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WHO WAS HITLER?
Excerpts from Novak's paper, "HITLER STUDIES: A FIELD OF AMATEURS," Ben Novak, City University of Bratislava, Slovak Republic. E-mail: trevrizent@gmail.com. June 15, 2006.
One of the greatest mysteries of the century must be the failure of professional historians and biographers, for more than half a century after the event, to show much interest in actually explaining it. The fact that Hitler continues to be a mystery, however, is not a fact like other facts, to be recorded as a datum of history and passed over. A mystery, by definition, is the appearance of something surprising or unexpected that fairly calls out for an explanation.
But, is it not one of the purposes of history (indeed, the major function of historians) to explain historical events and to make them understandable? Professional historians have consistently refused to get their hands dirty investigating the many mysteries of Hitler’s life and career by going into the field to interview witnesses. Historians have not only failed, but have been charged by fellow historians with “evading,” their duty to weave the facts of Hitler’s life and career into a coherent and comprehensible narrative.
If the career of Adolf Hitler is one of the most catastrophic events of the entire twentieth century, including in its wake the most destructive war as well as the greatest crimes against humanity in human history, then one of the greatest mysteries of the century must be the failure of professional historians and biographers, for more than half a century after the event, to show much interest in actually explaining it.
In 1975, it was reported that more than 50,000 serious books and scholarly articles had already been published, and bibliographers were complaining that their numbers were so high that it was becoming impossible to keep track of them. By 1995, it was reported that this number had increased by 70,000, to more than 120,000.
To get some idea of the enormity of this research, that computes to more than twenty-four scholarly books and articles on Hitler and Nazism published every working day for twenty years—and the number is growing exponentially. Thus public interest in the mystery of Hitler continues to grow, with no end in sight.
Adolf Hitler was, and is still, an unsolved mystery. Biographer Robert Payne calls the rise of Hitler “most crucial and mystifying event of our century,” while Eberhard Jäckel calls it “the seminal question of the twentieth century.” Percy Ernst Schramm speaks for all historians when he writes: “By virtue of his personality, his ideas, and the fact that he misled millions, Hitler poses an historical problem of the first magnitude.” H. R. Trevor-Roper writes that, despite the passage of half a century, “Hitler remains a frightening mystery.”
The fact that Hitler continues to be a mystery, however, is not a fact like other facts, to be recorded as a datum of history and passed over. A mystery, by definition, is the appearance of something surprising or unexpected that fairly calls out for an explanation. But, is it not one of the purposes of history—indeed, the major function of historians—to explain historical events and to make them understandable? Are historical problems of the “first magnitude” to be simply declared “inexplicable?” Is Hitler to live on as history’s greatest mystery—the most unique and inexplicable man who ever lived? If the answer to these questions is “no,” then we must inquire into the responsibility of historians as to why the mystery remains.
On the second count, historians have not only failed, but have been charged by fellow historians with “evading,” their duty to weave the facts of Hitler’s life and career into a coherent and comprehensible narrative. Instead, Hitler remains an unexplained mystery, an “unperson,” unique in all human history, declared to be “inexplicable.”
The most fundamental and difficult question in the field of Hitler studies is the question of how this uneducated high-school dropout and bum from the streets of Vienna ever came to be one of the most outstanding orators and political organizers in German if not all modern history.
Kubicek’s memoirs are important as the first and only insight into, as H. R. Trevor-Roper writes in the Introduction to Kubicek’s memoirs, the incipient character of the man who “without any other natural advantage besides his own personality, became the most powerful and terrible tyrant and conqueror of modern history.” It was only through the indefatigable work of Jetzinger, however, that this witness was discovered and his testimony obtained before he died. If it had been left to the professional historians, we would never have known of Kubizek, and his memoirs might never have been written and published.
EVADING THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM OF HITLER: The charge of evasion is not a new one. In fact, it was first raised as early as 1953 by the man who is often called the “Dean of Hitler Studies,” H. R. Trevor-Roper. Eight years after Hitler’s death, Trevor-Roper published an essay entitled “The Mind of Adolf Hitler,” in which he accused historians of “evading” the two unanswered questions that constitute “the problem with Hitler.” Those two unanswered questions are: 1) Who was this man? and 2) How did he do it? In the first paragraph, Trevor-Roper starkly charges historians with evading both: “Who was Hitler? The history of his political career is abundantly documented and we cannot escape from its terrible effects.
A whole generation may well be named in history after him and we shall speak of the Age of Hitler as we speak of the Age of Napoleon or the Age of Charlemagne. And yet, for all the harsh obviousness of its imprint on the world, how elusive his character remains! What he did is clear; every detail of his political activity is now—thanks to a seizure and exploitation of documents unparalleled in history—historically established; his daily life and personal behavior have been examined and exposed. But still, when asked not what he did but how he did it, or rather how he was able to do it, historians evade the question, sliding away behind implausible answers.”
Two years later, surveying the attempts of historians to come to grips with this “unperson”, Fritz Stern, a German professor of literature, sadly concluded that historians were simply baffled. “As we go down the list of the more important biographers, we find each more meticulous than his predecessor in the sifting of fact from fiction, of documented evidence from inference and interpretation. Yet there is a point at which it is apt to defeat its own purpose, which I take to be an understanding of history.
A montage of historical minutiae does not necessarily lead to better insight. More details often entail less sense. The facts of the case—chief among them the metamorphosis of the Nobody from Vienna into the Leader of Greater Germany— are so extraordinary that when they are ‘left to tell their own story’ they hardly make any sense at all.”
Thus we had to wait until 1998—fifty-three years after the death of Hitler, forty-five years after the first biography of Hitler by a professional historian, twenty-two years after the last major biography by a non-professional, and twelve years after the beginning of the Historikerstreit—for a second professional historian to venture a newly researched biography of Hitler.
This was Ian Kershaw, whose first volume, Hitler: Hubris 1889-1936, was published in 1998, followed by the second volume, Hitler: Nemesis 1936-1945 in 1999. Unfortunately, however, this work turned out to be a major disappointment. While excellently researched (with 362 pages of footnotes) and engagingly written, the author admits in the Introduction that he is without a clue as to how to answer the questions Trevor-Roper accused historians of “evading.”
Kershaw, however, at least acknowledges the problem: “How do we explain how someone with so few intellectual gifts and social attributes, someone no more than an empty vessel outside his political life, unapproachable and impenetrable even for those in close company, incapable, it seems of genuine friendship, without the background that bred high office, without even any experience of government before becoming Reich Chancellor, could nevertheless have such an immense historical impact, could make the entire world hold its breath?” Rather than attempting to answer this question, however, Kershaw does exactly what Trevor-Roper accused professional historians of doing: he immediately evades it, asserting that it is “falsely posed.”
Instead, Kershaw declares that Hitler (in a famous phrase borrowed from Winston Churchill), is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Therefore, Kershaw argues, there is no need to explain him. To a professional historian, it seems, a mystery is not something to be solved, uncovered, revealed, or explained; it is simply another datum, to be worked in with all the other facts, and treated as though it, too, were a “fact.” Thus Kershaw’s biography proceeds to tell not the story of Hitler the man—which is what biography is supposed to be—but only the story of Hitler’s power: “the character of his power— the power of the Führer.”
In other words, Kershaw treats Hitler as nothing more than the effects he caused, insisting mysteriously that there was no one behind the effects. When Kershaw seeks to go behind “the power of the Führer” to explain who this man was and how he did it, he finds nothing—only what he calls a “void” or a “black hole.” “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler,” he insists. Kershaw fails not only to provide a coherent narrative, but insists that the most stupendous effects of the twentieth century were all caused by “the little man who wasn’t there”.
Among professional historians, Rosenbaum describes what he calls three “levels of despair” induced by the failure to explain Hitler. The most extreme level he calls the “revolt against explanation itself.” Some historians seriously hold that any attempt to explain Hitler is “immoral.” These historians insist that Hitler must forever remain a mystery, and that history must never attempt to explain him. Any explanation is considered, reports Rosenbaum, “dangerous, forbidden, a transgression of near biblical proportions.”
The second level of despair, which Rosenbaum labels “moderate,” is based on the inability of historians to find any narrative into which Hitler fits or any new theory to explain him. It is the general consensus of historians that Hitler is simply not explainable by “the systems of explanation, historical and psychological, that we use to explain ordinary human behavior.”
Thus it is considered “moderate” to acknowledge the bankruptcy of imagination of the historical profession in its failure to find any narrative understandable to ordinary human beings or any credible explanation of the most stupendous events of the twentieth century.
Shortly after the rise of Hitler, Hermann Göring boastfully predicted that “In later time the historians will not know how to depict it. For the first time in world history the historians will conclude: that did not happen by the normal process.” It seems to be the position of “moderate” historians today that Göring was right.
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