the “blackmail of transcendence,” for torturing non-Jews with the invention of, the demands of conscience.

  “It seems pejorative, the phrase you use,” I said, “calling it ‘the blackmail of transcendence.’ Is there something wrong with asking people to be better than themselves?”

  “No,” he says. “But they hate you for it. We hate no one as deeply as somebody who says we’ve got to do better and keeps saying it and rubbing it in, just rubbing our nose in our own failing. Oh boy! Who do we hate most? Those who have been generous to us in a moment of weakness, those who have seen us in abject need? And when we end up doing well, we will do anything not to look them in the eye again.”

  It’s hard to deny that this is a truth of human nature, that, as the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. But is Steiner endorsing the view that the Jews deserve to be punished for asking (in the persons of Moses, Jesus, and Marx) for an ethic of good deeds? “Is transcendence something Jews should be apologetic for?” I asked Steiner.

  “On the contrary,” he said. “It’s the highest—My God, if we could be—if we could love our neighbors as ourselves, oh boy.”

  “But aren’t you saying the inevitable product of positing this as an ideal is Hitler?”

  “Not just positing it,” Steiner replied. “The Jews were demanding it and demanding it,” he said, once again sounding as if the Jews were to blame.

  “Should we have demanded less or—”

  He sighed, “Probably we should have done better by demanding it more of ourselves. Now if Mother Teresa were sitting here, I’d shut up. She has the right to demand it. I’ve known human beings—very few—who have given up high careers to work on the Afghan border in the refugee camps, right. Or people in geriatric wards in New York, emptying the shit bowls at night, holding people shouting and shaking with drugs. These people have every right to say to me, ‘Why don’t you do something more with your life?’ In fact, they don’t. The other ones that don’t [live those lives] do [demand] it. And until you know that you can do far better, it is very difficult to ask it of others. And Judaism has asked it of others three times.”

  Again, while Steiner insists these are questions he wants answers to, the way he frames the questions seems to suggest he knows the answers. Not that he likes the answers, but the answers do seem, if not to blame the Jews, then to implicate them in their fate. Here he seems to be saying that it’s not so much the Jews’ fault for demanding transcendence but rather for the implicit hypocrisy of demanding it from others without first sufficiently demonstrating it themselves. Jews don’t always live up to the standards they set for everyone, therefore, supposedly, we can understand why the world secretly approved when Hitler slaughtered them.

  Because of my admiration for Steiner’s intellect and his art, I was reluctant to come around to his critics’ view that he was, in his Hitler novel, devising sophisticated ways of blaming the victim. But, in fact, in my conversation with him at Cambridge that morning, he took a breathtaking leap even beyond the blame-the-victim rhetoric of his Hitler novel. He tossed out, almost casually, what might be seen as the ultimate blame-the-victim argument: the Jews’ ontological responsibility for Hitler’s crime.

  It was a line of speculation so shocking, so transgressive, I later found myself wishing I hadn’t heard it at all. He introduced it by referring to a startling remark in the final, posthumously published interview with Sidney Hook, the celebrated anticommunist philosopher—a remark Hook realized was so inflammatory he insisted it could not be published during his lifetime.

  “It had a tremendous impact on me,” Steiner tells me. “Dying, Sidney Hook gave [Norman] Podhoretz an interview. And he believed great philosophers should not be afraid to speak out, but he demanded it be kept posthumous. It says something very important. It says something roughly like this: If we [the Jews] had disappeared, assimilated, wouldn’t it have been much better? Hasn’t the price been too great? Now, this is a key question. And Hook was afraid to touch on that taboo until after his death, but it’s there. He dictates it to Podhoretz.”

  It’s controversial enough, but, Steiner says, “My question goes even further. I have said Auschwitz does two things: It does everything to the Jew, and it does everything to those who do it to the Jews.” And then he delivers the unspeakable implication: “The horror of the thing is we have lowered the threshold of mankind.”

  “We as Jews have? By—?”

  “By being the occasion of mankind’s ultimate bestiality,” he said. “We are that which has shown mankind to be ultimately bestial. We refused Jesus, who dies hideously on the cross. And then mankind turns on us in a vulgar kind of counter-Golgotha which is Auschwitz. And when somebody tortures a child, he does it to the child, he does it to himself, too.”

  “Well, true, but who are we to sympathize with—both equally?”

  Steiner presses on with his extraordinary argument about Jews lowering the threshold of mankind: “Auschwitz breaks the reinsurance on human hope in a sense.”

  “Breaks the reinsurance on human hope?” I asked. “The sense that there is always some kind of safety net, some reason not to give in to utter despair at the evil in the world?”

  “Yeah. And without us, there wouldn’t have been Auschwitz. In a sense, an obscene statement and yet an accurate statement.”

  Again, I found myself not quite willing to believe that Ste
iner believed in the implications of what he was saying: It went beyond blaming the victim for giving the perpetrator an excuse, a “reason” that explained his crime against them; it blamed the victim for even existing in the first place and thus becoming an “occasion” for the perpetrator sinking to new levels of depravity or inventing new degrees of evil.

  And so I questioned him closely about this conjecture. What was it about Auschwitz in the first place that defined it as a quantum leap in the evolution of evil, made it different from previous massacres, in the sense that this one “breaks the reinsurance on human hope”?

  What made it different, he says, is its “terrible ontological comprehensiveness. There have been many other horrible massacres,” he says. “And men are cruel, and they’ve tortured.” But the ontological difference, the new, darker mode of being that came into being with Auschwitz, has to do with the ontological reason the Jews were killed: not because of their actions but because of their being.

  “To kill a child because he is, not because he does, not because he believes, not because he belongs [to a religion]. For his being. That’s what the word ‘ontological’ means. Because you are, you must die. This is not like other pursuits. If you kill a lot of Serbs, it’s because you want their territory, et cetera, et cetera. Islam converts Jews, doesn’t kill them. The idea that the Jew has to be eliminated because he is, that his existential being is inadmissible—the attempt to fulfill that idea probably means that humanity has no road back to certain illusions.”

  “No road back”: What he’s saying has something in common with his speculation on Kafka as the cause of the death camps: By bringing into the world the previously unthinkable idea of such sophisticated bestiality, Kafka might somehow have caused it. Similarly by being the victim of such previously unimaginable bestiality, the Jews may have “caused” the bottom to drop out of the world, an unmendable rent in the tenuous fabric of hope suspended over the bottomless abyss of despair.

  Which is why Steiner invokes Sidney Hook’s despairing posthumous question: Might the world have been better off if the Jews had stopped being Jews? Hook asks. Might the world have been better off if the Jews had never existed at all? Steiner asks.

  Steiner calls this line of speculation obscene yet accurate. It’s certainly obscene; is it accurate? For one thing, Hook’s conjecture is belied by the fact that conversion or assimilation rarely spared Jews the ravages of anti-Semitism. Recently, Benzion Netanyahu demonstrated that in the Spanish Inquisition hatred and murder of the Jews persisted regardless of their conversion to Christianity: It was racial rather than religious (in fact, especially targeted at the converts and Marranos); so, of course, was Hitler’s.

  In another sense, Steiner’s ontological blame-the-Jews argument contradicts the gravamen of what he—or his Hitler—argues in that notorious speech in the novel. To Steiner’s Hitler, Jews weren’t exterminated just for “being” but for “cause”—for the torments of conscience they supposedly inflicted on the world, for instance.

  Just to clarify this point, I asked Steiner about his argument that the Jews were killed because they tortured the conscience of mankind.

  “You seem to be saying that something about the Jews—that this is a rational hatred—”

  “No—it is—no. Call it, if you want, an intuitive [hatred]—I believe that explanations for anti-Semitism of a sociopolitcal nature are fine as far as they go, but they tell you nothing about two things. About Jew-hatred where there are no Jews [in contemporary Poland, for instance] and about the ontological decision that one must kill the human person because of its being. And hence I put forward this image, this hypothesis that our invention of God, of Jesus, our invention of Marxist utopia, has left humanity so uncertain inwardly that it is trying to banish its own bad conscience.”

  “Are you saying, then, that the torture of conscience is worse than the torture in the camps even?”

  “Over the long run,” he says, “to feel yourself at fault probably builds up unbearable hatreds, self-hatreds. To feel yourself found out.”

  Of course, there are those who believe that what is really going on here is Steiner’s self-hatred, Steiner as a self-hating Jew. But I don’t think so. I found Steiner deeply identified as a Jew, not anti-Zionist, as he’s occasionally been portrayed—in fact, anti-anti-Zionist. But he has even more deeply identified with the Jew as the perennial outsider, with the alienating, self-lacerating, self-awareness of Jewish intellect, making the Jew so often an exile not just from a physical homeland but from metaphysical comfort in the world. He spoke in fact of his fondness for the figure of the Wandering Jew, and for Jewish wanderers and wonderers from Spinoza to Kafka and Trotsky.

  But I still found it disturbing how far he was willing to wander into speculation that seemed to make Jews responsible for the ontologic scale, the ontology-shifting-and-darkening crimes against them. Unless, perhaps, there was in Steiner a willful need to place himself and his people at the ontological center of the universe. It’s almost a Steinerian reinvention of the Chosen People doctrine he professes to question: the fate of the Jews as the fulcrum, the test case of Being.

  But something else seemed to be going on, something more disturbing, something that may confirm Steiner’s distrust of the Word, of the uncanny power of Hitler’s voice. In attempting a daring act of literary ventriloquism, in attempting to speak with Hitler’s voice, to make him mouth Steiner’s own ideas (about the blackmail of transcendence, and so on), a frightening inversion seems to have taken place, one that calls into question who is really pulling the strings—who is the ventriloquist, who the marionette. An inversion that finds a Jewish intellectual talking about the world being better off had the Jews never existed—arriving at the same place, by however different a route, that Hitler did. Another case of the subtle working of the Hitler spell?

  Still, as the formal interview came to a close, I couldn’t help being impressed by Steiner’s candor, by his willingness to take personal responsibility for ideas and questions he’d put in Hitler’s mouth fifteen years previously, by his courage, or recklessness, in venturing beyond them to even more incendiary territory. While raising the notion of his Hitler as a frightening creation who’d escaped him, he ultimately was standing squarely behind his Hitler, odd as it sounds to say it.

  Walking back to the porter’s lodge of Churchill College, Cambridge, Steiner and I returned to the subject of the historical Hitler—in particular, his fabled charisma.

  “I used to ask my students,” Steiner said, “‘If Hitler walked into a room, would you get up?’”

  “‘Would they get up’ meaning—”

  “Would one sit in the presence of world history?”

  “And you feel that the presence would be so commanding—but didn’t Beryl Bainbridge make him seem to be essentially just a slight, unimpressive figure?” I was referring to Bainbridge’s challenging novel, Young Adolf, which postulates an apocryphal young Hitler visiting his half brother Alois Jr. in Liver pool in 1911, during the “lost years” when he was twenty-two. Bainbridge’s brilliantly understated premise in limning a lazy, layabout slacker Hitler is to raise the question of the unbridgeable abyss between the youthful, inconsequential Hitler and the evil god he became. It raises the eternal question of the source of his metamorphosis: When and how did he acquire his demonic charisma?

  “But you feel that had the young Adolf walked into the room, one would have immediately known?” I asked him.

  “Many did,” he says. “Many did. Speer fell in love with him and never gave up that love.” (It’s interesting how often Speer’s love for Hitler is cited as impressive by sophisticated Hitler commentators such as Trevor-Roper and Steiner. It’s as if to say, If someone as sophisticated as I am could fall under the Hitler spell, then he really must have had something.)

  “Wasn’t Speer falling in love with the later, charismatic Hitler, though?” I asked.

  “Goebbels meets him very early, very early. And writes in his diary
, ‘Is he John the Baptist? Is he Jesus?’”

  “Yes, but that was still about 1925,” I said. “We still have him just the unimpressive corporal in the First World War.”

  “He’s not!” Steiner exclaims. “He has the Iron Cross twice over. Three times wounded! Oh boy! In the most dangerous of all military functions—namely, courier. Where the survival rate was about a week, usually like one hour. Later on, he’s a spotter, an artillery spotter in front of the lines. And he volunteered for this. And his contempt later for general staff officers who haven’t been in a fighting war was fully justified. He knew, he knew.”

  “So Hitler was a genuinely brave man?”

  “Immensely. You do not get three major wounds and the Iron Cross unless you are.”

  “So we can’t get off the hook by thinking of him as cowardly, as hypocritical about—”

  “Oh no.”

  “He was heroic and admirable in a way? Up to that point?”

  “Well, his record is objectively there for anybody to see. And it’s [his military courage] very important for the later politics.”

  I took my leave with mixed feelings. It was similarly hard to doubt Steiner’s personal courage in asking explosive questions—and giving incendiary answers to them—in venturing beyond the lines of conventional thinking on the subject. Speculations that make him vulnerable to hostile fire.

  And he has been fired upon. His most thoughtful and thoroughgoing critic, Hyam Maccoby, once said of Steiner and the words he put in Hitler’s mouth: “He knew he was playing with fire.”

  The implication is that Steiner was being intellectually immature, a child playing with matches; that he was giving in to the seductions of his own brilliance—to the impulse to play with ideas, to push speculations to the limits without caring enough for the consequences in the hands of those less well intentioned in a world dangerous to Jews. An impulse to play that might not be dangerous in one who lacked Steiner’s powerful intellect, but is in him. That, in effect, Steiner is too smart, but not wise enough, for his own good. Or ours.