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Debates concerning the historical and moral significance of Adolf Hitler have gone on since the beginning of his rise to power in Germany. In the decades after his bunker suicide, those debates elevated to arguments over the very nature and existence of evil. An integral part of the arguments has been the ongoing attempt to understand the why of Hitler. In this engaging work of literary journalism, Ron Rosenbaum travels the world to converse with some of the historians, philosophers, filmmakers, and others who have attempted to make sense of Hitler's actions, to find a root cause for the Holocaust.
Rosenbaum methodically examines the evidence for and against all the major hypotheses concerning the origin of Hitler's character. He sifts through all the rumors--including his alleged Jewish ancestry and what biographer Alan Bullock refers to as "the one-ball business"--and the attempts to derive some psychological cause from them. Various Hitlers emerge: Hitler as con man and brutal gangster, Hitler the unspeakable pervert, Hitler the ladies' man, Hitler as modernist artist working in the medium of evil....
But Rosenbaum's portrayals of those who would define Hitler are as fascinating as the shifting perspectives on the führer. Here we see the brave journalists of the Munich Post who attempted to reveal Hitler's evil to the world as early as the 1920s. We witness Shoah director Claude Lanzmann's imperious attempts to stifle analysis of Hitler and the Holocaust, branding such historical inquiries as "obscene." We see the effects, on a frazzled Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, of the controversy surrounding the publication of his Hitler's Willing Executioners. We see the interior crises of Hitler apologist David Irving and philosopher-novelist George Steiner, among others, as they struggle with the ramifications of their work and thought. And, best of all, we have Rosenbaum to serve as an informed, intimate, and on occasion witty guide. In White Noise, Don DeLillo depicted the satirical academic discipline of "Hitler studies;" Ron Rosenbaum breathes a life into the field that no fiction can match. --Ron Hogan
From Publishers Weekly
Seeking explanations for Hitler's monumental evil and the Holocaust, Rosenbaum traveled from Vienna and Munich to London, Paris and Jerusalem, interviewing leading historians, biographers, philosophers, psychologists and theologians. While this convoluted, selective survey of Hitler scholarship will frustrate readers looking for hard answers, it offers groundbreaking insights into the enigma of Hitler's psyche. Essayist Rosenbaum (Travels with Dr. Death), a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, gives voice to a diversity of opinion, from Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose best-selling The Last Days of Hitler presents the F?hrer as a self-deluded demigod, sincere in his demonic hatreds, to Oxford historian Alan Bullock, for whom Hitler is a shrewdly calculating, knowingly evil politician. Rosenbaum also interviewed critic/novelist George Steiner, who has interpreted Hitler as an "evil genius"Athe culmination of dark forces within European civilization; British historian of religion Hyam Maccoby, who argues that Christianity must bear responsibility for the Holocaust; documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann; and best-selling Harvard scholar Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners). Rosenbaum effectively re-creates the hitherto largely untold story of the heroic anti-Hitler Munich journalists who courageously took on the Nazis from 1920 to 1933. And he provides compelling testimony refuting the oft-repeated claim that Hitler had one undescended testicle. Author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Rosenbaum, a literary journalist (Esquire, New York Times Magazine), believes that although much has been written about Hitler, not much has been settled. Drawing on archival research and interviews with historians, he has produced a well-written work of historiography and, at times, investigative journalism, tracing the history not of Hitler per se but of the "Hitler explainers." Beginning with the intrepid Munich Post reporters of the 1920s and early 1930s, who dared to challenge Hitler's controlled public image and were a thorn in his side, to the early postwar historians (Trevor-Roper and Bullock) and the new generation of scholars (Browning and Goldhagen), the author gives these historians opportunities to address questions that might not have been covered in their published works. Readers expecting a full-length biography of Hitler (which was not the author's purpose) will no doubt be disappointed, but Rosenbaum admirably sheds light on the many quarrels and inconsistencies in the literature, from the mysterious death of Geli Raubal (Hitler's niece), to the question of Hitler's evil, to the debate between functionalists and intentionalists. For both public and academic libraries. (Notes not seen..-AJohn A. Drobnicki, CUNY York Coll. Lib., CUNYCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Michael R. Marrus
While respectful of most of the Hitler explainers, Rosenbaum appears largely as a skeptic, gently pointing out to his interviewees where evidence is thin or their explanations weak.
The Wall Street Journal, Anne Applebaum
[I]t will probably not please all of the more traditional writers of history, nor will it please readers who find even a touch of psycho-jargon too much to take. But once one gets over the novelty, and sometimes the irritation, of reading history in this way, it is impossible not to admire the depth of Mr. Rosenbaum's knowledge, the intelligence of the questions he asks and the time he has spent re-examining all the possible explanations of Hitler's character in general and his decision to destroy the Jews in particular.
New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
Unlike many intellectual histories, Explaining Hitler does not confine itself to simple textual analysis, but showcases Rosenbaum's reportorial skills with acute, sometimes edgy interviews with such controversial thinkers as Claude Lanzmann, the creator of the movie Shoah, George Steiner, the critic and author of the much debated novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., and the Hitler apologist David Irving. The resulting book ... is a lively, provocative work of cultural history that is as compelling as it is thoughtful, as readable as it is smart.
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Michael Andre Bernstein
A large part of the book's fascination arises directly from Rosenbaum's decision to forgo producing yet another conventional Hitler biography in order to focus on what could be called "the Hitler effect": the widely divergent, often contradictory accounts we have of him, his motives, personality, beliefs and even sexuality.
Mare Fisher, Washington Post
"Cultural criticism served up as riveting narrative history...with words and ideas that surprise, amuse and even elevate the reader."
From Kirkus Reviews
A resourcefully imaginative examination of our desperate search for an explanation of ultimate evil. In the vast literature on Hitler and the Holocaust, one question recurs again and again: Why? If the ``how'' (the mechanics and bureaucracy) of the ``final solution'' has been detailed, then the vexatious ``why'' still haunts the worlds collective conscience. Rosenbaum (Travels with Dr. Death, 1991; Manhattan Passions, 1987), a New York Observer cultural affairs columnist, brings a journalist's vigorous, querying temperament to a topic that all too often drowns in opaque pedantic moralizing. Rosenbaum has read extensively and thoughtfully; he also casts a wide intellectual net, writing chapters on the interpretive musings of H.R. Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Yehuda Bauer, the philosopher Berel Lang, literary critic George Steiner, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, and even the Hitler apologist and revisionist David Irving. (Conspicuously and curiously absent is Primo Levi, whose work The Drowned and the Saved is a classic in the field.) Potentially explosive subjects--for example, Hitler's reportedly ``abnormal'' sexuality--are handled with discerning intelligence. Rosenbaum employs a brilliant methodological stratagem by taking Albert Schweitzer's 1906 study, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, as a model. Schweitzer realized that the 19th-century school of German Protestant ``higher criticism,'' which prided itself on its ``scientific'' positivism in explaining Jesus, actually revealed more about scholars themselves than the historical figure they were studying. Similarly, Rosenbaum shows how the various attempts to ``explain'' Hitler are prisms that reflect our own fears and desires. This leads, of course, to the not insignificant matter of Rosenbaum's own fears and desires, ironically not fully addressed by the author. Yet his great contribution is that, unlike most Holocaust scholars, he refuses to offer a definitive explanation. Instead, he lays out with memorable clarity a series of tantalizing interpretations, preferring a ``poetry of doubt'' that allows us to grapple for ourselves with the question of evil. Profound and provocative. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld
All in all, Rosenbaum has succeeded in writing a highly important book. As a tour d'horizon of Holocaust scholarship, Explaining Hitler connects historical inquiry to the deepest issues of free will, personal responsibility, and evil. Still, for all its intellectual force, the book also has some curious flaws. For one thing, there are conspicuous and inexplicable absences. Where in Rosenbaum's book is Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and minister of armaments? Speer knew Hitler like few others, and lived to write a remarkable memoir. And where, too, is the distinguished German historian Joachim Fest? While such genuinely important material is passed over, Rosenbaum devotes a great deal of space to the numerous strange myths and rumors that have arisen about Hitler's psychopathology. But if the facts behind many of these are rather difficult to pin down, and if all tend to exonerate Hitler by pointing to one or another form of severe mental illness, what is the purpose of sorting them out, particularly those that are on their face utterly preposterous? It is a measure of Rosenbaum's achievement that, even with this contradiction at its core, Explaining Hitler is a book that glistens with insight and intelligence, and shimmers with originality.
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