Joachim Fest Proud to Be German Again
A High german view of a High german villain
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Apr 28, 1974
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Adolf Hitler was a brave soldier in World War I, only he was never promoted to the ranks of noncommissioned officers because, co-ordinate to the subsequent testimony of the regimental adjutant, "we could discover no leadership qualities in him." It was not an entirely unreasonable judgment. Until the age of 30, he never made a unmarried spoken communication and didn't even belong to any political party. When he finally ventured into politics, he fabricated several bad miscalculations and ended in Landsberg prison house, where the warden wrote of him: "He is easily content, pocket-size and desirous to delight. Makes no demands, is serenity and sensible, serious and quite without aggressiveness." Past the time this much‐misunderstood "man finally destroyed himself just after his 56th birthday, he had fulfilled his ain prediction that "we will comport half the world into destruction with us." Even so our understanding of the destroyer has not advanced very far beyond that day in 1930 when Hitler, on hearing that various critics were investigating his origins, nervously told an associate: "These people must non exist allowed to find out who I am."
The efforts to explain who Hitler was accept ranged from the passionate denunciations of his ideological enemies (Bertolt Brecht, for example) to the somewhat cooler accounts of journalists (William Shirer) and scholars (Alan Bullock) to the speculations of distant psychologists (Walter C. Langer), who suggest dark connections between Hitler'southward sexual disturbances and the politics of evil. After half a century, information technology might seem that there is little new to be said, just the gargantuan success of Albert Speer'south "Inside the 3rd Reich" apparently started all the same some other scramble amid the collectors and publishers of Nazi memorabilia. Final twelvemonth's results included, aside from Langer'south wartime crystal‐ball‐gazing "The Heed of Adolf Hitler," Robert Payne'south "The Life and Death of Hitler," Werner Maser's "Hitler: Legend, Myth and Reality," and even the recollections of an astrologer named Wilhelm Wulff, who never actually met Hitler but analyzed the Faker's horoscope for the edification of Henrich Himmler. At present, with Charlie Chaplin'south "The Great Dictator" still playing to big crowds in Berlin, an enterprising German publisher has actually started a pseudo‐newsmagazine called Das Dritte Reich to restate the whole story in bimonthly installments. And and so this spring brings us Joachim C. Fest's "Hitler," which is, among other things, the longest and about comprehensive of all the Hitler biographies. It is likewise the most successful, with sales reported at 500,000 copies in Germany and 200,000 in France.
Fest's credentials are good, He is not an academician or a polemicist but a professional person journalist, intelligent, scrupulous, off-white‐minded. Now 48, he has worked as director of the North High german Telly in Hamburg, and he is an editor of the distinguished Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1970, he wrote an interesting series of portraits of the "Nazi leaders, "The Face of the Third Reich." That prompted William Jovanovich of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich to commission a major biography of Hitler. "He said they wanted this book from a German language," Fest told an interviewer, "non another 1 like the before works by Bullock, Shirer, and then on, simply a book by a German language writer."
Similar whatsoever competent and conscientious journalist, Fest tries to provide a reasonably objective account. He does non seem to have unearthed any important new document'southward, or to have interviewed many major survivors of the Third Reich (except for Speer, whose memoirs he helped to compile), but he has dug deeply into the mountains of evidence, and he has advisedly weighed the significance of all the testimony. He takes the states over all the familiar footing, from the malign influence of Richard Wagner on the neurotic young student in Vienna to the effects of various drugs on the halfmad tyrant issuing suicidal orders from his subterranean bunker. In mulling over every shred of evidence, Fest helps to right certain legends —the young Hitler of the Vienna years was not a penniless vagrant, for example, but a rather prosperous pensioner with vast architectural plans — but these are relatively pocket-sized points. A major work on this subject at this fourth dimension really needs more flair and fashion that Fest can provide.
His prose, equally reproduced in this translation, ranges from the pedestrian to the opaque. (To cite one example: "The regime was abjuring its visions and reducing them to an idde fixe." Or some other "The dilemma faced past the active opponents of the government in Germany was computed of a complicated complex of inhibitions.") Only his most remarkable failure every bit a journalist is that he treats most every dramatic climax in his story as something to be evaded, circled around, or backed into. On the burning of the Reichstag, for instance, he says that there are still "considerable doubts" nigh who started the burn down, but "we need non go into it ourselves, since the question [has] but small bearing on our agreement of the political currents." The famous called-for of the books receives but one sentence, plus the annotate that "people felt again that there was a firm hand at the helm of state." Even the moment of Hitler's invasion of Poland is buried in a paragraph that begins with the German radio broadcasting a series of Nazi demands to Warsaw. The final upshot of this careful, sensible approach is, unfortunately, that Fest doesn't really tell us very much that we didn't already know—and that in telling us what we practice know, he manmake all leaden.
Then why the swell success? One of the oddities of the Hitler books now coming from Federal republic of germany is the relatively small share devoted to Globe State of war II, and to the atrocities that it engendered. In Shirer, for case, the invasion of Poland comes at well-nigh the halfway point; in Bullock at about two‐thirds. Fest, past dissimilarity, reaches page 625 before the state of war gets under style, leaving only about 100 pages for such events as Dunkirk, Stalingrad and Auschwitz. This departure in emphasis suggests that the Hitler nosotros proceed trying to bewitch varies widely, fifty-fifty among men of goodwill, from i country to another. There are two basic questions that every inquiry tries to answer (i) how did an obscure and semi‐literate Austrian demagogue ("a guttersnipe," as Winston Churchill aptly called him) get the constitutionally called ruler of Germany and (ii) how did this ruler lead a supposedly civilized people into war, barbarism and destruction? Outside of Germany, the involvement in the beginning question is rather limited. It is our own meet with the monster that continues to fascinate united states. Thus the British still relish replaying the heroic Battle of Great britain (to which Fest devotes less than a paragraph), and the French are plainly just beginning to confront the long suppressed ugliness of their collaboration (which Fest ignores almost entirely). In the United States, Hitler is however largely the ogre of the Final Solution, and the public interest in that horror is non entirely free of morbidity (run into the advertising for SS helmets in the back of certain magazines). Just Fest devotes very lilliputian attention to whatever of that. There is just one brief mention, for instance, of Treblinka, and the fact that 700,000 people died there.
©1974, The New York Times Co. All rights reserved.
It is non obligatory, of course, that every biographer of Hitler tell his story in terms of the concentration camps — or, for that matter, tile Boxing of United kingdom. Nor is Fest in any way too lenient in his criticisms of the Nazis. Still, any business relationship of the rising and fall of Hitler becomes inevitably colored past the nationality of the author. This is not a affair of bias so much every bit of a difference in point of view. The differences are oftentimes subtle, perhaps fifty-fifty unconscious, simply it is not insignificant that Fest frequently refers to the Allies as "the enemy." Would a nonGerman author repeatedly tell us that the Germans were outnumbered in battle — outnumbered in the Blitzkrieg against France, outnumbered at El Alamein, outnumbered on D‐ Twenty-four hours? Would a not‐German writer tell us that the British had "initiated" in 1942 a policy of "terror bombing of the civilian population" without ever mentioning Rotterdam or Coventry or the repeated assaults on London's Eastward Stop?
The German view of Globe War II seems to consist mainly of some early victories, so a lot of Allied air raids, and the terrible defeat in the snows of Russia — a series of cataclysms that nobody, not even the Ground forces conspirators of July xx, could do much nearly, because the Reich was by and then in the easily of a wild human and his ruthless secret law. "What the public now felt," Fest observes, "was non then much its erstwhile adoration as a dull, fatalistic sense of an indissoluble reciprocal bond." The bond was not reciprecal, though, for Hitler told a foreign visitor that "if the German people are no longer so potent and ready for sacrifice that they volition stake their ain blood on their existence, they deserve to laissez passer away and exist annihilated past another, stronger power .... If that is the case, I would not shed a tear for the German people."
For the Germans, therefore, the Hitler to be exorcised is the homo they voted for back in 1933. Some years agone, the standard liberal view was that Hitler simply expressed the mystical aggressiveness of the High german people, but this was non a view that the Germans could accept as anything only alien propaganda. A more than charitable argument was that the Germans had not really supported Hitler at all, that he never won a bulk in a free ballot. Just this was merely a technicality, for the Nazis won a lot more than votes than any other party, and once Hitler was in power, the Germans cheered.
To the explanation of this sad fact, Fest devotes virtually of his labors, leading us through all the labyrinths of German language politics of the 1920'southward. He tells us well-nigh the psychological scars of the 30 Years State of war, reopened and infected by Versailles. He tells us all the shortcomings of the Weimar Republic. This provides a good groundwork, but it is simply background. He tells us, too, of Hitler's often underestimated tactical skills, his ability to change direction and to play off ane enemy against another, and his passionate rhetoric — some of which sounds today strangely like the rallying and uplifting speeches of Charles de Gaulle or John Kennedy. Yet as late as 1929, the Nazis were nil — they held. 12 seats in a Reichstag of some 500 members. A year later, the economic system had collapsed, the unemployed numbered in the millions, and the Nazis won their first stunning ballot victory. And once Hitler had gained power, he did create jobs, build highways, and even preside over victory in the Olympics. All of which leads Fest to the conclusion that "if Hitler had succumbed to an bump-off or an blow at the end of 1938, few would hesitate to telephone call him one of the greatest of German statesmen, the consummator of German'due south history.
Peradventure. Perhaps, after a scrutiny of all the documents, this is the sensible view. Perhaps it is the view that sensible Germans have long been waiting to hear — that they too were victims of the tragedy. Notwithstanding the enigma of Hitler remains, and what remains most enigmatic is not really the question of who he was, and why he became the leader of Germany, merely rather, who the Germans are, and why they were led so far. ■
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/28/archives/a-german-view-of-a-german-villain-hitler.html
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