UBC: Hitler (Bullock)

[truepenny]

Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Abridged edition. 1964. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

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This is an excellent biography. Inevitably, the fact that it was written nearly fifty years ago shows--more scholarship has been done and some of Bullock's ancillary facts are wrong (e.g., in 1941, the Russians were not better equipped and better fed than the Germans (Ivan's War); Albert Speer's "economic miracle" was almost entirely the work of the man he replaced (The Wages of Destruction); and so on)--but does not detract from Bullock's accomplishment in describing and analyzing Hitler's career. He explains the Beer Hall Putsch so that I understand it, which no one else I've read has managed (he's not as good on the Night of the Long Knives--Hohne is better--but that's less about Hitler's personal machinations and more about the machinations of those around him). Bullock talks very lucidly about why Hitler made the decisions he did, and without ever losing sight of the ideological reasons, he makes it clear how Nazi ideology both sprang out of and dovetailed with Hitler's personal obsessions and egomania.

I also appreciate Bullock's insistence that we give Hitler credit for being what he was--a man with a genius for politics and political manipulation--rather than simply dismissing him as a vulgar demagogue. But he also says:

The fact that his career ended in failure, and that his defeat was pre-eminently due to his own mistakes, does not by itself detract from Hitler's claim to greatness. The flaw lies deeper. For these remarkable powers [laid out in the preceding paragraph] were combined with an ugly and strident egotism, a moral and intellectual cretinism. The passions which ruled Hitler's mind were ignoble: hatred, resentment, the lust to dominate, and, where he could not dominate, to destroy. His career did not exalt but debased the human condition, and his twelve years' dictatorship was barren of all ideas save one--the further extension of his own power and that of the nation with which he had identified himself. [...] National Socialism produced nothing. Hitler constantly exalted force over the power of ideas and delighted to prove that men were governed by cupidity, fear, and their baser passions. The sole theme of the Nazi revolution was domination, dressed up as the doctrine of race, and failing that, a vindictive destructiveness. It is this emptiness, this lack of anything to justify the suffering he caused rather than his own monstrous and ungovernable will which makes Hitler both so repellent and so barren a figure.
(486-7)

This is an old-fashioned view--no trendy pomo existential moral-relativism-cum-nihilism here--but I think it does articulate something about Nazism and Hitler that matters: their essential pettiness--and, even more important, the idea that human beings can, and deserve to, be better than that.

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Reading about Hitler (and the other Nazis) often makes me think of something Diana Wynne Jones wrote near the end of Witch Week:

Now, when Inquisitor Littleton suddenly spoke in his loud grating voice, Charles looked at the inquisitor. He was a small man with a stupid face, in a blue suit which did not fit, who enjoyed arresting witches.

Charles found himself remembering his first witch again. The fat man who had been so astonished at being burned. And he suddenly understood the witch's amazement. It was because someone so ordinary, so plain stupid, as Inquisitor Littleton had the power to burn him. And that was all wrong.
(Witch Week 203)

I think my mental image of Hitler is always partly an image of Inquisitor Littleton: a stupid man who enjoys arresting witches. A man who does not deserve the power he has over life and death. Because in some ways that's the worst thing about Hitler. Not just that he wasn't worth the suffering, destruction, and death he caused (because, really, nobody could possibly be worth that--the idea is ludicrous), but that he wasn't worth the devotion he caused, either. As horrible a man as Josef Goebbels was, Hitler still didn't deserve his suicide.

Comments

to destroy

[marycatelli]

how very true

when the war was clearly lost, he was ordering the destruction of German industry and supplies and saying that so far from worrying about what the German people would need to leave, it would be better to destroy even those needed for a most basic level of sustenance.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Downfall ?

Bruno Ganz's performance as Hitler in that stuck me as doing something amazing that I would sum up as the ruins of great charisma, that felt very plausible indeed.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I haven't--but that accords with what Bullock says about Hitler's effect on people.