[ Two new books on the fascist leader walk different paths; one
identifying Hitler as key to virtually every juncture of the party’s
rise and fall while the other looks more toward his racial worldview
as profoundly preoccupied with ‘Anglo-America.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HITLER: STILL MESSING WITH OUR HEADS  
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Christopher Clark
November 7, 2019
London Review of Books
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_ Two new books on the fascist leader walk different paths; one
identifying Hitler as key to virtually every juncture of the party’s
rise and fall while the other looks more toward his racial worldview
as profoundly preoccupied with ‘Anglo-America. _

Adolf Hitler, German Nazi Chancellor giving the Nazi salute, standing
next to "Deputy Fhhrer" Rudolf Hess; 1939 photo., AFP / Getty Images
// USA Today

 

Something very strange happens in the middle of _The End_, the sixth
and last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s titanic work of
self-description. At around page 482, the book swerves away from
scenes of family and social life, and plunges, like a car crashing
through a safety barrier, into a prolonged reflection on Adolf Hitler.
For 360 pages Knausgaard discusses Hitler’s youthful longing and
seriousness, his love for his mother, his struggle with an
authoritarian father, his refusal of the destinies prescribed for him
by convention. Long passages are given over to summarising, or simply
quoting from, the first volume of _Mein Kampf_, written while Hitler
was in prison in 1925. Knausgaard reflects (twice) on that moment in
1945, preserved on film, when Hitler emerged, ‘his hands shaking
with sickness’, from a bunker beneath Berlin, ‘with the world in
flames and millions of people dead as a result of his volition’, to
greet a line of young boys who had been called up to defend the
collapsing city. In that perilous moment, he writes, Hitler revealed,
‘in a fleeting gleam of his eyes … something warm and kind, his
soul’. ‘He was a small person,’ Knausgaard concedes, ‘but so
are we all.’ And out of these and many other thoughts about Hitler
spiral a long series of reflections on modern life, accompanied by
high-end literary and cultural references. Not until page 848
does _The End_ escape from Hitler’s orbit. In the meantime, the
reader has trekked across a massive, crater-like depression in the
book’s structure. It is like coming up for air when we are finally
allowed to re-inhabit the body of the writer: ‘I sat down again,
poured myself some tepid coffee from the vacuum jug and lit another
cigarette.’

What is Hitler doing in this book? I suppose his appearance at some
point was inevitable, given that the cycle’s Norwegian title,
reluctantly accepted by Knausgaard’s publisher, was _Min Kamp_.
(The German translator refused to use _Mein Kampf_ as the title, and
the books are published in Germany under the clunking rubric _Das
autobiografische Projekt_.) Asked why he chose the title, Knausgaard
has tended to fudge. A friend suggested it, he told one interviewer.
It was better than his other working titles, ‘Argentina’ and
‘Parrot Park’. The Hitler essay at the heart of Book 6 doesn’t
answer the question either, not directly. We have to infer its purpose
by examining the services Hitler performs for the man who has summoned
him back from the dead.

_Mein Kampf_, Knausgaard says, is ‘literature’s only unmentionable
work’. To read it is to travel into a forbidden zone. What
Knausgaard finds when he breaches the taboo is a crumpled,
Hitler-shaped image of himself. The hated father, the beloved mother,
the fear of intimacy, the sense of outsiderhood and the ponderous
seriousness with which he approaches life, all these fixtures of the
self on display throughout _Min Kamp_ are also present in the author
of _Mein Kampf_. Even Hitler’s abstention from masturbation,
recalled by his youthful roommate August Kubizek and much discussed in
the Hitler literature, chimes with Knausgaard’s belated and
laborious efforts at onanism, bleakly recorded in Book 4.

To frame the journey towards Hitler as an encounter with oneself is
unexpected. It doesn’t mean that Knausgaard endorses Hitler’s acts
or worldview, though he insists that it must be possible to
distinguish between who Hitler was and what he did. In the case of the
young Hitler, already himself but not yet the author of a genocidal
war, the distinction seems (at least to Knausgaard) impossible to
deny. Hence the rage he directs at Ian Kershaw, the author of the
classic English-language biography. Knausgaard accuses Kershaw of
adopting a dismissive attitude towards the young Hitler, of failing to
warm to the passion and innocence of his subject. This excessively
‘negative’ view, Knausgaard suggests, is not just ‘immature’,
it makes the biography ‘almost unreadable’.

These strictures are bewildering. It is one thing for a male Norwegian
writer to emote empathetically in the direction of an image of Adolf
Hitler he has developed in his own mind after reading half a dozen
books. But the task of Kershaw, who has immersed himself over decades
in treatises and archival records, can scarcely be to sound out his
own spiritual affinity with Hitler, it must rather be to understand
what it was about him, even in his youth, that might help explain his
later career. The distanciated, analytical perspective of the
historian is precisely what disgusts Knausgaard.

By fixing on Hitler as the disturbing doppelgänger of the authorial
ego, Knausgaard expands his work’s moral remit by folding into it
the arc of modern history. Hitler becomes a test case for
the _Narrenfreiheit_ of the contemporary novelist. Readers with a
better understanding than I have of the Norwegian context will no
doubt discern other, local resonances. But it may be worth bearing in
mind that the impact of the Nazi occupation on Norwegian society was
especially deep. In trials that lasted from 1945 until 1957, more than
90,000 cases of collaboration were investigated (3.2 per cent of the
country’s population was involved) and 46,000 people were sentenced.
Far from stabilising the country, as the returning Norwegian
government-in-exile had hoped, the trials had a profoundly polarising
effect. This was the most expansive juridical reckoning anywhere in
postwar Europe. Knausgaard makes no mention of these events, beyond
registering his surprise when he discovers a Nazi pin among the
belongings of his dead father. But the controversy of the trials
resonates in his need to express both the attraction and the repulsion
awakened in him by Nazism and Hitler.

Hitler: A Biography
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By Peter Longerich
Oxford University Press; 1,344 pages
Hardcover:  $39.95;  E-book:  $21.99
October 3, 2019 
ISBN: 9780190056735
ISBN-13:9780190057145

 

 

To turn to Peter Longerich’s _Hitler: A Life_, superbly translated
by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe, is to re-encounter the sober,
appraising diction that Knausgaard deplores in Kershaw’s writing.
Longerich is in no doubt that his subject was emotionally
‘retarded’ and unable to feel empathy. Hitler’s early life
reveals, he writes, a ‘lack of feeling in his dealings with
others’, a ‘marked egocentricity’ and a tendency to seek refuge
in a ‘fantasy world focused on himself’. Even as a soldier during
the First World War he stood out as an ‘eccentric loner’: his only
emotionally significant relationship was with his dog Foxl, which was
allowed to sleep with him.

Longerich’s meticulous account touches on many issues, from
Hitler’s management of dissent within his party to his thoughts on
foreign policy, rearmament and the economy; from the tactical skill
with which he handled the relations between his movement and the
political elites to his understanding and consolidation of his own
leadership role. Longerich has little time for the notion that
Hitler’s charisma was crucial to sustaining the regime’s
authority. The monopolistic control of media and public communications
was more important than the ‘Hitler myth’ explored by Kershaw, or,
for that matter, the spiritual-erotic union imagined by Knausgaard
between the ‘we-less I’ of Hitler and the ‘I-less we’ of the
German people.

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Hitler: Only the World Was Enough
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By Brendan Simms
Penguin Random House Canada (Allen Lane); 600 pages
September 24, 2019
Hardcover:  $59.95 (Canadian), 

 

Two strands of Longerich’s argument are especially worthy of note.
The first is that, despite the claims he made throughout his life,
Hitler’s early career was not marked by a lonely mission to save his
country. On the contrary, his entry into politics was orchestrated by
powerful interests. It was the Reichswehr (German Army) Information
Department in Munich that arranged for Hitler to be trained in public
speaking and then employed him as an agitator to immunise the soldiers
still serving in Munich against the appeal of socialism. As a
naturally talented popular speaker who stood out for the vehemence of
his antisemitism, Hitler soon merged into a network of army officers,
racist journalists and extreme right-wing organisations, all of them
united in their aim of building a platform for anti-socialist
agitation. In 1920-21 these groups were also sponsored and encouraged
by the Bavarian government under Gustav von Kahr, who worked hard to
transform Bavaria into a ‘cell of order’ in which right-wing
groups could flourish.

Throughout the Weimar years and especially in the period 1930-33,
Hitler continued to be seen as a potential asset by conservative
interests who hoped to use him as a weapon against the political left.
The so-called seizure of power was as much the achievement of these
conservative elites as it was of the Nazi leaders and their movement.
It was they, and not the Nazis, who prematurely dissolved two
parliaments in 1930 and 1932 at a time when support for the far right
was growing; it was they who brought down the Social-Democrat
government of Prussia in the summer of 1932 with a coup that replaced
the elected Prussian state government with an imperial commissariat.
And it was the absorption of Prussia into the federal government that
enabled Hermann Goering to secure control of the Prussian police force
– the largest in Germany – after the appointment of Hitler to the
chancellorship. Here, too, the conservatives provided the Nazis with
key tools for the consolidation of their own power. Even the Reichstag
Fire Decrees, which suspended civil and political rights, and the
Enabling Act, which made it possible for the Hitler cabinet to
override parliament, were devices concocted by the conservatives.
Electoral success and control over a large political movement with a
formidable militia were important assets, but it was the combination
of these advantages with the collaboration of the old elites that gave
Hitler and his party the edge they needed in 1933.

The extent of Hitler’s ability to shape the evolution of his regime
has long been the subject of debate. ‘Intentionalists’ argued that
he enjoyed a plenitude of power and used it to pursue a consistent
programme. ‘Structuralists’ argued that the chaotic interplay
between poorly co-ordinated centres of power opened the regime to
influence from below, meaning that its leaders were as often as not
carried along on a tide of ‘cumulative radicalisation’ generated
by negative energies they were responsible for releasing but which
were not ultimately under their control. Kershaw’s biography
balanced the two perspectives, identifying the many different local
and regional initiatives that shaped policy but also insisting on
Hitler’s role in deciding which would be adopted.

Longerich pushes hard in the intentionalist direction, identifying
Hitler as the key decision-maker at virtually every key juncture.
Hitler directed the putsch against the SA and other opponents of the
regime in the summer of 1934, enabled the forcible sterilisation of
the ‘Rhineland bastards’ (children of French colonial troops and
German women) in 1937, and triggered the murder of seventy thousand
people under the ‘euthanasia’ programme of 1939-41. Hitler ensured
that the war against the Soviet Union would be one of racial conquest
and annihilation, insisting that it was ‘a confrontation between two
ideologies’ in the course of which ‘the Jewish-Bolshevik
intelligentsia … must be eliminated.’ And Hitler was implicated in
every stage of the genocide against the Jews. In April 1943, for
example, he hectored the Hungarian leader, Admiral Horthy, insisting
that he send Hungary’s Jews to the death camps. ‘Jews’, he told
Horthy, had to be ‘treated like tuberculosis bacilli’. The
Slovaks, the Croatians and other satellites were also taken to task
for dragging their feet over the deportation of ‘their’ Jews.

Longerich’s meticulous account draws on stupendous reading in the
archives. If there is a weakness, it lies in the decision to focus the
inquiry so tightly on Hitler alone. Whereas the early part of the book
is scrupulously attentive to context and to the young Hitler’s
dependence on a multitude of helpers, the fully-fledged dictator
dominates the stage. And this, of course, makes it harder to verify
the claims Longerich makes for Hitler’s central place in the
regime’s decision-making structure.

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Longerich’s book moves steadily over its terrain, like one of those
cleaners on the floors of swimming pools that collect drowned insects
and dead leaves. Brendan Simms’s _Hitler: Only the World Was
Enough_ is a very different undertaking; written with passion, it
grabs the reader by the elbow and propels her from the very first page
towards one, ultimate conclusion. The central argument is that at the
centre of Hitler’s worldview was a profound preoccupation with
‘Anglo-America’. It began on the Western Front during the First
World War when his unit faced British, Canadian and Australian troops
and found them to be tough fighters. It deepened in 1918 when he
encountered some American prisoners of war, freshly arrived from
across the Atlantic, and noticed that some of them had German names.
These ‘seminal’ experiences, Simms argues, ensured that Hitler
became obsessed with the power, size and global reach of capitalist
Anglo-America. He also came to believe that ‘the Anglo-Saxons’
enjoyed these advantages in part because their racial value had been
elevated by the influx over several centuries of German emigrants who,
by leaving their country, had placed sound hereditary material in the
hands of a foreign power.

Simms is not the first historian to stress the importance of America
to Nazism. Adam Tooze’s _Wages of Destruction_ (2006) highlighted
the crushing asymmetries between the American and German war efforts
in 1941-45 and his next book, _The Deluge_ (2014), proposed a
rethinking of the 20th century as an era marked not by the fragility,
but by the immense power of the liberal Anglo-American order. In
tracing Hitler’s thinking about the Anglo-world across an impressive
range of fronts over the span of his political career, Simms is able
to show that the US and Britain were more important reference points
than has previously been acknowledged, and that Hitler’s
geopolitical vision was genuinely global. The case he makes for this
claim is compelling and original. If this were the book’s objective,
we could simply record our approval and retire, tired but happy, to
bed. But Simms has a much larger objective in view.

His book, he announces in the introduction, is not intended to be
‘additive’ in the sense of merely bringing new ideas to an
existing literature. Instead, it aims to be ‘substitutive’. The
book is not offering a new perspective on Hitler: it is proposing a
new theory _of_ Hitler. Hitler’s antisemitism, his quest for
‘living space’ in the east, his aspiration to overcome class
antagonisms through the creation of a harmonious ‘people’s
community’ (_Volksgemeinschaft_), even his architectural preferences
– all of these, in Simms’s reading, are subordinate functions of
his obsession with Anglo-America. The _Volksgemeinschaft_ becomes
Germany’s attempt to match the American Dream; the aim of the war
with Russia is to deny resources to the Anglo-Americans; antisemitism
is merely an articulation of Hitler’s loathing for Anglo-American
‘plutocratic capitalism’.

Rethinking Hitler in this way forces Simms to shunt the Soviet Union,
the decisive theatre of the war, to the margins of his analysis. Even
when Hitler is bogged down in his attritional conflict with the Red
Army, Simms insists it is Anglo-America he has in his sights. Not all
of these claims are new. In a controversial study published in 1987,
the German historian Rainer Zitelmann argued that Hitler was
contemptuous of radical antisemites, admired Stalin and pursued
eastern ‘living space’ chiefly as a means of achieving parity with
the United States. What sets Simms apart is his determination to
answer every question with the same argument.

This means that Hitler has to be uncoupled from the idea of
anti-Bolshevism and aligned instead with the enemies of ‘plutocratic
capitalism’. But was Hitler an ‘anti-capitalist’? There was an
anti-capitalist ‘left wing’ within the Nazi Party, but Hitler
never made any serious effort to follow through on their demands: the
banks were never nationalised, corporate profits remained buoyant,
department stores remained in business, and the power of those Nazis
who espoused a ‘second [social] revolution’ was destroyed by the
putsch of 1934, in which he played a central role. As for Hitler’s
frequent expressions of loathing for Bolshevism and the German left
(not to mention his regime’s murderous attacks on both), Simms has
to put these aside as aberrations or decode them as indirect
references to world Jewry and its capitalist schemes.

Hitler’s antisemitism, too, becomes a dependent variable. But while
it’s certainly true that he toyed with the idea of using the Jews as
‘hostages’ to deter Washington from entering the war, Simms’s
reasoning makes it impossible to explain the increase in the intensity
of the use of extermination in the last years of the conflict, when
America was already in the fight and nothing could be gained through
further killing sprees within the shrinking area under German control.
Longerich argues, rightly in my view, that for Hitler the
extermination of the Jews was an end in its own right, but also that
it became a tool of power politics, drawing satellite governments into
a web of criminal complicity from which there could be no escape. As
Lucy Dawidowicz argued many years ago and Richard Evans reminded us
more recently, Hitler’s ‘war against the Jews’ really was a war
against the Jews.

Simms’s monocausal approach creates an inertia at the heart of his
narrative. Hitler, having been shaped for life by his early wartime
encounters, is immune to change. That he acquired a set of enduring
convictions fairly early seems plausible, but that he fixed them into
an unalterable hierarchy and stuck to this order of priorities
throughout his life seems much less likely. Hitler’s political
commentaries, memoranda and monologues – and, for that matter, his
political behaviour and decision-making – are full of moments when
he seems to switch from one priority to another as circumstances
change. In Longerich’s account, Hitler is repeatedly forced to pull
back from one commitment and prioritise another. For Simms, Hitler’s
mind is as unreactive as argon gas: he never yields an iota to the
pressure of events. The closing sentence of the last chapter says it
all: ‘As in the beginning, so at the end.’

Hitler got a lot of things wrong, Simms tells us, and his career was
ultimately a ‘catastrophic failure’. But he was ‘exactly
right’ about ‘the overwhelming power of Anglo-America’ and
‘entirely accurate’ in his conviction that the Germans were too
weak to prevail against ‘the “Anglo-Saxons”, the global
“master race”’. It was a fatal error, Simms observes, to muster
a continental European ‘coalition of cripples’ against the awesome
might of Anglo-America, whose exploits against the Third Reich are
reported with knee-hugging gusto. Simms’s suggestion that Hitler was
fundamentally anti-capitalist has already earned him a sharp rebuke
from Richard Evans in the _Guardian_. Evans accused him of using
Hitler to besmirch the reputation of the left and of thereby importing
into British academic discourse the extremist polemics of the American
alt-right. This seems to me a misunderstanding. Simms’s book
displays a geopolitical vision of a post-Brexit world in which
Anglo-America rises above a weak and fragmented Europe too lacking in
political cohesion to wield real power on the global stage. It is no
accident that the book’s subtitle gestures to _The World Is Not
Enough_ (1999), in which James Bond and an American nuclear physicist
save the world from chaos. Simms is a prolific commentator on current
affairs and he has repeatedly criticised the EU states (especially
Ireland) for failing to see that Britain, like America, is, by
tradition and character, an ‘ordering power’, not a power that can
be subordinated to an order greater than itself. It is, quite simply,
a country of a different, stronger and better kind. On this question,
it seems that Simms and his subject are in agreement.

Knausgaard recalls the sensation of near nausea that overcame him as
he began reading _Mein Kampf_: ‘Hitler’s words and Hitler’s
thoughts were thereby admitted to my own mind and for a brief moment
became a part of it.’ Simms confesses a similar apprehension: ‘the
author,’ he writes, ‘has tried throughout to get into Hitler’s
mind, without letting [Hitler] get into his.’ Whether Hitler gets
into our minds, or we mislay something of our own inside his, it’s
clear that this strange and hateful man, who has been dead for 74
years, is still messing with our heads.
 

_[Essayist Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at
Cambridge. His new book is Time and Power
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