A L S O +T O D A Y

Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from the Lives of 20 Young Writers
Reviewed by Peter Kurth
Calm, self-aware and thoughtful personal essays from young writers, many of whom were previously unpublished

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My syndrome, myself
By Laura Miller
(06/24/98)

Rethinking Jonestown
By Scott McLemee
(06/17/98)

Beach reading 1998
By Dwight Garner
(06/15/98)

Punch drunk
By Vivian Gornick
(05/27/98)

Cormac McCarthy: Shakespeare of the American West
By Vince Passaro
(05/20/98)

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______The artist of Death

WHO WAS THE MAN WHO PERPETRATED THE GREATEST
CRIME IN HUMAN HISTORY? RON ROSENBAUM
BRILLIANTLY EXPLORES THE ORIGINS OF HITLER'S EVIL.
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EXPLAINING HITLER: THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF HIS EVIL
BY RON ROSENBAUM | RANDOM HOUSE | 484 PAGES

BY GARY KAMIYA | He is a satanic cartoon, the nightmare we cannot awake from and the cliché we erect against the void he made. He is the black hole in the middle of our blasted century, a figure so weighted down with the allegorical trappings of Evil that his reality seems ungraspable. Adolf Hitler stands at the limit of so many kinds of human understanding -- moral, political, psychological, perhaps even metaphysical -- that he is forever escaping into the gilded glare of the absolute, like the hideous negative of one of those inscrutable saints in Byzantine portraits.

"These people must not know where I come from," Hitler said when he learned of an early investigation into his murky origins. "Nobody must know who I am."

For half a century, historians have been trying to learn who he was -- and there is still no consensus. In "Explaining Hitler," Ron Rosenbaum tries to approach him indirectly, by interrogating the ways that other scholars and journalists have tried to explain Hitler. He hopes to discover, he says, "if not the truth about Hitler, then some truths about what we talk about when we talk about Hitler. What it tells us about Hitler, what it tells us about ourselves."

Few contemporary writers are better equipped to pull off this tricky double task. Rosenbaum, who writes a column of sui generis criticism for the New York Observer and teaches literary journalism at Columbia University, is a rare triple threat: He is a first-rate thinker, a fine reporter and a superb writer. He is also, as this volume proves, in control of a massive body of scholarly work on Hitler. "What I've attempted in this book is to approach not all but certain aspects of Hitler scholarship with the eye of an educated consumer," he writes modestly. In fact, Rosenbaum's ambition -- and achievement -- is considerably larger than that. "Explaining Hitler" is more than a shopper's guide to Hitler Studies. He doesn't offer, or claim to offer, a unified vision of the obscure Austrian corporal who authored the Holocaust and was personally responsible for the deaths of 40 million people. But Rosenbaum clears away -- or at least makes problematic -- a lot of widely held myths, gives clear and logical accounts of the major controversies in the field and, at crucial moments, delivers his own lucid opinions. The portrait that results is in some ways the intellectual equivalent of a cubist painting: It doesn't always look like the Hitler you think you know, but it gives you the tools to see him in a new, deeper way.

Rather than merely synthesizing the views of Hitler scholars, Rosenbaum interrogates those scholars (and is sometimes kicked out of interviews with them for his trouble), sets them rhetorically against each other, meditates on the psychological needs their views might fulfill. From his strangely truncated interview with the battle-scarred Daniel Goldhagen, author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners," to his challenging conversation with George Steiner, author of a provocative -- some believe obscenely provocative -- novel about Hitler; from a sleepless night spent in the "Gestapo Cottage" near Hitler's mountain retreat to a close encounter with the strange, convoluted mind of revisionist historian David Irving, Rosenbaum turns his quest into an engrossing moral, intellectual and personal odyssey.

What really makes "Explaining Hitler" a page-turner is, paradoxically, the very thing that is most problematic about its method: its founding assumption that Hitler is a vast enigma, a White Whale-like mystery to be forever searched for. This assumption creates intellectual and literary suspense -- when will the hidden truth about Hitler, what Rosenbaum calls the "lost safe-deposit box," be found? -- but it also, inadvertently, tilts the book toward so-called Hitler Exceptionalism, the belief that Hitler was not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from all other human beings.

But if Rosenbaum, in the end, reluctantly sides with the Hitler exceptionalists, to his credit he resists mystifying his subject. And if at times one wishes he had pursued only his ambitious original aim of providing "some answer to the question 'What made Hitler Hitler?'" and had not wandered into the fascinating but endless thickets of secondary historiographical interpretation, he pulls off his audacious double mission with energy and a powerful shaping intelligence. Personal without being self-indulgent, erudite without being pedantic, written with passion and a moral engagement worthy of its momentous subject, "Explaining Hitler" is an exemplary work of intellectual journalism, an idiosyncratic classic.

Rosenbaum opens his book with a vivid and haunting scene: his search for the ur-mystery of Hitler, his family origins. "I was ready to give up and go back," he writes. "A surprise mid-autumn thunderstorm had blown out of Russia and was blanketing Central Europe, making the relatively primitive back roads of this backwoods quarter of Austria increasingly impassable." Rosenbaum and his guide are searching for a ghost town named Döllersheim -- Hitler's ancestral village, which was "literally blasted off the map and out of existence sometime after Hitler annexed Austria. An effort -- some partisans in the controversy contend -- to erase all traces of certain irregular and disreputable Hitler family events that took place there."

N E X T+P A G E+| Was Hitler Jewish?

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ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MORSE