Ron Rosenbaum’s 1998 book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, got a lot of critical approbation, much of it apparently for the author’s argument that many “Hitler studies” arrived at conclusions that were simply a projection of the authors’ preconceived biases onto the Hitler story. Here’s a bit of the original New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani:
. . . he shows how historians, philosophers and psychologists have projected their own agendas, preconceptions and yearnings for certainty onto their portraits of Hitler, and how their portraits in turn mirror broader cultural assumptions.
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, portions of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, is a lively, provocative work of cultural history that is as compelling as it is thoughtful, as readable as it is smart.
As Rosenbaum observes in this volume, “powerful tendencies in contemporary scholarship have cumulatively served to diminish the decisiveness and centrality of Hitler’s role.”
. . . In analyzing the consequences and implications of various efforts to explain Hitler, Rosenbaum himself has made an important contribution to our understanding not just of Hitler, but of the cultural processes by which we try to come to terms with history as well.
With “Explaining Hitler,” he has written a book that does for Hitler studies what David Lehman’s superb book “Signs of the Times” did for deconstruction: he has written an exciting, lucid book informed by two qualities in increasingly short supply in academic circles: old-fashioned moral rigor and plain old common sense.
Now, as explained by Laurie Winer at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rosenbaum published an updated edition in 2014 that contained a new afterword. The LARB has published that in full, and although I haven’t read the original book, the afterword is informative, breezy and amusing, including mentions of the “Downfall” parodies we’ve seen on the Internet as well as of “Godwin’s Law” (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1.”)—a law that’s increasingly being obeyed, and approaching the asymptote faster. If anyone has read Explaining Hitler, please weigh in below.
What I found interesting in Rosenbaum’s new afterword was what he said about free will. Rosenbaum appears to have striven mightily to show that Hitler was not just a product of the material forces of the environment—Hitler’s genes, environment, and so on—but made his decisions freely—decisions that produced great evil—as a result of free will. Rosenbaum appears to think that Hitler was somehow free of the laws of physics. But let me show you by giving a few quotes:
But something or some things made Hitler want to do what he did. It wasn’t a concatenation of impersonal, external forces, a kind of collective determinism. It required his impassioned personal desire for extermination, even at the potential cost of defeat for Germany. It required him to choose evil. It required free will.
. . . One of the fascinating things I discovered in the course of writing this book was the reluctance of scholars and savants to use the word “evil” in regard to Hitler. Some years after writing the book and studying the question of evil, on a fellowship at Cambridge where I got to converse with scientists and theologians on this tormentingly complex matter, I ended up writing a long essay I called “Rescuing Evil.” It was an attempt to find a rationale for rescuing the idea of freely chosen “wickedness” (the technical philosophical term) from the determinists and materialists who would instead explain away evil as the purely neurochemical, physiological product of the brain.
“Neuromitigation,” the great contrarian writer and physician Raymond Tallis called it in an essay in the London Times Literary Supplement, and alas that is the way “scientific” studies of evildoers are heading. Blame it all on a brain defect. Neuroscientists would have a field day with their fMRI machines and Hitler’s brain. Sooner or later they’d claim to find some fragment of gray matter responsible for it all. Instead, we have a gray area, a fog, a Night and Fog, to cite Alain Resnais’s groundbreaking Holocaust movie, that we may never penetrate, and physics alone may never explain.
Of course physics may never explain this, for it requires knowledge that is either inaccessible or too complicated to apprehend, but surely physics underlies all of what Hitler did, and his actions were the result of and therefore compatible with the laws of physics. The question, though, is whether Hitler’s deeds were independent of the laws of physics, and that’s what Rosenbaum seems to think.
Now it’s not absolutely clear from these passages whether Rosenbaum is a dualist, but it sure seems that way. After all, even compatibilists, who are mostly of the “determinism rules; you-couldn’t-have-done-otherwise” stripe, would agree that all human behavior is “a concatenation of impersonal, external forces, a kind of collective determinism”; that Hitler’s deeds were “neurochemical, physiological product[s] of the brain”; and, I think, would “blame it on a brain defect,” or at least on the neurological wiring produced by Hitler’s genes and circumstances. Rosenbaum’s dissing of neuroscience is telling.
I suspect Rosenbaum really does think that Hitler could have “chosen” to do otherwise, and that gives him a reason to say that Hitler had “chosen wickedness”—in other words, Hitler was morally evil. As I’ve said before (and others have disagreed, most vociferously Dan Dennett), if our behaviors are determined, the word “moral choice” loses meaning—except in the sense of meaning “determinism led somebody to do something that society deems immoral”. As I’ve written before, at least one study shows that most folks feel that a fully deterministic view of human behavior means that “people would not be considered fully morally responsible for their actions”. For them, and for me, “moral responsibility” means “you had the possibility of making either a moral or immoral choice.”
Well, even without moral responsibility, we still bear responsibility for our actions, as we are the beings who committed them. Hitler, like every other evildoer, had to be punished for his injurious (murderous!) behavior—for reformation, to sequester him from society, and as a deterrent (deterrents are of course completely compatible with pure determinism). Reformation seems out of the question, and surely Hitler would have been hanged had he been caught, but he chose to kill himself. (I’m not a fan of capital punishment, and would have put him away for life.)
An interesting sidelight: Rosenbaum argues provocatively that the military defeat of Germany, as well as Hitler’s suicide, did not mean he lost the war, for Hitler conceived of the war not as a military exercise against the allies, but primarily as a way to dispose of the Jews, whom he saw as viruses. In that, says Rosenbaum, Hitler wound up winning, for he exterminated most of Europe’s Jews—and the population has never recovered.
