Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

"When Hitler's war ended in 1945, the war over Hitler--who he really was, what gave birth to his unique evil--had just begun. Half a century later, we know that Hitler didn't escape from the Berlin bunker, but--in ways both frightening and profound--Hitler has managed to escape explanation. Fierce battles still rage among historians, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians over the meaning of Hitler. [This book] is an extraordinary expedition into the war zone of Hitler theories by Ron Rosenbaum, a writer acclaimed for investigating the elusive mysteries that haunt and provoke us. More than ten years ago, Rosenbaum began exploring some maddeningly unresolved yet crucial controversies over Hitler's psyche, his ancestry, his sexuality, the origin of his anti-Semitism. Rosenbaum discovered in the meanings projected upon the Rorschach of Hitler by the possessed and embattled explainers that what we really talk about when we talk about Hitler is the enigma of ultimate evil--the ways we explain it, the ways we explain it away. Rosenbaum embarked on an investigative odyssey that took him from Vienna and Munich to London, Paris, and Jerusalem, searching for answers in neglected archives, in the fading memories of heroic anti-Hitler journalists of the Weimar era, and in dramatic face-to-face encounters with some of the most brilliant and controversial explainers of our era, ranging from Alan Bullock and Hugh Trevor-Roper to Daniel Goldhagen, George Steiner, Claude Lanzmann, even David Irving. Along the way he pursues to the bitter end a range of Hitler theories, from the profound to the heretical, from the psychosexual (should we believe the OSS reports that Hitler practiced an outré sexual perversion with his half-niece Geli Raubal?) to the genealogical (what about whispers that Hitler had a Jewish grandfather?) and the theological--concluding with an impassioned examination of the clash of contemporary scholarly visions of Hitler between the 'laughing Hitler' of Lucy Dawidowicz and the 'Hamlet Hitler' of Christopher Browning. In the kind of riveting writing and thinking that has led NPR' s Maureen Corrigan to characterize him as a 'prose master' of 'great cultural journalism' and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Powers to call him 'one of the few distinctive voices of modern American literary journalism,' Ron Rosenbaum illuminates what Hitler explainers tell us about Hitler, about the explainers--and about ourselves."--Dust jacket.