Explaining Hitler; The Search for the Origins of His Evil

Expanding on his lead essay in The New Yorker magazine, the author presents a literary investigation of the heated controversies among historians, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians about the life and nature of Adolf Hitler. 40,000 first printing. Tour.

Seeking explanations for Hitler's monumental evil and the Holocaust, Rosenbaum traveled from Vienna and Munich to London, Paris and Jerusalem, interviewing leading historians, biographers, philosophers, psychologists and theologians. While this convoluted, selective survey of Hitler scholarship will frustrate readers looking for hard answers, it offers groundbreaking insights into the enigma of Hitler's psyche. Essayist Rosenbaum (Travels with Dr. Death), a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, gives voice to a diversity of opinion, from Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose best-selling The Last Days of Hitler presents the F?hrer as a self-deluded demigod, sincere in his demonic hatreds, to Oxford historian Alan Bullock, for whom Hitler is a shrewdly calculating, knowingly evil politician. Rosenbaum also interviewed critic/novelist George Steiner, who has interpreted Hitler as an "evil genius"Athe culmination of dark forces within European civilization; British historian of religion Hyam Maccoby, who argues that Christianity must bear responsibility for the Holocaust; documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann; and best-selling Harvard scholar Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners). Rosenbaum effectively re-creates the hitherto largely untold story of the heroic anti-Hitler Munich journalists who courageously took on the Nazis from 1920 to 1933. And he provides compelling testimony refuting the oft-repeated claim that Hitler had one undescended testicle. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A resourcefully imaginative examination of our desperate search for an explanation of ultimate evil. In the vast literature on Hitler and the Holocaust, one question recurs again and again: Why? If the ``how'' (the mechanics and bureaucracy) of the ``final solution'' has been detailed, then the vexatious ``why'' still haunts the worlds collective conscience. Rosenbaum (Travels with Dr. Death, 1991; Manhattan Passions, 1987), a New York Observer cultural affairs columnist, brings a journalist's vigorous, querying temperament to a topic that all too often drowns in opaque pedantic moralizing. Rosenbaum has read extensively and thoughtfully; he also casts a wide intellectual net, writing chapters on the interpretive musings of H.R. Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Yehuda Bauer, the philosopher Berel Lang, literary critic George Steiner, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, and even the Hitler apologist and revisionist David Irving. (Conspicuously and curiously absent is Primo Levi, whose work The Drowned and the Saved is a classic in the field.) Potentially explosive subjects--for example, Hitler's reportedly ``abnormal'' sexuality--are handled with discerning intelligence. Rosenbaum employs a brilliant methodological stratagem by taking Albert Schweitzer's 1906 study, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, as a model. Schweitzer realized that the 19th-century school of German Protestant ``higher criticism,'' which prided itself on its ``scientific'' positivism in explaining Jesus, actually revealed more about scholars themselves than the historical figure they were studying. Similarly, Rosenbaum shows how the various attempts to ``explain'' Hitler are prisms that reflect our own fears and desires. This leads, of course, to the not insignificant matter of Rosenbaum's own fears and desires, ironically not fully addressed by the author. Yet his great contribution is that, unlike most Holocaust scholars, he refuses to offer a definitive explanation. Instead, he lays out with memorable clarity a series of tantalizing interpretations, preferring a ``poetry of doubt'' that allows us to grapple for ourselves with the question of evil. Profound and provocative. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rosenbaum, a literary journalist (Esquire, New York Times Magazine), believes that although much has been written about Hitler, not much has been settled. Drawing on archival research and interviews with historians, he has produced a well-written work of historiography and, at times, investigative journalism, tracing the history not of Hitler per se but of the "Hitler explainers." Beginning with the intrepid Munich Post reporters of the 1920s and early 1930s, who dared to challenge Hitler's controlled public image and were a thorn in his side, to the early postwar historians (Trevor-Roper and Bullock) and the new generation of scholars (Browning and Goldhagen), the author gives these historians opportunities to address questions that might not have been covered in their published works. Readers expecting a full-length biography of Hitler (which was not the author's purpose) will no doubt be disappointed, but Rosenbaum admirably sheds light on the many quarrels and inconsistencies in the literature, from the mysterious death of Geli Raubal (Hitler's niece), to the question of Hitler's evil, to the debate between functionalists and intentionalists. For both public and academic libraries. (Notes not seen..
-AJohn A. Drobnicki, CUNY York Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.