!UBC: Hilter's War
Jan. 12th, 2010 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyHoyt, Edwin P. Hitler's War. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988.
This is a !UBC because I stopped reading on p. 70, for reasons I will explain below.
There are two books with the title Hitler's War. One, by David Irving, is a revisionist history arguing that Hitler was not responsible for the genocide of the Jews. This one promised, from the dust-jacket copy, to be an analysis of Hitler's foreign policy and military decisions. I'd quite like to read that book; pity this wasn't it.
From the seventy pages that I read, plus a brief reconnoitre amongst the (scanty and over-general) endnotes and page-long bibliography (in a book about Hitler!), Hoyt's Hitler's War is the retelling by Edwin P. Hoyt of Hitler's rise, apogee, and fall, based almost entirely on secondary sources and entirely on books either written in or translated into English. (I don't believe it is impossible to write a good book about Hitler, or the Nazis, or the Holocaust, relying only on sources in English, but I think it would be very difficult and would have to be approached with a tremendous quantity of care.) In those seventy pages, I did not encounter anything I had not seen before, except Hoyt's promised analysis, which I found (a.) not very analytical, (b.) surfacy, (c.) simplistic, and (d.) sometimes at odds with facts from other things I'd read. It was very much like reading the Reader's Digest Condensed version of Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. What drove me to investigate the endnotes and bibliography--which in retrospect I realize I should have consulted before buying the book at all--was Hoyt's habit of writing dialogue for Hitler and Hitler's generals without citing sources.
(And then there was the unfortunate phrase, Keitel aroused General Beck, at which point I became completely and irredeemably twelve.)
Hoyt seems to be trying to tell a story. For example, he recounts the trial of General von Fritsch for homosexuality as if the Big Reveal (it was all lies! Himmler's lies!) is, in fact, a reveal, when it shouldn't be. One of the things I used to tell my students--and had to tell myself more than once--is that analytical writing is not about keeping secrets. You don't hide your cleverest idea from your reader until your final paragraph. Not all nonfiction works this way--you can write about the process of uncovering the truth about whatever your subject is--but Hoyt is writing about a much-covered piece of ground, and, as he says, writing "through common materials," i.e., secondary sources in English. There aren't any surprises here, and obfuscating your material . . . well, I suppose it might make it more interesting for someone who'd never read anything about Hitler and the NSDAP and the Third Reich, or for someone who wanted to read The Story of Hitler and His Generals--but I am not either of those persons and I merely found it irritating.
I don't want historiography to tell me stories. I become very suspicious when it tries, because I know all about the power of narrative and the power of narrative conventions, and the way that making a story out of something warps and changes it. I want historiography to tell me, as best it can and no matter how messy and inconvenient and ugly it is, the truth. Which is not to say that stories cannot also tell the truth, but the only way a story can tell the truth is by coming out the other side of a lie. And for that, you want fiction.
At this point, I realized that I was not in sympathy with Mr. Hoyt's project and decided to do us both a favor and Put. The. Book. Down. I've started Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, instead, and we'll see how it goes.
This is a !UBC because I stopped reading on p. 70, for reasons I will explain below.
There are two books with the title Hitler's War. One, by David Irving, is a revisionist history arguing that Hitler was not responsible for the genocide of the Jews. This one promised, from the dust-jacket copy, to be an analysis of Hitler's foreign policy and military decisions. I'd quite like to read that book; pity this wasn't it.
From the seventy pages that I read, plus a brief reconnoitre amongst the (scanty and over-general) endnotes and page-long bibliography (in a book about Hitler!), Hoyt's Hitler's War is the retelling by Edwin P. Hoyt of Hitler's rise, apogee, and fall, based almost entirely on secondary sources and entirely on books either written in or translated into English. (I don't believe it is impossible to write a good book about Hitler, or the Nazis, or the Holocaust, relying only on sources in English, but I think it would be very difficult and would have to be approached with a tremendous quantity of care.) In those seventy pages, I did not encounter anything I had not seen before, except Hoyt's promised analysis, which I found (a.) not very analytical, (b.) surfacy, (c.) simplistic, and (d.) sometimes at odds with facts from other things I'd read. It was very much like reading the Reader's Digest Condensed version of Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. What drove me to investigate the endnotes and bibliography--which in retrospect I realize I should have consulted before buying the book at all--was Hoyt's habit of writing dialogue for Hitler and Hitler's generals without citing sources.
(And then there was the unfortunate phrase, Keitel aroused General Beck, at which point I became completely and irredeemably twelve.)
Hoyt seems to be trying to tell a story. For example, he recounts the trial of General von Fritsch for homosexuality as if the Big Reveal (it was all lies! Himmler's lies!) is, in fact, a reveal, when it shouldn't be. One of the things I used to tell my students--and had to tell myself more than once--is that analytical writing is not about keeping secrets. You don't hide your cleverest idea from your reader until your final paragraph. Not all nonfiction works this way--you can write about the process of uncovering the truth about whatever your subject is--but Hoyt is writing about a much-covered piece of ground, and, as he says, writing "through common materials," i.e., secondary sources in English. There aren't any surprises here, and obfuscating your material . . . well, I suppose it might make it more interesting for someone who'd never read anything about Hitler and the NSDAP and the Third Reich, or for someone who wanted to read The Story of Hitler and His Generals--but I am not either of those persons and I merely found it irritating.
I don't want historiography to tell me stories. I become very suspicious when it tries, because I know all about the power of narrative and the power of narrative conventions, and the way that making a story out of something warps and changes it. I want historiography to tell me, as best it can and no matter how messy and inconvenient and ugly it is, the truth. Which is not to say that stories cannot also tell the truth, but the only way a story can tell the truth is by coming out the other side of a lie. And for that, you want fiction.
At this point, I realized that I was not in sympathy with Mr. Hoyt's project and decided to do us both a favor and Put. The. Book. Down. I've started Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, instead, and we'll see how it goes.
