Books, Arts & Manners February 23, 1998

T H ED E V I L'SO W N

RICHARD BROOKHISER

Mr. Brookhiser is a senior editor at NR.

JOHN Lukacs, the historian of the Second World War and much else, is a complex talent. He ranges wide, and sits at home (home being Central Europe, though he has lived here for decades). His great strengths and his weaknesses appear in each of these characteristic modes.
Ideas are a trap for him. He will pick up a thought as hard as biscotti, and fuss with it until it turns back into batter. Never look too hard at the shuffling qualifications in his paragraphs -- you will get dizzy. On the other hand, he has a fine sensibility, which enables him to observe
The Hitler of History,
by John Lukacs (Knopf, 279 pp., $26)

and evoke cultural and social scenes in places ranging from Budapest to Philadelphia. He has written little vignettes of American life that are so true and right they make you laugh out loud -- which inspires confidence in his takes on other people and places.
But the first job of historians is to tell stories (not necessarily the most important job, to be Lukacsian for a moment, but the first job). Lukacs's grasp of his material is weakest when he is furthest from his personal ground zero. On the cold war, or anything in the Pacific or west of the Alleghenies, he is not reliable. He writes best about his two favorite figures, Churchill and Roosevelt, when he details their wartime partnership -- less well when he touches on other aspects of their careers. When he deals with the hot core of World War II, all cylinders are firing. He has written this particular book a number of times. The best version is probably the first, The Last European War, 1939 - 1941. But The Hitler of History is a close second.
Hitler for him is the hero of World War II, in the sense in which Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. Like Satan, Hitler puts the story in motion. Their vices (pride for Satan, hatred for Hitler) impelled them to act, and their virtues enabled them to act as effectively as they did. Like Satan, Hitler is cool. Satan's style appears in his language, Hitler's in paraphernalia -- rallies, autobahns, leather. Historians and poets who, like Lukacs and Milton, are moralists, must respond to these facts, even as they judge them.
The subject of this book is the different portraits that historians and biographers have drawn of Hitler, from the Thirties on. The occasion for it is the Historikerstreit, or Historians' Quarrel, a dispute provoked in the mid Eighties among German historians by those who wished, in Martin Broszat's words, to move from the ``demonization'' to the ``historicization'' of Hitler and National Socialism. This desire, unexceptionable in itself -- what can history tell us about demons? -- degenerated into polemics about the relative immorality of Communism and Nazism; for some writers, notably the English journalist David Irving, it developed into outright admiration for Hitler.
Lukacs is harsh on Irving's arguments, and his scholarship: ``One of the rhetorical habits of ideological advocates is their emphatic use of adverbs and adjectives, which they employ not as qualifiers but [as] rhetorical substitutes for evidence.'' Irving's copious footnotes, which are meant to testify to his industrious burrowing in German sources, often refer to other matters, or to nothing at all. Lukacs himself believes in ``historicization,'' though he insists that this increases the moral responsibility of Hitler, and of his sup- porters. ``For a 'satanic apparition,''' Lukacs quotes the Austrian historian Friedrich Heer, ``no one is responsible -- at best, an exorcist. . . . This 'satanic apparition' was a very concrete human incarnation who . . . was promoted and helped into power by very responsible and notable men.''
He was also maintained in power by popular support. Though he came to office by close elections and backstairs maneuvers, he soon struck most Germans as giving them what they wanted, a conviction they shared almost until the end. ``As late as March 1945,'' Lukacs writes, Albert ``Speer was driven to despair as he overheard the talk of German workers who, unlike himself, were still confident . . . of victory.'' Lukacs sees Hitler as a prototype, ``the first of Antichrist-like popular figures'' in the age of the masses. ``The Antichrist will not be horrid and devilish,'' but ``smiling, generous, popular, an idol, adored by masses of people because of the sunny prosperity he seems to have brought, a false father (or husband) to his people.''
Whence arose Hitler's hatred for Jews? Lukacs dismisses some psychobiographical explanations, then toys with another: that Hitler thought his father was the illegitimate son of a Jewish man. This rumor, which circulated during Hitler's lifetime, is probably false. What matters is whether Hitler believed it, especially since he seems to have hated and feared his father (his statements in Mein Kampf to the contrary notwithstanding). Hitler claimed that his ideology, including his anti-Semitism, was learned in Vienna; Lukacs inclines toward those historians (including Churchill) who believed that his experience of the 1919 Munich Soviet and its suppression was decisive.
Hitler's career was a failure; all the major results of his war, from an occupied Berlin to the founding of Israel, were the opposite of his intentions. But his career may not be over. Lukacs, on thin ice, treads gingerly. One of the ``most important and potentially fruitful intellectual achievement[s]'' of the nineteenth century was the reaction of ``a romantic (and often sentimental and categorical) idealism'' against ``the materialism (and often against the rationalism) of the Enlightenment.'' This countermovement ``was mostly represented and exemplified by Germans; and then it was carried by some of them to extremes, to a deterministic idealism that proved to be more inhumane than the deterministic materialism that had preceded'' it. ``And an incarnation'' of that extreme ``was Adolf Hitler.'' In other words: Hitler let down his side. But his side may rise again. Without, we must work and pray, him.