THE MYSTERY OF EVIL

MANY HAVE TRIED TO UNDERSTAND HITLER, BUT THE FULL TRUTH MAY NEVER BE KNOWN

Author: By Steve Dowden

Date: SUNDAY, July 19, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

His very name, synonymous with evil on a monstrous scale, is so encrusted with legend, rumor, and myth that just disentangling the verifiable facts of his life is no small matter. Each biographer's Hitler is rather a different man from all the others. The scholars and interpreters have presented us with so many different Hitlers that, as Ron Rosenbaum puts it, ``they might not recognize each other well enough to say `Heil' if they came face to face in Hell.'' Even where the available facts are on the table, commentators find little to agree about.

This is because the stakes are so high. Understanding Hitler and how he and his criminal regime were possible at all is a crucial facet of our era's moral character. Explaining him -- or, for some, explaining him away -- is a key to understanding the moral world we inhabit and how it has come to be what it is. Living in a time that produced a figure such as Hitler implies an undercurrent of moral chaos that remains deeply unsettling even half a century after his death. Hitler has become the emblem of how low the world we live in can sink.

Rosenbaum, a literary journalist, has fully grasped the stakes. He has set out in his new book to examine in detail what we can and do know about Hitler and what he stands for.

Rosenbaum approaches his subject not by weighing in on behalf of any particular school of explanation, but by doggedly and impartially exploring the various competing explanations of Hitler, from the clear-sighted anti-Nazi journalists of Hitler's own day to the latest controversies among professional historians.

Did Hitler act out of a deep conviction of his own moral rectitude, as Hugh Trevor-Roper has argued, or was he a cynical ``mountebank'' acting out a role for the sake of gaining power, as Alan Bullock has proposed? Or did he begin by acting a role and finally come to believe in the fictional self he created?

Was his inner life driven by some kind of psychosexual pathology? Certainly his sexual life was odd. Questions about whether his genitalia were complete remain alive. His young and beautiful niece, Geli Raubal, may have been his lover, and he may have had her murdered: The evidence is suggestive but not conclusive. Perhaps he never had a lover of any sort.

Did Hitler experience a mental collapse in 1918 that included hallucinations and voices or a ``vision'' (as Hitler himself claimed)? The evidence is not unequivocal, but Lucy Dawidowicz has proposed that he did undergo some crucial episode in an army hospital. It was at this early and transforming moment, she suggests, that Hitler defined his central mission in life: to exterminate the Jews for supposedly betraying Germany at the end of the First World War.

Did Hitler fear that he may have had Jewish ancestors in his family tree? The evidence, once again, is strangely incomplete, possibly because his secret police covered the trail or possibly because there is simply nothing here to discover. Yet it is so very odd that these and other basic facts cannot be settled.

Rosenbaum investigates all these controversies and many more. He also wonders if any of these circumstances could, even if true, ``explain'' anything about the profound strangeness of Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism.

Or was it profound at all? Perhaps Hitler was only the indifferent instrument of an abstract anti-Semitism -- German anti-Semitism, or Christian anti-Semitism, or even Western racism as a whole -- that was already in place, an historical accident just waiting to happen. Daniel Goldhagen supposes that if Hitler hadn't been there to envision and carry out the Final Solution, then someone else ``like Hitler'' would have been.

Someone else ``like Hitler''? The mind boggles. Rosenbaum is skeptical about the various ``functionalist'' arguments, the views that diminish Hitler's essential strangeness, and moral agency, in favor of large and abstract historical forces.

Rosenbaum's circumspect reportage amply demonstrates that we do not yet know who Hitler was and are not likely to find out. The facts do not add up to any clear explanation. Hitler is an abyss that cannot be fathomed but cannot be ignored, either. The many ambiguities do not release us from the obligation to seek understanding. They intensify the obligation.

Rosenbaum's response to this defining circumstance is shrewd. He shifts the focus away from Hitler himself and onto the irrepressible need to make sense of him. Though Rosenbaum rigorously attends to the historical record (debunking a good deal of fanciful nonsense and misinformation along the way), his distinctive achievement in this book has a pronounced literary quality. He presents the task of explaining Hitler as one that necessarily involves a sophisticated element of morally alert interpretation.

For better or for worse, Hitler has become a figure who is simultaneously historical and symbolic, which is to say, literary. Rosenbaum lays claim to no final answers, but by deploying and interweaving techniques proper to both history and literature, he uniquely illuminates one of the darkest corners of modern experience.