“Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil”, by Ron Rosenbaum

 

444 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0679431510

Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil is an ambitious book in which the author critiques those theorists and academics who try to come up with reasonable and rational explanations for Hitler’s unreasonable and irrational actions, i.e. whether Hitler is motivated by childhood traumas, sadistic power, sincere belief in his anti-Semitism, etc., and what Rosenbaum discovers, to his dismay, is that too many deep thinkers cannot accept evil without “the fig leaf of rectitude”…or, in other words, too many good-intentioned people unwittingly give Hitler a pass, excusing his evil in a way, by saying he was crazy, deranged, sincerely misguided, a true believer in his own vision, or what have you. That, as I said, is the ambitious premise of this book, but Rosenbaum doesn’t do much to justify it; rather, he seems to merely canvas others who have their opinions, which often are at odds with other opinions presented in the book, with no settlement or conclusions being drawn. It’s as if a bunch of intellectuals had gathered together for a late-night bull-session on the topic “Hitler: WTF?” and just sorta rambled on and on until the sun came up and the herbal tea ran out.

Rosenbaum states that he was guided by “Negative Capability” – I know, I know, me, too, so I looked it up, and it turns out that it was first used by Romantic poet John Keats in 1817 to characterize the capacity of the greatest writers – particularly Shakespeare – to pursue a vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty. The term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability of the individual to perceive, think and operate beyond any presupposition of a predetermined capacity of the human being. In other words, you can’t and shouldn’t be certain of anything as such certitude closes the mind; it’s best to allow a certain amount of mystery and inexpressibility in one’s understanding of things and, in so doing, you will keep an open mind. Not so bad then, right? However, Rosenbaum takes Negative Capability to mean that an understanding of some things is unattainable and that it is intellectually superior to be able stop grasping after answers. This creates a skepticism that closes the mind to explanation, and this is the lens through which he filters all these Hitler explanations.

So what is the explanation for Hitler’s evil? After 400-or-so pages, Rosembaum still doesn’t know, which kind of makes one wonder what the damn point of the book was to begin with. While Explaining Hitler does have its good moments, I found it to be uninteresting at best, with Rosembaum seemingly noncommittal and, at times, even afraid to present his own ideas about the subject. Best stick to Fest.