A modern prejudice holds that two scholars—if organized in a “project”—are always better than one, truth being an antagonist inclined to yield itself to mass assault rather than in individual combat. That this is a prejudice, is made clear by Solomon F. Bloom in his critique of a recent Unesco-sponsored group effort to understand Nazism, The Third Reich.

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What is a book? We cannot hope that it shall aways fulfill John Milton’s vision. “A good book,” Milton said in defending the freedom to publish in Areopagitica , “is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” So much has the idea of a book deteriorated that one hardly knows today what to expect between hard covers. In the academic world, perhaps nothing has accelerated this deterioration so much as the practice of compiling any disparate and disconnected pieces that an enterprising editor can find a common label for. Is it the industrial assembly line, or the collective spirit of our age, that has suggested to scholars the novel notion of hunting in packs?

It is true that group life can be a powerful stimulant to learning and writing. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters germinated in an appreciative salon which heard them read before it saw them in print. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding originated in a discussion group that met regularly to canvass its problems. But neither group nor salon pretended to do the job itself. In the end a solitary individual had to shut himself up in a room and do some highly private worrying and inditing.

Group effort is, of course, essential for production of an encyclopedic character. The Cambridge histories were classic cases in point. But even there the intellectual coherence of the group determines whether its joint work crosses the line that separates factual survey and description from insight and interpretation. Among collective enterprises of this sort, the Histoire génerale, edited by Lavisse and Rambaud, was distinguished by a high degree of integration and unity. Its contributors, unlike the miscellaneous group that wrote the chapters of the Cambridge histories, shared a point of view, a method of analysis, and a manner of expression.

Yet today symposia are produced by people who haven’t met and books are written by groups that have nothing in common. It is hardly consoling to reflect that it is usually the most complex subjects that are assigned, on the principle of the division of labor, like Adam Smith’s pins, to tribes of strangers. Nothing could be more praiseworthy than the object of the book—let us call it that—before us: The Third Reich¹ At Beirut in 1948 the General Conference of UNESCO resolved to sponsor a study by leading historians of “the methods and procedure used to propagate Nazism and Fascism in the period preceding the Second World War: this should help to make possible the identification of similar movements in the future, from the first moment of their appearance. The conclusions reached in this report ought to be made known as widely as possible.” (Italian Fascism was dropped from the report because the authors dealing with it were not ready in time.) It was thought essential to study the causes and the historical setting of Nazism as well as its methods, although this changed the original simple aim of the project.

UNESCO persuaded the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies to undertake the planning and supervision of the project. The council appointed a Standing Committee, which in turn appointed three sub-commissions. It was these sub-commissions that assigned subjects on the philosophic origins, the circumstances, and the techniques of Nazism, the final sub-divisions into which the project was divided. Twenty-seven historians, hailing from half a dozen countries, including Germany, most of them able and well-known men, went to work.

What could be more scientific, efficient, and up to date?

The result is a tome of more than nine hundred pages which is anything but a manual making it easy for people to distinguish Nazi movements at a glance, and in the germ. The sponsors were careful—and I suppose happy—to leave the responsibility for the conclusions to the individual contributors. That will satisfy everybody, except perhaps the reader who may look for the certified detecting rod he has been promised.

This is not, of course, to say that when twenty-seven accredited scholars play on a theme of this sort, nothing good can come of it. There is much material here, on a wide, indeed a bewildering, variety of subjects. Not all of it is new or surprising—but then novelty is hardly desirable in a subject where originality is not synonymous with penetration. It is virtually impossible, in a limited space, to describe and evaluate, or even summarize adequately, the range, content, and points of view of these essays.

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BY way of illustration, The Third Reich contains a series of meaty chapters—mostly by French scholars—on the ideological and literary sources that fed Nazism. Edmond Vermeil, Jean Jacques Anstett, Louis Sauzin, Claude David, and Roy Pascal have written effectively and objectively on the masquerade of prejudice as folk poetry, chauvinism as “world historical” mission, and amoralism as Nature worship that disfigured the German scene for a century. We may notice, as a sample, Anstett’s article on Paul Lagarde, a quiet and penetrating analysis of a “radical conservative” writer of Bismarck’s day. He identifies and labels the evil inherent in Lagarde’s preachment of a mission that placed Germans in inevitable conflict with Slavs and Frenchmen, and in. his exaltation of the interests of the “organic” nation above religion and humanity. Lagarde was “anti-Semitic out of resentment: the Jewish people had succeeded by virtue of its national religion in being what the German people had not yet succeeded in being: a nation. . . . Hatred and self-contempt are therefore a form of compensation for a deep-seated sense of inferiority.” Lagarde countered one messianism with another, but a messianism indifferent to universal ideals.

A Dutch scholar, Louis de Jong, gives a judicious account of the successes, and failures, of the Fifth Column. There is a succinct summary of the anti-Semitic policies by Léon Poliakov, author of the invaluable Harvest of Hate. A. J. P. Taylor employs his accustomed scalpel to good effect in laying open the intrigues and maneuvers that preceded “The Seizure of Power.” There are chapters on the role of the Communists, on methods of propaganda, on economic conditions and developments, and on religious issues.

In general, the French and English contributions are objective and astringent in tone and factual in content, while the Germans run to heavy “philosophy” and “philosophy of history.” Some of them are defensive, and even apologetic. The Publishing Committee has found it necessary, for example, to add a note suggesting that the estimates of reparations paid to the Allies after 1919 that are cited by Professor Friedrich Lütge in an article on economic conditions are based on partial sources.

The chief trouble is that the book breaks clear down the middle. More than one third of it—and probably the most valuable third—is devoted to the intellectual and spiritual antecedents of Nazism. Nothing else than these can explain adequately, if not the reason for the political rise of Nazism, the far more significant fact of its acceptance and toleration by respectable circles and conservative elements in Germany. Yet several German contributors challenge the premise of this section. Professor J. J. Schokking of the University of Cologne can detect in Nazism no doctrine or aim at all. To him, it was only an armory of techniques for seizing power: provocation, intimidation, infiltration. Jews were harried and murdered not “for reasons to be inferred from any racial theory, but because the pleasure of Jew-baiting symbolized submission to the party’s collective will.” Nazism, he contends, had no race philosophy. “The close connections that unquestionably existed between Nazi activities and attempts to ‘purify’ the German people in accordance with the precepts of the so-called race theories [why ‘so-called’—did they not exist?] were far more complicated. This question, however, does not fall within the scope of this article.” That is unfortunate. If Professor Schokking will look at Hitler’s Tischgespräche, he would find a blueprint of a racial empire, down to the music that would be played to lull the slave peoples, and the question of whether, and how, they were to be treated for toothache.

Professor Theodor Litt of Bonn University employs another technique for sundering the connection between German history and Nazism. He converts ideas into “ideas,” things inherently suspect and fake. “‘Ideas,’ thanks to their ambivalence, can be only too easily changed into the opposite of what they originally meant. And a people which takes ideas as seriously as the German people does [and as, evidently, Professor Litt does not] is particularly open to their inherent dangers.” In other words, no matter how high-minded a culture Germany might have and no matter how it might be degraded and perverted by a self-interested political party, the German people would fall for it, and all this because it is too fond of ideas! Corresponding to Jewish anti-Semitism, there seems to be a German anti-Germanism.

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The most remarkable exercise in disengagement is produced by the most eminent of the German contributors to The Third Reich. Professor Gerhard Ritter of the University of Freiburg-Breisgau has written the leading article of the second section of the book, which deals with “the circumstances which made possible the transformation of an ideology into a political programme.” It has the promising title of “The Historical Foundations of the Rise of National Socialism.” Professor Ritter rejects all attempts “to explain the distinctly militarist nature of German nationalism by its origins at the time of the wars of liberation (1813), and the glorification of war throughout the nineteenth century, which is shown by quotations from all sorts of authors.” Such procedures “may be useful in illustrating the historical characteristics of German views on the state, even in Hitler’s time.” They “become sterile if they are used to explain the rapid decline of the Weimar Republic and the triumphal ascent of the Hitlerian Party from 1930 to 1933.” Germany was “unprepared internally” for that ascent. If Professor Ritter’s judgment were restricted to the mechanics of obtaining power, his case might be arguable. But he ventures to say that “history can never be written by means of quotations from literature, since it is almost always possible to find such quotations contradicted elsewhere.” Are there then no controls by which to validate the use of literary and ideological sources? Are there no criteria for determining the relevance, effectiveness, and consequence of ideas? Ritter’s position has been examined by Professor Albrecht von Rantzau in his essay on “The Glorification of the State in German Historical Writing,” published in Hans Kohn’s collection of recent writings on German History (1955). Von Rantzau characterizes Ritter rather paradoxically as “a strongly disillusioned apologist for nationalism.” Ritter traces the evil to the influence of the West on Germany. It was Democracy, invented by the French, and Evolution, invented by the English, that introduced the demonic and irrational into German political life.

Ritter’s more positive contribution to the discussion, however, reveals his true attitude. He ascribes the rise of Nazism to Germany’s quest for a leader whom she could trust to fuse her energies. “If the situation is simplified somewhat,” he writes, “ . . . Hitler’s mission in history was to accomplish that which the Emperor [William II] and his government had been unable to accomplish in the First World War: to weld the nation into a closed, warlike community under the leadership of a really popular Fuehrer, respected by all.” Ritter extols the examples of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, who “could guide their people through waves of hope and despair, through attacks of pessimism and failures, and inspire them with courage to continue—to continue until the end of the crisis, when American aid began to make itself felt.”

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Professor Ritter emphasizes the natural need of the German people to show “its worth was as great as its vitality,” and to satisfy itself that it held “the place and rank which it deserves.” This need bred “a forced atmosphere, composed of national consciousness of strength, of inferiority complex, and of the fear of being cut off from other countries.” It led to a yearning for a higher coherence and integration of purpose and policy. But our author is not critical of the motives and authenticity of this quest. He does not stop to ask himself, coherence for what? After unification, Germany had been coherent enough to create a successful industrial economy, to develop complex and energetic educational institutions, and to achieve a territorial and diplomatic position that was all but dominant on the European continent. Germany impressed the world, even if she did not impress herself, as a nation, if anything, too coherent and electric. What then was lacking? It seems that the German leaders, having conceived the ambition to dominate the Continent completely, and to extend their domination beyond it, had failed to weld their nation into a unity sufficiently tense to make good that ambition. Professor Ritter does not raise the question of whether the ambition was either justified or feasible. Would he argue that if William II had been a Clemenceau he would have won the First World War? And if all Germany lacked was “Führerschaft,“ why then did she not win the Second World War, when she had it in plenty?

One is left with the notion that a great nation is one which can integrate itself and breed the leadership to win world wars. Iron coherence, and warlike self-assertion, alone validate national self-esteem. They are worth while in themselves, regardless of aim or result. Professor Ritter pictures Germany as a romantic hero isolated from the world and confronting it wilfully. His conception of leadership smacks of the miraculous. He forgets that such leaders as Lloyd George and Clemenceau were typical products of the parliamentary arena, one of the most significant contributions of that Western spirit which he condemns.

In short, Professor Ritter exemplifies the very disease that the intellectual historians, whose methods he rejects, have tried to diagnose. He is object rather than subject in this discussion. His case is important, for, as von Rantzau observes, Professor Ritter’s “publications after 1945 may be . . . taken as highly representative of the [German] historical scholarship of the present day.”

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The German contributions to The Third Reich raise some disturbing questions in the mind of the reader. We have noticed the disposition to sever Hitlerism from the mainstream of German history. When it is accepted, the blame is laid on the populace rather than the leadership and the upper classes. The Nazis knew, observes Professor Litt, that “there is no better way of mastering a German than by the lofty formulae of a metaphysical system conferring on any and every political action the consecration of eternity.” Ritter accuses his compatriots of lacking critical ability, and “political and moral flair.” This lack seems to him to be “the most serious guilt with which the Germans can be reproached and this reproach is not diminished by the fact that Germany was certainly not the only country to lack political and moral instinct where Hitler was concerned”—a common and typical proviso.

The role of the conservatives, the military, and the industrialists, is distinctly underplayed. The Germans have left it to an Englishman—Professor Taylor—to point out the simple fact that Hitler did not seize power, but was given it. The calculations behind that gift are familiar to everybody. “If we look back over this wretched story, we see a man bent on success on the one side, and a group of politicians without ideas or principles on the other . . . the greatest responsibility lay with those who let Hitler in and established him as Chancellor. Hitler recognized it himself.”

Finally, there is an ambivalent attitude toward the “Führer.” A goggle-eyed admiration of the skill and the “virtuosity” of the demagogic methods of the Nazis breaks through more than once. Ever since the successes of Bismarck, Germans have exhibited a fascination for trickery, duplicity, and magic in politics. The leaders who organized the cabinet of January 1933 and gave Hitler the Chancellorship thought that they were perpetrating a very clever stroke and duping each other. When Hitler began to “put things over” on the “simpletons” who governed England and France—this was his own estimate of them—the enthusiasm over his sharpness and cunning hardly knew bounds. It is not easy to turn around now. The result is a general desire to forget Hitler. Only one essay in this book deals with him, and it was written by an English scholar. Unfortunately Allan Bullock’s discussion of Hitler’s political ideas is conventional. “Up to the present,” Professor Ritter observes accurately, “precise scientific research on Hitler’s intellectual origins has scarcely begun.” What are German, and other, historians waiting for? What will become, in another decade or two, of the host of witnesses who might have valuable testimony to give?

Perhaps all these tendencies fall into a pattern.

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¹ The Third Reich: A Study published under the Auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies and with the Assistance of the UNESCO. Edited by Maurice Baumont, John H. E. Fried, and Edmond Vermeil (Frederick A. Praeger, 910 pp., $9.00).

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