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Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, updated edition Kindle Edition
A balanced and thoughtful overview of a subject both frightening and profound, this is an extraordinary quest, an expedition into the war zone of Hitler theories, a provocative work of cultural history that is as compelling as it is thoughtful, as readable as it is smart” (New York Times).
First published in 1998 to rave reviews, Explaining Hitler became a New York Times–bestseller. This new edition is an update of that classic and a critically important contribution to the study of the twentieth century's darkest moment.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDa Capo Press
- Publication dateJuly 8, 2014
- File size2034 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Rosenbaum methodically examines the evidence for and against all the major hypotheses concerning the origin of Hitler's character. He sifts through all the rumors--including his alleged Jewish ancestry and what biographer Alan Bullock refers to as "the one-ball business"--and the attempts to derive some psychological cause from them. Various Hitlers emerge: Hitler as con man and brutal gangster, Hitler the unspeakable pervert, Hitler the ladies' man, Hitler as modernist artist working in the medium of evil....
But Rosenbaum's portrayals of those who would define Hitler are as fascinating as the shifting perspectives on the führer. Here we see the brave journalists of the Munich Post who attempted to reveal Hitler's evil to the world as early as the 1920s. We witness Shoah director Claude Lanzmann's imperious attempts to stifle analysis of Hitler and the Holocaust, branding such historical inquiries as "obscene." We see the effects, on a frazzled Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, of the controversy surrounding the publication of his Hitler's Willing Executioners. We see the interior crises of Hitler apologist David Irving and philosopher-novelist George Steiner, among others, as they struggle with the ramifications of their work and thought. And, best of all, we have Rosenbaum to serve as an informed, intimate, and on occasion witty guide. In White Noise, Don DeLillo depicted the satirical academic discipline of "Hitler studies;" Ron Rosenbaum breathes a life into the field that no fiction can match. --Ron Hogan
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
-AJohn A. Drobnicki, CUNY York Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Brilliant...restlessly probing and deeply intelligent""Time"
"A remarkable journey by one of the most original journalists and writers of our time"David Remnick, author of "Lenin's Tomb"
"Fascinating...A provocative work of cultural history that is as compelling as it is thoughtful, as readable as it is smart.... Mr. Rosenbaum has made an important contribution to our understanding not just of Hitler, but of the cultural processes by which we try to come to terms with history as well.... He has written an exciting, lucid book informed by old-fashioned moral rigor and common sense."Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times"
"Glistens with insight and intelligence and shimmers with originality."Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Commentary"
"Cultural criticism served up as riveting narrative history...with words and ideas that surprise, amuse, and even elevate the reader."Marc Fisher, "Washington Post"
"A work of importance and fascination"George Steiner, "The Observer" (UK)
"Intriguing, thought provoking, and intelligent"Ian Kershaw, author of "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris," in "The Guardian" (UK)
"Financial Times"
""Explaining Hitler" [is] a work of almost uncanny percipience and stamina."
"
A "New York Times" Bestseller
"Time"
"Brilliant...restlessly probing and deeply intelligent"
David Remnick, author of "Lenin's Tomb"
"A remarkable journey by one of the most original journalists and writers of our time"
Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times"
"Fascinating...A provocative work of cultural history that is as compelling as it is thoughtful, as readable as it is smart.... Mr. Rosenbaum has made an important contribution to our understanding not just of Hitler, but of the cultural processes by which we try to come to terms with history as well.... He has written an exciting, lucid book informed by old-fashioned moral rigor and common sense."
Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Commentary"
"Glistens with insight and intelligence and shimmers with originality."
Marc Fisher, "Washington Post"
"Cultural criticism served up as riveting narrative history...with words and ideas that surprise, amuse, and even elevate the reader."
George Steiner, "The Observer" (UK)
"A work of importance and fascination"
Ian Kershaw, author of "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris," in "The Guardian" (UK)
"Intriguing, thought provoking, and intelligent"
"Financial Times"
""Explaining Hitler" [is] a work of almost uncanny percipience and stamina."
"New York Times," 1/8/16
Considered one of the definitive examinations of the Nazi dictator s mind. "
A "New York Times" Bestseller
"Brilliant...restlessly probing and deeply intelligent"--"Time"
"A remarkable journey by one of the most original journalists and writers of our time"--David Remnick, author of "Lenin's Tomb"
"Fascinating...A provocative work of cultural history that is as compelling as it is thoughtful, as readable as it is smart.... Mr. Rosenbaum has made an important contribution to our understanding not just of Hitler, but of the cultural processes by which we try to come to terms with history as well.... He has written an exciting, lucid book informed by old-fashioned moral rigor and common sense."--Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times"
"Glistens with insight and intelligence and shimmers with originality."--Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Commentary"
"Cultural criticism served up as riveting narrative history...with words and ideas that surprise, amuse, and even elevate the reader."--Marc Fisher, "Washington Post"
"A work of importance and fascination"--George Steiner, "The Observer" (UK)
"Intriguing, thought provoking, and intelligent"--Ian Kershaw, author of "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris", in "The Guardian" (UK)
About the Author
From The Washington Post
"Cultural criticism served up as riveting narrative history...with words and ideas that surprise, amuse and even elevate the reader."
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Mysterious Stranger, the Serving Girl, and the Family Romance of the Hitler Explainers
In which the author makes an expedition to the Hitler family "ancestral home" and meditates upon the romantic life of Maria Schicklgruber, as imagined by historical fantasists Iwas ready to give up and turn back. A surprise mid-autumn snowstorm had blown out of Russia and was blanketing Central Europe, making the relatively primitive back roads of this backwoods quarter of Austria increasingly impassable.
We were only about twenty miles short of our objective, but our rented Volkswagen was beginning to skid, once bringing us perilously close to the brink of one of the woody ravines that crisscrossed the otherwise featureless reaches of snow-covered farmland stretching north to the Czech border.
I'd timidly suggested to my Austrian researcher, Waltraud, who was at the wheel, that we ought to consider abandoning our quest for the day because of the risk. But she wanted to press on, declaring that, as a native of the mountainous Tyrol, she had experience navigating the far more treacherous mountain roads of the Alps.
Not entirely reassured, I nonetheless felt there was something appropriate about the blizzardy circumstances of this venture: The storm we were heading into was an autumnal version of the blitz of snow that had halted Hitler's panzer divisions just short of Moscow in the winter of 1941-the beginning of the end for him. The place we were fighting through the snow to find-a ghost town called Döllersheim-was the beginning of the beginning: the primal scene of the mysteries behind the Hitler family romance.
The disappearance, the apparently deliberate erasure, of Döllersheim is one of the most peculiar aspects of the deeply tangled Hitler-genealogy controversy. The tiny village was literally blasted off the map and out of existence sometime after Hitler annexed Austria. An effort-some partisans in the controversy contend-to erase all traces of certain irregular and disreputable Hitler family events that took place there. Irregularities that have long cast a shadow over accounts of Hitler's origins. Irregularities that had given rise to repeated pilgrimages to Döllersheim in the prewar years by journalists and other interested investigators, news of which invariably provoked Hitler into near-apoplectic rages.
"People must not know who I am," he was reported to have ranted when he learned of one of the early investigations into his family history. "They must not know where I come from."
And there are those who insist that after 1938 he made Döllersheim pay the price for being the site of such inquiries, made it disappear. Whatever the cause of the erasure, there can be little doubt of its effectiveness. That morning in Vienna, as the snow began gusting in from the east, I searched in vain for a map that still had the hamlet of Döllersheim on it, until I happened on a little shop belonging to a rare-book dealer who was able to dig up a musty 1896 German atlas of the world which still had the hamlet of Döllersheim on its map of Austria. While the map showed no roads, it did provide a means of triangulation: The dot on the map for Döllersheim was just north of a bend in the river Kamp and just east of another little dot on the map called Ottenstein.
Ottenstein: That name conjured up a peculiarly memorable phrase, "scion of the seigneurial house of Ottenstein." This Heathcliffian heroic epithet appears in a catalog of candidates-list of suspects, one might say-for the shadowy figure at the heart of the Hitler family romance: the man who fathered Hitler's father. The identity of the man who impregnated a forty-two-year-old unmarried serving woman named Maria Schicklgruber sometime in late 1836 was not disclosed on the baby's baptismal certificate filed in her parish church in Döllersheim when the child (christened Alois Schicklgruber) was born on June 7, 1837. That blank line on the baptismal certificate, in the space where the name of the father of the child should be, has become a kind of blank screen onto which journalists, intelligence agencies, historians, psychoanalysts, and other fantasists have projected a wild array of alternative candidates to the man named in the official Nazi genealogies as Hitler's paternal grandfather, Johann Georg Hiedler.
Hundreds and hundreds of pages in scores of books have been devoted to trying to divine the sexual choice behind that blank line, to read the mind of the woman who made the choice: Maria Schicklgruber. She was, in fact, the first of three generations of Hitler-related women whose unfathomable erotic liaisons cast a powerful spell over Hitler's life-and over his subsequent biographers. After Maria, there was Hitler's mother, Klara, and then his half-niece Geli Raubal. Three women-all, interestingly, serving girls-whose greatest service has been to the Hitler explainers.
The flavor of the speculation over Maria Schicklgruber's sexual choices is captured by the partial catalog of candidates for the role of Hitler's paternal grandfather offered by the impressionable German biographer of Hitler, Werner Maser.
"Various candidates have been suggested," Maser writes. In addition to the official nominee on the Nazi Party family tree for Hitler, Johann Georg Hiedler, and Maser's own candidate, Johann Georg's wealthier brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, there are "a 'Graz Jew' by the name of Frankenberger, a scion of the seigneurial house of Ottenstein, and even a Baron Rothschild of Vienna." Maser doesn't believe Adolf Hitler was a Frankenberger, an Ottenstein, or a Rothschild descendant (the latter astonishing suggestion seems to be traceable to the pre-Anschluss anti-Hitler Austrian secret police). But he has concocted an elaborate theory of rural sexual intrigue and greed over a legacy to bolster the candidacy of his man, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler.
One can argue with Maser's Brueghelian explanation of the Döllersheim ambiguities, but it's hard to deny his summary of the confused state of Hitler studies on the paternal-grandfather question: "If there is one fact on which at least some biographers are agreed, it is that Adolf's paternal grandfather was not the man officially regarded as such, namely the journeyman miller Johann Georg Hiedler." (A "fact" only "some" biographers agree upon is hardly a fact to rely upon.) The more judicious Alan Bullock says, "In all probability, we shall never know for certain who Adolf Hitler's grandfather, the father of Alois, really was. It has been suggested that he may have been a Jew, without definite proof one way or the other."
The closer we got to our destination, to Döllersheim, the more empty and remote from civilization the countryside began to look, the further back in time we seemed to be going. This part of Austria, the Waldviertel (the sector northwest of Vienna, between the Danube and the Czech border), and its scattered peasant-farmer inhabitants have remained relatively isolated from cosmopolitan civilization for centuries. With the heavy blanketing of snow shrouding the occasional ancient barn and farmhouse and obliterating almost all remaining visible traces of modernity, the lonely look and feel of the countryside could not have differed much from the way it looked some 156 years earlier. When someone-either a local-yokel miller or a mysterious stranger with "alien blood"-bedded down a middle-aged peasant woman named Maria Schicklgruber, leaving her pregnant with Hitler's father and leaving subsequent historians a legacy of doubt. Doubt that may have haunted Hitler as well as those who tried to explain him.
As we pulled into the courtyard of a three-century-old inn to ask for directions to Döllersheim, the remote snowbound setting and the nature of our search for Maria Schicklgruber's shadowy secret lover recalled to me the opening of Mark Twain's peculiar, posthumously published fable of evil, The Mysterious Stranger: "It was in 1590-winter. Austria was far away from the world, and asleep. . . . And our village was in the middle of that sleep. . . . It drowsed in peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude . . . news from the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams."
Of course, someone does then come to disturb the dreams of this insulated Austrian fastness in Twain's tale, "a mysterious stranger" who turns out to be Satan, although Twain's Satan is both more angelic and more diabolical than the conventional Prince of Darkness.
I was surprised when, after I returned home from Döllersheim and reread The Mysterious Stranger, to find in it the following passage from Twain's 1916 fable: "We had two priests [in the sleepy village]. One of them, Father Adolf, was a very zealous and strenuous priest. . . . [No one] was held in more solemn and awful respect. This was because he had absolutely no fear of the Devil. Father Adolf had actually met Satan face to face more than once."
It's remarkable how accurately Twain evoked the drowsing remoteness of this countryside, the sense of the sinister potential in somber, muffled silence. The little inn we'd stopped at was built sometime around 1600, one of the men huddled in front of the fireplace in the dining room told us. And aside from a poster on the wall announcing a "Disco Abend" next Saturday night at the local parish hall, it didn't look like much had changed in the centuries since. We ordered some wursts and asked the locals if they could help us find Döllersheim. It was they who gave us our first intimation of the nature of the verfallen world we were heading into.
The verfallen world, the ruined wasteland that was once Hitler's "ancestral homeland": It is the ur-source of Hitler's strangeness, the original locus of his alienness, his foreignness, an uncertainty of origins that was more than geographical. Throughout his life, wherever he we...
Product details
- ASIN : B00J1JPTMA
- Publisher : Da Capo Press; Updated ed. edition (July 8, 2014)
- Publication date : July 8, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 2034 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 492 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #228,324 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #116 in History of Germany
- #213 in Jewish History (Kindle Store)
- #420 in German History (Books)
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What these theorists are doing, Rosenbaum convincingly argues, is trying to come up with a single theory that says more about themselves than it does Hitler. A single theory advances their specialty and more importantly a theory is a form of consolation, a comfort because we deluded ourselves into believing that evil--even the kind of evil on the magnitude of Hitler--can be explained.
In fact, what I got from reading this book is that evil cannot be explained entirely. Hitler, the mountebank, became a cult figure who created an Evil Culture, complete with art, architecture, music, and fashion, and the Cult of his Personality was necessary for the Nazi evil. You couldn't replace him with some other anti-Semite to advance his vision. In other words, Hitler was Nazism.
What I concluded from this book is that Hitler was a fake, a clown who became intoxicated by his own cheap demagoguery and the German people's belief in it and in this intoxication he unleashed pure evil: a man who takes sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing others.
Rosenbaum warns us not to try to explain evil with one over simplistic theory to suffer the either/or fallacy of Hitler was either a true believer or a cunning manipulator because he was in fact both.
Each also gave depth to my understanding of all the others that preceded it. Partly because of all that came before it, I found Rosenbaum's chapter 17 on George Steiner's work the most thought-provoking.
The overall benefit of this book is it demonstrates how different investigators focus on a different term in what must be a multi-term equation of how and why an event takes place. Was it Hitler, or anti-Jewish cultural sentiment, or..., or ... ?
It is really ALL these things. The questions are (1) what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for creating something as awful as Nazi Germany? and (2) What order of the causal terms represents their comparative causal strength?
What makes this so exciting is that we have a specific historic event on which to focus.
Reading this book prompted me to buy and view a number of multi-part documentaries on Hitler, Germany, and the two world wars.
ANYONE interested in positive social change would be well-served by this case study of its opposite.
AND... to balance, I suggest a reading of the Russian experience that put Stalin in power. All the same questions and points of view apply.
Explaining Hitler is a misleading title, for the focus is primarily on the Jewish academic community's attempts to explain Hitler-to put it in grossly oversimplified terms, this is somewhat like the prey explaining the motivations of the predator. The result is that, while Hitler remains a mystery, the academic and personal biases of the explainers are revealed. To each person's theories and comments Rosenbaum adds his own analysis, finding the flaws with precision.
Hitler explanation ranges from the deeply personal (abusive father, infection by a Jewish prostitute, mother's painful death under the care of a Jewish physician) to the inevitable influence of historical forces (post-war inflation, depression). Rosenbaum discusses the personal in depth, including Hitler's rumored Jewish ancestor and bizarre relationship with his half-niece Geli Raubal, the convolutions each theory takes, and the lack of facts or reliable information to support any of them. For example, Rosenbaum astutely points out the only real "proof" of the abusive father is Hitler's own assertion and sarcastically suggests that there is reason not to trust Hitler's word. One argument that immediately comes to mind that Rosenbaum only briefly alludes to later is that millions of people have abusive fathers, bad experiences with individual members of ethnic and other groups, and so forth, yet do not turn into war criminals responsible for the deaths of millions. In short, these theories might explain Hitler's anti-Semitism, but not the results.
What is disturbing about so many of these explanations (some of which are advocated by such noted people as Simon Wiesenthal, who favors the Jewish prostitute theory), and more sophisticated ones that appear later in the book, such as George Steiner's, is their insistence that a Jew or a group of Jews is responsible. In these theories, a Jewish ancestor, a Jewish prostitute, an Eastern Jew with a different appearance, or the Jewish "blackmail of transcendence" and "addiction to the ideal" is responsible for Hitler-implying Hitler is not responsible at all. Although the egotistical and monomaniacal Claude Lanzmann, maker of the documentary Shoah, is too self-centered and angry to clearly articulate the basis for his belief that Hitler explanation is inherently "obscene," it could be because so much "explanation" has found a way to point a finger at the Jews, directly or indirectly, while minimizing Hitler. Perhaps for that reason, Lanzmann is interested only in how the Holocaust was accomplished, not with the motivations of Hitler or his followers. The major flaw is that Lanzmann has missed the point by dictating that his rule of "There is no why" must apply to all other individuals-and the irony of that.
As Rosenbaum repeatedly points out, no explanations for Hitler are acceptable that excuse him-that look to a bad experience with a Jew rather than to, for example, the influence of anti-Semitism surrounding him in Austria and Germany. Again, however, it can be said that anti-Semitic influence has surrounded many people (as Rosenbaum notes, pre-war France was more anti-Semitic than either Austria or Germany) who have not killed, let alone killed millions.
Rosenbaum's approach is excellent, pairing individuals with complementary or opposing viewpoints, e.g., Lanzmann and Dr. Micheels, the theologian Emil Fackenheim and the atheist historian Yehuda Bauer in "The Temptation to Blame God." Even revisionist David Irving is given a chapter. Rosenbaum saves what seems to be his preference for the last chapter-Lucy Dawidowicz's belief that Hitler decided on The Final Solution as early as 1918, based on what he said and did not say over time, and on the "laughter" that is transferred from the Jewish victims to the Nazi victors. While this does not explain the origins of Hitler's evil, it pinpoints the time frame and removes the notion that he was ambivalent or experienced a sense of moral ambiguity. Dawidowicz's Hitler knows early on what he wants to do and lets insiders in on the "joke" he finds it to be. Presented in this way, Dawidowicz does seem to have come closest to the truth about Hitler. After all, how can one capable of ambivalence ultimately kill millions?
To me, one critical question is not why or how any one man became evil or chose an evil course of action, for the explanation could simply be that the capacity for evil in an individual may be higher than most of us are capable of realising or accepting. That is, everyday evil like John Wayne Gacy's is accomplished in isolation and is therefore limited in scope. The intent and the desired scope given opportunity remain unknowns. The more frightening question is why and how so many chose to follow Hitler. I do not necessarily mean the German people, per se, but the thousands of bureaucrats, managers, and soldiers who physically carried out The Final Solution, knowing exactly what this entailed and what it signified. Hitler seized the opportunity offered by the political and social situation to institutionalize his personal evil. A single man may envision and desire genocide, but it takes followers and believers to carry it out. Explaining Hitler (or Stalin or Genghis Khan) is not enough to explain the scope of this particular human evil. Without followers, there are no leaders. And without followers, millions of Jews (and Cambodians and Indians and so forth) could not have died. The evil that is so hard to face goes well beyond Hitler to a place that no one could truly wish to discover.
Diane L. Schirf, 18 January 2004.
Top reviews from other countries
From Trevor-Roper, to Bullock to David Irving, Mr. Rosenbaum has met with them and many others in order to investigate their intimate thoughts behind the writing---Rosenbaum's interviews with each scholar are candid and insightful, reaching down past the academic into the 'real' grit behind why each person formulated his or her hypothesis of Hitler and the Reich and the origin of evil.
Having not read any literature on Hitler before, this was an invaluable source for a novice to the school of Holocaust study. Granted, you do not get the vast knowledge of each school of thought written by each Hitler explainer, but you do get a serious condensed version of each accented by Rosenbaum's witty, intelligent insight. Considering that there are literally thousands of books on the subject of Hitler in dozens of languages, I feel quite fortunate that I started with this particular book as it succeeds in cutting to the heart of what I was actually interested in: Who is Hitler and is he the personification of evil in human history?
Mr. Rosenbaum begins his book with one of the most beautifully written prefaces I have ever had the good fortune to read. While the language is very academic, I felt that the inner most feelings of this author were expressed and articulated beautifully and it set the tone for the following chapters. With such a contentious subject matter, Mr. Rosenbaum does an incredible job of presenting the material and widely varying opinions of his subjects in a largely unbiased manner. This is truly a great work which I will no doubt read again in the future and will refer back to as I continue my exploration into the dark heart of humanity.