Hitler: A Closer Look

Moore 1

HITLER: A CLOSER LOOK

Nathan Moore Dr. Mark Stoneman George Mason University HIS 635, Germany in the Age of Extremes May 3, 2014

Moore 2 What Hitler could never accomplish in life, he achieved in death; conquering the world. More books have been written about Hitler than any other political figure of the twentiethcentury.1 One biographer went as far to say that no historical figure will be written about more than Hitler except Jesus.2 There’s even a mathematical law dictating that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler [increases].”3 With over one hundred major biographies in existence it is hard to imagine that any scholar, let alone a first year graduate student, could add to the conversation on Hitler.4 However, John Lukas provides some hope because he defines all history as essentially revisionist, meaning that what the historian is after is not so much accuracy as it is an understanding; a process that never ends and is renewed with each new age. Christopher Hill also reminds one that “history has to be rewritten every generation, because although the past does not change the present does.”5 It is certainly an interesting time to be writing about Hitler because he has been surging back into international headlines again. Not only did Mein Kampf become an e-book best-seller in 2013, but Hitler’s name is being invoked more often by political leaders to condemn individuals and nations as evil.6 In 2014 in the month of February alone Hitler’s name and his Nazi party were used haphazardly and repeatedly in international dialogue: Philippine President Benigno Aquino compared China’s claims to parts of the South China Sea to Hitler’s claims on the Czech territory, North Korea denounced Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as an "Asian 1

John Lukas. The Hitler of History. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.), 2. Robert G. L. Waite. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. (New York: New American Library, 1977), xi. 2

David Mitchell. “Before you start mouthing off about Hitler, you’d better know your Nazis.” The Guardian. March 27, 2010. 4 Lukas, The Hitler of History, 1. 5 Christopher Hill. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 15. 6 Alison Flood. "Mein Kampf becomes an ebook bestseller." The Guardian, January 9, 2014. 3

Moore 3 Hitler," the U.N denounced North Korea for committing “Nazi” crimes,” and multiple comparisons have been made between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hitler during the recent crisis in Ukraine.7 These comparisons are troubling because as historian Andrew Zimmerman observed, “historians of Germany today….[are] living in a world that has not yet made sense of, nor even drawn basic political lessons from, the experience of German fascism;” so why should anyone expect to better understand, say, North Korea, through the metaphor of the Nazis?8 Some would also argue that the world at large has not learned the lessons of fascism; a dangerous proposition when an openly fascist political party, National Dawn, is the third most popular party in Greece and as the World Socialist Website reported, “for the first time since 1945, an avowedly anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi party controls key levers of state power in [the] European capital [of Ukraine].”9 Historian Margaret Lavinia Anderson recognized that when studying history, “a subject is always necessary. But it’s not sufficient; we need to know there’s a stake.”10 There is no deficit of stakes in the study of Hitler and the Third Reich. It is imperative to come to a better understanding of Hitler so that atrocities on such a scale are never repeated again, and also so that Hitler can no longer stand for a symbol of evil and be used to morally 7

"China slams Philippine leader for Hitler comparison." BBC, February 5, 2014; "North Korea calls Japanese PM 'Asian Hitler'." The Telegraph, February 4, 2014; Tom Miles. "UN's North Korea Crimes Against Humanity Report Rejected By China." Huffington Post, March 17, 2014; Garry Kasparov. "Vladimir Putin and the Lessons of 1938." Politico, March 16, 2014; Lawrence Rees. "Hitler and Putin." WW2History.com. March 4, 2014. 8

Margaret L. Anderson, Christian Goeschel, Ian McNeely, Andrew Zimmerman, and H. G. Penny. "FORUM: German History beyond National Socialism." German History 29, no. 3 (2011): 471. 9

Nektaria Stamouli. "Greece's Far-Right Golden Dawn Party Vows to Run in Elections." The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2014; Julie Hyland. "The fascist danger in Ukraine." World Socialist Website, March 6, 2014. 10

Anderson, “FORUM: Germany History beyond National Socialism,” 474.

Moore 4 condemn individuals and nations in the present. The history of Hitler then is a history of rhetoric, and it just might be time to expand that rhetoric into visual spaces where the conversation can continue in a new form. Because of the biblical flood of Hitler studies some scholars have felt the need to “apologize for yet another book on Hitler,” or worse, they have become cynical of the entire endeavor, but others have found new and unique ways to revisit this dark past by turning to film and art, and looking beyond the borders of Germany to encompass a more global perspective.11 However, there will always be unique problems to Hitler studies that every scholar must face, such as the limitations of biography, the plea for historiciziation, and the ever present specter of evil. The relationship between Hitler and evil is so intimate that Ron Rosenbaum claimed that the term cannot be “defined or defended” without Hitler.12 It is as if Hitler forms the very foundation for the root of the word. But just as Andrew Zimmerman observed that it might be productive to take “the German national narrative out of the study of National Socialism and the Holocaust,” it might be equally productive to take the narrative of evil out of the study of Hitler.13 Two recent works on Hitler, Ian Kershaw’s 2000 Hitler biography and R. H. S. Stolfi’s 2011 response, both deal with the problem of evil in different ways. In the case of Kershaw, he approaches Hitler from a stance of antipathy that is brought on by Hitler’s “evil nature,” and Stolfi seeks to point out this glaring flaw in his work, Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny. Instead of demonizing Hitler, as Kershaw does, or glorifying Hitler as Stolfi ultimately does, Hitler 11

Michael H. Kater. "Hitler in a Social Context." Central European History 14, no. 3 (September 1981): 243-244. 12

Ron Rosenbaum. Explaining Hitler. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.), xxi.

13

Anderson, “FORUM: Germany History beyond National Socialism,” 471.

Moore 5 should be looked upon as a human being. Evil is also the road block to historicizing Hitler, which some scholars believe is the only way to ever truly know the man or learn from his misguided mission. Ultimately, historiciziation, or placing the past in the past, is a noble goal, but one that may never be reached. Historiciziation is especially important in German history because of the extremes the country went to during World War II, producing the two modern day emblems of absolute evil: Hitler and the Holocaust. Historian Martin Broszat called for the historiciziation of National Socialism, Peter Novick called for the historiciziation of the Holocaust, and Dagmar Herzog even called for the historiciziation of “post-war memories.”14 Broszat defines historiciziation as providing “insight in a double sense: seen, on the one hand, as a distancing explanation and an objectification to be achieved analytically; and, on the other, viewed as a comprehending, subjective appropriation and empathetic reliving of past achievements, sensations, concerns and mistakes.”15 John Lukas would take issue with Broszat’s goal of “objectivity,” and note that “like all human knowledge, historical knowledge is both personal and participant;” that is why E. H. Carr warned budding historians to “study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”16 Therefore, one of many paradoxes in Hitler studies emerges; how can the goal of historiciziation be to place Hitler in the past “for good,” when all history is constantly being reinterpreted and always seen through “the eyes of the present?”17

14

Dagmar Herzog. Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.), 265. 15

Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer. "A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism." New German Critique 44 (1988), 87. 16

Lukas, The Hitler of History, 250; E. H. Carr. What is History? (New York: A Vintage Book, 1961), 26. 17 Ibid., 28.

Moore 6 The answer is that historiciziation is not a linear process with a beginning and end; it is cyclical, meaning that a historical event or person can be historicized and become dehistoricized, only to be historicized again. In The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick explains that “in the postwar years, much more than nowadays, the Holocaust was historicized— thought about and talked about as a terrible feature of the period that had ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Holocaust had not, in the postwar years, attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons that could be derived from contemplating it.”18 Furthermore, a historical event can be historicized for one nation and not another, or for one individual and not another. The goal cannot be to historicize the Third Reich, Hitler, or the Holocaust for good. Currently, Hitler is not historicized in many respects, but an argument can be made that he was much more historicized before Martin Broszat’s call for historians to “historicize the Third Reich.” Broszat sits at the center of what came to be known as the Historikerstreit or “Historian’s Fight,” because of a 1985 essay he wrote titled "A Plea for the Historiciziation of National Socialism.” His main argument was that the “Nazi period cannot be excluded from historical understanding - no matter how much the mass crimes and catastrophes which the regime perpetrated challenge one again and again to take a stance of resolute political and moral condemnation.”19 As seemingly innocent as this statement may seem, it erupted into a firestorm of controversy with critics accusing Broszat of not trying to historicize the Third Reich, but normalize it, or in other words, diminish the unique stature of the Holocaust and treat it the same as any other historical event. Broszat passionately refuted this assertion in a series of letters with

18

Peter Novick. The Holocaust in American Life. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.), 110. 19 Broszat, "A Controversy about the Historiciziation of National Socialism,” 87.

Moore 7 historian Saul Friedländer which were published in the journal, New German Critique in 1988. Broszat defended historiciziation as a necessary process that balances the “desire to understand” and critical distancing” from the historical subject. Friedlander’s criticisms of historiciziation are based on the distance it creates between the historian and his subject. He worries that historiciziation, far from yielding more effective and rational analysis, results in the “relativization of the political sphere [and] historical evaluation of the Nazi epoch as if it were as removed from us as 16th-century France ...20 Throughout their letters the two historians never find any real areas of agreement or compromise; in fact, historian Richard J. Evans even wrote that the controversy “has little to offer anyone with a serious scholarly interest in the German past…it makes no new contribution to historical understanding.”21 Even Broszat and Friedlander felt as if the lesson of the “Historian’s Fight” was that perhaps Hitler studies must break free of the written word and move into the visual realm. Broszat hit upon an interesting idea when saying “the history of the Nazi period cannot be determined by German historians alone (one might very well add that the Nazi period cannot be determined by historians alone, but must be aided by artists, writers, and filmmakers.)”22 Similarly, Friedländer offered the idea that “at some stage, a new style has to be introduced for the purpose of historical description, something we have not yet encountered very much in historiographical work. One could say, in fact, that for the historian who chooses narration regarding the immense majority of topics covered by historical inquiry, the duty is, in a sense, to try to visualize as well as possible the events described in order to be able to render them with all 20

Ibid., 93. Lukas, The Hitler of History, 232. 22 Ibid., 90. 21

Moore 8 the necessary plasticity.”23 A survey of the army of Hitler biographies also suggests that where words have failed, visualizations in the form of images, film, and art may succeed. A historian of the English Reformation once said that all “biography is distortion. However historically well founded his work may be, the biographer takes a man out of his context, and in so doing is forced to alter the focus of the age.”24 Ian Worthington, a historian of ancient Greece and Macedonia, would go as far to warn that “biography is not history” and John Lukas would capture the same idea more colorfully when saying “biography is not biology.”25 In many ways, every biographer of Hitler, from Konrad Heiden in the 1930s to Ian Kershaw in 2000, has had to grapple with these problems, and since Hitler is such a central figure in the Nazi narrative, indeed Nazism has often been called Hitlerism, the genre of biography will always be wedded to the subject.26 However, in several Hitler biographies, British historian Ian Kershaw sees “the inability of the biographical approach to avoid the extreme personalization of complex issues.”27 Mortiz Follmer, on the other hand, takes a more optimistic approach and counters: “a classic historiographical genre, biographies have long provided crucial insights into a regime that offered its ‘leaders’ unprecedented space for realizing their ambitions.”28 Follmer sees more

23

Ibid., 124. Paul Seaver. Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artist in Seventeenth-century London. (Stanford University Press, 1988.), 187. 25 Ian Worthington. Philip II of Macedonia. (London: Yale University Press, 2008.), 213; Lukas, The Hitler of History, 223. 24

26

Joachim Fest. Hitler. (New York: Harvest Book, 1973.), 8.

27

Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. 2nd ed. (New York: Edward Arnold, 1985.), 63. 28

Moritz Follmer. "The Subjective Dimension of Nazism." The Historical Journal 56, no. 4 (December 2013): 1111.

Moore 9 subtle and complex dangers to the genre of biography, stating, “leaving aside both the interest – often more sensational than scholarly – in the personal lives of high-ranking Nazis, and studies that treat one of them in conjunction with a particular policy field of the Third Reich, the conceptual challenge lies in drawing connections between a specific protagonist and German politics, society, and culture.29 Allan Bullock isolated the same problem with biography and suggested that “after the pendulum has swung between exaggerating and underestimating [Hitler’s role], the longer perspective suggests that…neither the historical circumstances nor the individual personality is sufficient explanation by itself without the other.”30 Kershaw’s 2000 Hitler biography represents one extreme of this pendulum and R. H. S. Stolfi’s 2012 work the other. Whereas earlier Hitler biographers prefaced their work with the noble, but perhaps naïve goals of objectivity and dispassionate analysis, Ian Kershaw’s work, which is widely regarded as the standard in the genre today, begins with a strange crucifixion of Hitler as an “unperson.” Even though Kershaw is reacting to overly “Hitler centric” narratives, he goes too far to remove Hitler from his own biography. The odd term “unperson” was first introduced into Hitler studies by biographer Joachim Fest in 1973, but its origin goes back to George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984, in which an unperson was someone who was erased by the state to the point where it seemed as if they never existed.31 Kershaw certainly doesn’t have this extreme goal in mind, but his use of the word perpetuates a dangerous rhetorical dehumanization. One could easily argue that no human being, no matter how despicable, is an “unperson,” and by labeling even an “evil” person as such, one is merely perpetuating the ritual dehumanization of others and leaving the 29

30 31

Ibid., 1111. Alan Bullock. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.), 977. George Orwell. 1984. 1949. A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook. Chapter 4.

Moore 10 door open for more radical minds to turn words into action. If someone is an unperson their life has no value, and that is a dangerous assumption to make. Kershaw opens his biography with a strongly worded question: “How could such a bizarre misfit ever have been in a position to take power in Germany, a modern, complex, economically developed, culturally advanced country?”32 From there he goes on to label Hitler a void, an empty vessel, someone with…few intellectual gifts and social attributes…unapproachable and impenetrable even for those in close company, incapable it seems of genuine friendship (never mind the title of Heinrich Hoffman’s memoirs Hitler was My Friend or the “too impressionable” August Kubziek who was Hitler’s childhood friend).33 Kershaw states “the role of the biographer at this point becomes clearer. It is a task which has to focus not upon the personality of Hitler, but squarely and directly upon the character of his power—the power of the Fuhrer…to explain this power, therefore, we must look in the first instance to others, not to Hitler himself.”34 For Kershaw, “a history of Hitler has to be…a history of his power.”35 He is following in the footsteps of previous biographers like the German journalist Sebastian Haffner who saw little value in Hitler’s personal biography. Stolfi, who holds a PhD in modern European history, wrote a book in 2011 that was largely a response to the way Hitler was treated in Kershaw’s works. When reviewing Stolfi’s book, Hitler: Beyond Tyranny and Evil, Dr. Russell Lemmons commended Stolfi for trying to refute a “marked tendency to view the Führer as an ‘unperson,’ a perspective that tells us very little about one of the most influential figures of the past century.” However, he quickly noted

32 33

Ian Kershaw. Hitler: A Biography. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000.), xxvii.

Ibid., xxxvi-xxxviii. Ibid., xxxvii-xxxviii. 35 Ibid., xxxix. 34

Moore 11 that “although Stolfi has a point, he very quickly goes awry.”36 Other reviewers like Roderick Stackelberg come down more harshly and declared “it is impossible to take this defiantly revisionist biography of Hitler seriously.”37 What these reviewers take issue with is the fact that Stolfi takes a positive stance toward Hitler on every issue and he barely mentions the Holocaust; and when he does he bumps the number of total Jews killed from the standard 6 million to 4.5. Stackelberg warned that “the significance of apparently inconsequential books such as [Stolfi’s] as indicators of a militarism perversely festering in our political culture should not be underestimated.”38 The fact that Mein Kampf is a bestseller again, also raises fears of a renewed militarism that is only backed up by statistics showing the rise of racially based hate groups right-wing armed militias in the United States.39 While Stolfi’s work may play a part in a reactionary element in society, it also highlights the fact that Hitler is far less historicized today than he was in the 1970s during the Hitler Wave, in which three major Hitler biographies were produced by Werner Maser, Joachim Fest, and John Toland. Demonizing Hitler or praising Hitler misses the mark of historiciziation, which is something that the biographers that both Kershaw and Stolfi complain about strived for. The authors of the Hitler biographies that came before Ian Kershaw’s and Stolfi’s work went to great lengths to stress their objectivity and dispassionate position, whereas Kershaw introduces his book by dehumanizing Hitler with an arsenal of unflattering insults, and Stolfi,

36

Russell Lemmons. "Review of Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny. By R. H. S. Stolfi." The Historian (2012), 636. 37

Stackelberg, Roderick. "Review of Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny. By R. H. S. Stolfi." Central European History (2012): 199. 38

Ibid., 200-201. Kim Severson. "Number of U.S. Hate Groups Is Rising, Report Says." The New York Times, March 7, 2012. 39

Moore 12 constant praise. In contrast to these methods, in 1951 Alan Bullock gave this clear-eyed preface to his Hitler biography: I wrote this book without any particular axe to grind or case to argue. I have no simple formula to offer in explanation of the events I have described; few major historical events appear to me to be susceptible of simple explanations. Nor has it been my purpose to rehabilitate or indict Adolf Hitler. If I cannot claim the impartiality of a judge, I have not cast myself for the role of prosecuting counsel, still less for that of counsel for the defense. However, disputable some of my interpretations may be, there is a solid substratum of fact—and the facts are eloquent enough.40 Writing a little over a decade later, Hitler biographer John Toland tried to historicize his subject when stating “as one of those whose life was altered by Hitler, I have done my utmost to subdue my own feelings and to write of him as if he had lived a hundred years ago…My book has no thesis, and any conclusions to be found in it were reached only during the writing, perhaps the most meaningful being that Hitler was far more complex and contradictory than I had imagined.”41 Interestingly, the book that goes the farthest to historicize Hitler relies on images, not words to accomplish this goal. Allan Bullock’s 1992 book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, was heavily influenced by the “Historian’s Quarrel” in the 1980s, leading Bullock to try “unusual methods” to historicize Hitler. Bullock took issue with the idea that “the Jewish Holocaust [should] be regarded as a unique event [that cannot be compared with] other examples of genocide, or of other inhuman acts…”42 He countered that “the issue of ‘uniqueness’ [is] an unsatisfactory focus. It is an issue that naturally concerns Germans, but it looks at the experience of terror and extermination in this period too much from the point of view of those who may be held responsible for inflicting it, too little from the point of view of the victims.” To bring the 40

Alan Bullock. Adolf Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. (New York: Perennial Library, 1962.), viii. John Toland. Adolf Hitler. (New York: Ballantin, 1976.) xi. 42 Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, 974. 41

Moore 13 victims back into the conversation, Bullock “designed [a] map to bring out the monstrous total of victims of repression in these years, whichever regime they suffered under, rather than to lose sight of this in arguments about which had the worst record.”43 Bullock explained that “the [Map of Hell] on which I have sought to represent these facts geographically brings together both the German and the Russian camp-sites and deliberately presents what took place in these places, without differentiation of responsibility, as crimes against a shared humanity.” By ignoring issues of the “uniqueness” of Nazism, Bullock treats Hitler and the Holocaust as any other historical event, resulting in an engaging reflection as opposed to a “trivialization” of Nazi atrocities. If words have failed in Hitler studies, then it is time to turn to a different medium, one in which the famous director D.W. Griffith had religious faith in. Speaking about the birth of modern cinema, Griffith exclaimed, “we’ve gone beyond babel, beyond words. We’ve found a universal language—a power that can make men brothers and end wars forever.”44 If cinema can’t quite fulfill all of these utopian goals at the moment, in the case of Hitler studies it can offer a unique way to historicize Hitler by allowing the audience to feel empathy for the man called the Demon King. In her work Prosthetic Memory, cultural historian Alison Landsberg states that “cinema is a technology that can generate empathy.”45 She begins by defining empathy as starting from “the position of difference. Empathy is ‘the power of entering into the experience of or understanding objects of emotions outside ourselves… [it is a way of] both

43

Ibid., 975. Alison Landsberg. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.), 56. 44

45

Ibid., 150

Moore 14 feeling for and feeling different from the subject of inquiry.”46 Landsberg explains the relationship between memory and empathy when stating: Prosthetic memory teaches ethical thinking by fostering empathy. As I described previously, the experience of empathy has more potential and is more politically useful and progressive than its cousin sympathy…in the act of sympathizing, one projects one’s own feelings onto another….The experience of empathy, by contrast, is not purely emotional but also contains a cognitive component. It therefore takes work and thought to achieve….the connection one feels when one empathizes with another is more than a feeling of emotional connect; it is a feeling of cognitive, intellectual connection, an intellectual coming-to-terms with another person’s circumstances.47 Film has always played a prominent and unique role in the Third Reich. One immediately thinks of Hitler’s soaring speeches and roaring crowds during the Nuremberg Rally in Triumph of the Will, or the meticulously crafted propaganda films of Joseph Goebbels. Even after the Nazis lost the war, “rubble films” like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero helped to shift the focus from the ordinary German’s role in the Holocaust to their victimization at the hands of Allied bombing. And as Peter Novick recounts: “the airing of the series [Holocaust], in January 1979, became the turning point in Germany’s long-delayed confrontation with the Holocaust…It enabled Germans to connect with the Jewish victims, and with the crime, as never before.”48 Film helped to bring the Nazis to power and it has helped in dealing with their dark legacy. Film has continued to play a large role in the memory and myth making of the Third Reich, often in unexpected ways, as Dagmar Herzog notes that “the persistent linkage of pornography and Nazism in literature and film and in the popular imagination actually captures some truths about the Third Reich that are too frequently suppressed in scholarly writing about the era.”49 The same could be said for the equally persistent link between Nazism and evil in 46

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 149. 48 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 213. 49 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 14. 47

Moore 15 horror films such as Deathship, The Keep, and Dead Snow.50 Quentin Tarantino even resurrected the emblem of evil himself in his 2009 film Inglorious Basterds, just so Hitler could finally get the brutal death he deserved.51 However, perhaps no film is more important when considering Hitler’s role in history, and his historiciziation, than the 2004 film Downfall. Downfall is a 2004 film based off of the diaries of Hitler’s last secretary Traudl Junge, that was produced by Bernd Eichinger and starred Bruno Ganz as Hitler. The director took a strong stance to the accusations that his film “humanized Hitler” when saying “there is no need to humanize Hitler because we all know that he was a human being. The task was to create a three-dimensional picture of this man. It was to get as close to what this man really was—and had to be—to seduce a whole civilized nation into barbarism. To me it's obvious that a demonic creature would never be able to lure a whole people into something evil like that.”52 He goes on to give one of the most articulate expressions of how and why one should historicize Hitler. Eichinger proclaimed: To me, it's not enough to say he was a monster—he was a monster, of course, and he was the most evil person that maybe ever lived—but behind this there is other stuff. If you dare to discover that, I thought you have to show it. That's what I did. I was not humanizing. We had no master plan that we were going to make a new image of Hitler—nothing. This is what [emerged after] reading, in three or four months, forty volumes from different people about this time in the bunker. There's no evidence in film—you have to read, if you want to know. There were a lot of people surrounding him closely, and [if] you read [their accounts], it tells you part of who he was. And I thought, “I am going to tell this.” This is what people now call “humanizing.” It is not humanizing. I think it's rather responsible. I say, “a closer look.” And maybe this is the thing to do in these days. What Chaplin did many, many years ago [in The Great

50

Alvin Rakoff. Death Ship. (1980); Michael Mann. The Keep. (1983); Tommy Wirkola. Dead Snow. (2009). 51 Quentin Tarantino. Inglorious Basterds. (2009). 52 Carlo Cavagna. “Interviews: Downfall.” Aboutfilm.com. 2005.

Moore 16 Dictator] was to make him ridiculous. That was, at that time, the right thing to do. But not now.53 John Bendix saw the film as a right step in the direction of historiciziation, stating “[Hitler] is being starkly, realistically, and humanly, portrayed precisely in order to more fully and finally lay him to rest.”54 And he believes that this is what the German people want when reporting “the growing sentiment is that two generations after the downfall of that Reich, it is becoming time to put an era now sliding out of active memory into its historical con- text and to live more normal lives—without forgetting that shadow.55 It is not strange to think that a film could have a stronger impact on a historical debate than thousands of scholarly books and articles because it has happened before in Germany. Peter Novick recalls that: “the airing of the series [Holocaust], in January 1979, became the turning point in Germany’s long-delayed confrontation with the Holocaust…It enabled Germans to connect with the Jewish victims, and with the crime, as never before.” Novick quotes one German journalist who ecstatically wrote: It is absolutely fantastic…’Holocaust’ has shaken up post-Hitler Germany in a way that German intellectuals have been unable to do. No other film has ever made the Jews’ road of suffering leading to the gas chambers so vivid….Only since and as a result of ‘Holocaust’ does a majority of the nation know what lay behind the horrible and vacuous formula ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’ They know it because a U.S. film maker had the courage to break with the paralyzing dogma…that mass murder must not be represented in art.”56 Downfall had a similar immediate impact with “many German schools [making] it part of their history curriculum.” Bendix says that “most disturbing for many Germans was their feeling they were facing Hitler—as Bruno Ganz plays him, physically imploding but still capable of towering rage when he hears what he does not like, and yet also capable of being kind to his 53

Ibid. John Bendix. "Facing Hitler: German Responses to Downfall." German Politics and Society 25, no. 81 (2007): 72. 55 Ibid., 72. 56 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 213. 54

Moore 17 naive secretary. This was Hitler, the real human being that you were facing, intimately and at eye-level.57 However, it seems that this face to face encounter with the Devil was healing and cathartic because “A FORSA poll was conducted soon after the film opened, and found 69 percent of those surveyed agreeing it was ‘all right to show Hitler's human sides in a cinema film and students who had seen the film saw Hitler in a more human light and had less of a negative reaction to him than students who had not.’58 It seems that the notion of Hitler as evil may be fading away after all. Peter Lipton, an atheist philosopher, mused: “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 per cent of their make-up, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.”59 Psychologist Simon Baren Cohen, who was in the crowd for that speech, thought about what he heard and concluded: I found it a provocative idea because the implication of this attitude is that no one— however, evil we pain them to be—should be treated as 100 per cent bad, or as beyond responding to a humane approach. The question is whether one can push this to its logical conclusion: If unambiguously ‘evil’ individuals (a candidate for this category might be Hitler) felt remorse for their crimes, and had been punished, would we try to focus on their good qualities, with a view to rehabilitating them? My own view is that we should do this—no matter how bad their crime. It is the only way we can establish that we are showing empathy to the perpetrator, not just repeating the crime of turning the perpetrator into an object, and thus dehumanizing them. To do that renders us no better than the person we punish.60

Bendix, “Facing Hitler,” 78. Ibid., 78. 59 Simon Baron-Cohen. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. (Allen Lane, 2011.) 60 Ibid. 57 58

Moore 18 It is ironic to call Hitler evil and the Devil when this is the very language he used to demonize the Jews. Robert Waite reports that “Hitler said explicitly that ‘the Jew is the personification of the Devil and of all evil.’ And thus he reached the conclusion that in fighting the Devil he was doing the work of Almighty God.”61 The danger of equating a religious mission with a military one is not unknown to our own times, with President George W. Bush receiving biblical quotes attached to his military reports justifying his actions such as: "Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand” and "It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men."62 It cannot be denied that by casting the enemy as evil it was easier to believe one was carrying out a holy mission and in both cases, evil acts were the result of dehumanizing language and the religious justification to back it up. To get away from the ritual of dehumanizing and demonizing Hitler, it may be helpful to look across fields to see how other historians have dealt with similarly complex issues. Alan Bullock wrote that “in the 1960s and 1970s a younger generation of historians reacted against the model of the monolithic totalitarian state, and against the popular stereotype of Hitler as an all-powerful dictator dominating events. This revolt fitted in with, and drew strength from, the dominant trend in the postwar study of history, the rise of social and economic history, of history seen ‘from below,’ challenging the traditional concentration on political history, history seen ‘from above.”63 While this trend resulted in a new focus on “social forces” in German history, social historians of the Reformation engaged in an intimate dialogue with the

61

Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, 32.

Jennifer Parker. "Rumsfeld’s Biblical Message-Laden Intelligence Briefs." ABC, May 17, 2009. 62

63

Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 976.

Moore 19 people of the Reformation, not the theology. Some of their strategies could be applied to Hitler studies and offer interesting questions to ponder. After all, looking to the Reformation to advance Hitler studies is not all that strange because it too was a tumultuous time that produced “messianic” thinkers with revolution on their mind. John Lukas compared Hitler to Martin Luther, because of the fact that without them their revolutions would have happened, but “not in the way it happened.”64 Battling decades of historiography based in theological debates and the deeds of “great men,” social historians of the Reformation like John Bossy and Natalie Zemon Davis pushed back and “stuck up for the reality of the past as something actually there, not as the proverbial nose of wax begging to be remodeled according to the artistic canons or surgical technology the present.”65 Zemon Davis urged historians to “respect the ways” of the people they study, and asked them to “imagine that they are in some sense equivalent to us, in some kind of exchange with us while we look them over, able to answer us back if we should go astray.”66 Could historians ever elevate Hitler to be their equal, and even if they could imagine him guiding them in their studies with his own words, would they listen to what he would have to say? The crux of the Historian’s Fight in the 1980s was whether or not the history of the Third Reich should be treated as unique and in a world of its own. In Life and Death in the Third Reich, Peter Fritzsche puts this problem in historical context when stating:

64

Lukas, the Hitler of History, 258 John Bossy. Christianity in the West 1400-1700. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.), viii. 65

66

Natalie Zemon Davis. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965.), 266.

Moore 20 Once the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, the catastrophe of Auschwitz was often combined with Hiroshima to create ‘Auschwitz-Hiroshima,’ in a twinned existential threat to world civilization that loomed in the future. In this way, the historical specificities of Nazism or the Holocaust were subordinated to technocratic developments and military capacities operating on a global scale in a kind of epic modernity that World War II epitomized…it created equivalences between belligerent states, and as a result tended to overlook the central role of racism and anti-Semitism in the Third Reich.67 A strong case can be made, however, that an ‘Auschwitz-Hiroshima’ paradigm is a successful model that interprets two unique atrocities in a socially beneficially way. One could also take issue with Fritzsche’s claim that this type of “normalizing” model “overlooks the central role of racism…in the Third Reich,” because racism also played a factor in the U.S. hatred of the Japanese during the war. A contemporary historian of WWII noted that “probably in all our history no foes has been so detested as were the Japanese.” Historian John Dower reported that “Americans thought of the Japanese as vermin, cockroaches…and rats.” Time even wrote that “the ordinary, unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing…indicates it.”68 A.N. Wilson’s conclusion in his biography of Hitler was that “Hitler, in his racial discrimination, was simply being normal. The United States and the British Empire were both racist through and through.”69 R. H. S. Stolfi perceptively observed that the Allied “victors…have failed to assign evil in cases of similar [atrocities]” such as the dropping of the atomic bomb.70 Wilson gave a reason for why Americans are able to forget these atrocities; it is

67

Peter Fritzsche. Life and Death in the Third Reich. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.) 301. 68

Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone. The Untold History of the United States. New York: Gallery Books, 2012. 149. 69 A. N. Wilson, Hitler. (New York: Basic Books, 2012.), 185. 70 Stolfi, Hitler: Beyond Tyranny and Evil, 41.

Moore 21 “because we still regard [Hitler] as the Demon King of history [that] we think that if we say the opposite of what Hitler said, we shall somehow be living a better life.”71 To escape from treating Hitler as the central focus of Germany history or as the “Demon King,” he must be given to the history of the world because as Ian McNeely argued, “embedding Germany in world history [is] the most promising approach because globalization is the most powerful political, economic and cultural trend of our times.”72 To say that Nazism was unique is irrelevant because every historical act in history is unique. What is interesting is not that Nazism was an aberration of the 20th century, but that it was a natural product of it. To deal with this fact, the history of the Third Reich must break free of the German national narrative and enter the narrative of the world. Some historians have tried to do this, such as Christian Goeschel who argued that “we must broaden our view of German history, not narrow it.”73 Or Margaret Anderson who said “we should always be looking over our shoulders, across the (various) ponds, for connections, comparisons, analogies.”74 A safe place to start with these analogies could be the Reformation, a time period similar to the Third Reich simply because, as Christopher Hill notes, “in time of revolution men think aggressive thoughts, and these can be recognized by others as valid, as divinely inspired.”75 Not only did the Reformation see the St. Bartholomew’s massacre in which ordinary civilians were driven by dehumanizing rhetoric to brutally murder people of another religion, but it also witnessed the witch hunts of Matthew Hopkins, a man who was called the most depraved and wicked man in history only two years after the end of World

71

Wilson, Hitler, 185. Anderson, “FORUM: German history beyond National Socialism, 483. 73 Ibid., 473. 74 Ibid., 482. 75 Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 368. 72

Moore 22 War II.76 In his book Witchfinders, Malcolm Gaskill offers a model for how to move beyond the notion of Hitler as evil. He states that: No one knows exactly how many suffered in the witch-craze of 1645 to 1647: as many as three hundred women and men were integrated, of whom more than a hundred were put to death. It was a terrible tragedy; but it needs to be seen as part of something even more terrible, a civil war characterized by bigotry, brutality and bloodshed. The conflict killed 190,000 Englishmen out of a population of five million, amounting to 3.7 per cent—a greater proportion than during the First World War. If one discounts the sensational, the particular and the judgmental, one is left with a different kind of Matthew Hopkins: an intransigent and dangerous figure, for sure, but a charismatic man of his time, no more ruthless than his contemporaries, above all, drive by a ‘messianic desire to purify.77 A continued conversation on Hitler is healthy because it constantly forces one to question and confront the complexities of the past and present. What is dangerous is the suppression or silence of discussion on Hitler. Recently, Bavaria has decided to “scrap its plans to reprint Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf with critical commentary when a legal ban by Germany on republishing it expires at the end of 2015.” The reason given by Bavaria’s Science Minister Ludwig Spaenle was, “many conversations with Holocaust victims and their families have shown us that any sort of reprint of the disgraceful writings would cause enormous pain.” Spaenle also “warned that any publisher who tried to reprint the seditious” book will face criminal charges.”78 By demonizing Hitler and using dehumanizing language to describe him, scholars have inadvertently added fuel to the argument that Hitler should be banned and repressed as opposed to liberated and analyzed as a human being and a historical subject. Ian Kershaw, Mary Fulbrook and Sebastian Haffner all offer assurances to anyone fearful of another Hitler or Nazi state rising any time soon, but even if their pronouncements follow the

76

Malcolm Gaskill. Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.), 283. 77 Ibid., 285. 78 “Bavaria Will not Reprint Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in 2014. The Jewish Press. December 12, 2013.

Moore 23 obvious logic that history can never repeat itself exactly again, they seem to be too eager to claim that a nationalist uprising could never again lead to obscene violence. Allan Bullock wasn’t as sure as these three when he acutely observed that “in the same way immigration and increasing tensions in multi-racial societies can be expected to keep alive ethnic antagonisms and the racist fantasies that sustain them. It remains an open question whether these will produce a revival of the Communist or of the Nazi version of millenarianism—or will find expression in which new forms as religious fundamentalism.”79 A different tone is struck by Sebastian Haffner in 1979 when he wrote, “…events such as the ones which cleared the road for Hitler in 1930 are not to be expected again as far as is humanly predictable.”80 Thirty years later Mary Fulbrook echoed “such a unique combination of circumstances as occurred in Germany, opening the way for the rise of Hitler, is unlikely ever to recur it its entirety.”81 Ian Kershaw has called Hitler “unrepeatable,” and although it would be an exaggeration to go as far as the World Socialist Website and say that the world is witnessing Fascism rise from the ashes to plunge the planet into World War III, there are certainly disturbing similarities in the rise of the fanatical right and militarists that needs to be examined. If Hitler and Nazism continue to be written off as evil, a deeper understanding will be lost that could potentially aid one in understanding current trends that appear to be anti-democratic and socially regressive. The term evil needs to be retired too, and not because of Hitler, but because it obstructs rational dialogue in the present. The Problem of Evil, or Theodicy, has been embedded within the Western Tradition for centuries, and has roots in the philosophers and theologians. It is 79

Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, 973. Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler, 62. 81 Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2008: The Divided Nation. 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.), 55. 80

Moore 24 interesting to remember, however, that “for Hindu thought…there is no Problem of Evil. The conventional, relative world is necessarily a world of opposites. Light is inconceivable apart from darkness; order is meaningless without disorder…” In this world view, creation is “incomplete without evil.”82 In the Western tradition to continually invoke evil, it seems that the West is incomplete without evil too. Hitler’s evil nature is inextricably linked to the Holocaust; therefore, American remembrance of Hitler is intimately tied to their interaction with this horrifying atrocity. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow found that “the Holocaust… [was] a symbol of ever-present evil rather the Holocaust as historical event that was of interest to persons troubled about the moral fabric.” Peter Novick explains that “the Holocaust became a screen on which people projected a variety of values and anxieties” and so it is with Hitler.83 Hitler remains a symbol of evil when it serves the needs of those remembering him. It has been shown that Hitler could very well become historicized for Germany, and yet remain the epitome of the Devil in America, and this would be so that Americans do not have to confront their own evil past; slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, drones. It has been shown that Hitler was far more historicized during the post-war period than he was in Ian Kershaw’s Hitler biography or Stolfi’s response. If biography has ultimately failed, it is not because the biographies are not astounding works in themselves; many of them are contrary to what Kershaw and Stolfi would claim. However, it might be time to move beyond the barriers of the written word, as the film Downfall does, in trying to collectively remain in a constructive dialogue with the Hitler of history. Daniel J. Boorstein. The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World. (New York: Vintage Books, 1998.), 17-18. 82

83

Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 234

Moore 25 A tiny statue in Poland might help to explain the current state of Hitler studies and show how visualizing Hitler can help the world move forward. The work called “HIM” was done by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and it is a tiny figure of Hitler praying in a spot where thousands of Jews lost their lives to the Nazi terror. The strange and provocative piece of art was meant “to make people reflect on the nature of evil.”84 Even though the statue has had its critics, “many others are praising the artwork, saying it has a strong emotional impact.” Cattelan wanted his viewers to meditate on the fact that even “evil” once took the form of a ‘sweet praying child.”85 This piece of art challenges the dominant narrative of evil and forces everyone who passes it to question whether evil is a useful term at all when describing any human being, no matter what their crime. Perhaps art can help to elevate the collective consciousness to this plateau and the world can begin to “learn the lessons of Hitler.”

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“Adolf Hitler praying statue causes controversy in Warsaw.” The Telegraph. December 28, 2012. 85 Ibid. 84

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