The Nazi Problem
Germany in the 20th Century
By Edmond Vermeil
Praeger. 288 pp. $5.50.
The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany
By T. L. Jarman
New York University Press. 388 pp. $4.95.
“It is truly a miracle to trace the development of our movement,” Hitler said in 1935, when he looked back over the past sixteen years and compared his present power with its humble beginnings. “To posterity it will appear a fairy tale.” By now there are plenty of fairy tales. There is the fairy tale of the Marxists, who (having failed to account for any such possibility in their cosmology) write off the whole fascist episode as the last convulsions of capitalism; there is the fairy tale of the virtuous Germans, who deny all responsibility for Nazism, as if it were a sudden unpredictable visitation from without, like the Black Death or the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages; and there is the fairy tale of the professional anti-Germans who find nothing odd at all in Nazism: it was merely, they say, the natural expression of ordinary German nastiness. And then there is the fairy tale of the European left, according to which Hitler himself was a person of no importance, “the world’s most inflated nonentity” as I read in one of today’s press cuttings, a mere nobody, as that Panjandrum of the New Statesman, Mr. Leonard Woolf, declares, accidentally tossed up, as such men are, by a period of revolution. But somehow I do not think that these are the kind of fairy tales that Hitler was thinking of when he thus foreshadowed the opinions of posterity.
The duty of the historian is not merely to narrate: it is to explain. Unfortunately, once one has accepted this truism, it is easy to go too far, and the trouble with our second-class historians is that instead of explaining, they feel it their duty to explain away. As we read their dreary narratives, their careful parade of causes and consequences, their profound retrospective judgments, all problems fade away and we are left with a tedious demonstration that everything which happened was bound to happen, precisely as it did happen, and an unavoidable impression that it would have been equally bound to happen even if it had been diametrically opposite to what did in fact happen. And then we ask whether such an explanation really explains anything. The test is to ask these infallible explainers what will happen next. At that point, we generally find, they suddenly fail.
Professor Vermeil is such a historian. No doubt he is very distinguished. He is a professor of the Sorbonne and has written much on the subject. No doubt he knows a lot about the views of Pan-German ideologues in the past. And no doubt, too, he is right—as far as he goes. If one grubs away in the works of Fichte or Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one can find views comparable with those expressed by Hitler and Himmler and Rosenberg. But why, we ask, did all these forces lead to Nazism in one generation rather than another? Why was it Adolf Hitler rather than another who harnessed these forces? In Professor Vermeil’s narrative everything follows everything else as if no alternative was possible. Fact follows fact with dreary accuracy; movements “come on the scene”; there is nothing new under the sun; and “consequently” what happened was perfectly natural. Nazism was the logical development of a central tendency in German history: there is no problem to explain.
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Once a revolution has happened it is always easy to look back and find its “origins”; but often these supposed “origins” are not significant causes at all: they are the intellectual garbage which, having long festered in stagnant corners of society, has only accidentally been swirled together and brought to light by a force which may originate in some quite different quarter. It is quite possible that Pan-German rubbish would have continued for decades in Germany as the jargon of inconspicuous crackpot schoolmasters if Hitler had not obtained power and turned it into an orthodoxy. The central problem of modern Germany history is not where Hitler found this dead rubbish, but how Hitler happened, how he was able to galvanize it suddenly into terrible life. For who, in the 1920’s, could have predicted that the most highly educated, highly disciplined, highly industrialized country in Europe would surrender itself willingly, without revolution or civil war, and without effective after-thought, to an uneducated, foreign, bohemian terrorist, an unscrupulous, megalomaniac criminal? And who could have predicted that this bohemian criminal, without any advantages of birth or wealth or education, would, from nothing, create a movement with which he could capture this power, and having captured it, would carry through a revolution, create an army, outmaneuver the former victors of Germany, and having raised his country, in five years, from utter weakness into terrifying power, make war, and conquer—however briefly—the whole continent of Europe—just as he had promised to do as a penniless, unemployable dreamer in the slums of Vienna, the beer halls of Munich? Surely Hitler was right: posterity ought to regard such a story almost as a fairy tale: a horrible, cautionary fairy tale.
It is the great merit of Mr. Jarman’s book that he does recognize this problem. Consequently I have found his book more useful, more readable, more sensible than any other work of comparable scope on the subject. No one, I believe, can hope to understand or explain Nazism unless he is prepared to admit the reality of this problem, and unless, furthermore, he is willing to make a distinction which our ideologically minded historians seem incapable of making: that is, to admit that Hitler, without whom Nazism could not have existed—for he preceded it, founded it, nurtured it, expressed it, and to the end controlled it—was both a revolutionary leader of genius and the meanest, most squalid character who has ever, by genius, conquered great political power. In the 1930’s too many observers recognized the first fact and therefore, because they could not make this distinction, refused even to conceive the second. Since 1945 the second is a platitude; but because the distinction still seems beyond the capacity of the average man, and even the average historian, the first fact is stubbornly denied and Hitler’s rise, being therefore the rise of a nobody, must be ascribed to impersonal historic forces which, though now obvious, seem to have attracted no attention at the time. Fortunately Mr. Jarman can make this distinction. He also has a sound historical sense which enables him, instead of being smothered by his sources, to select them judiciously and trust his own selective judgment. There may be nothing new in his book: it is essentially a summary of known or knowable facts; but it is an altogether excellent summary: it leaves out nothing that is significant and much (thank God!) that is insignificant; and his two chapters on “The German Enigma” and “The Positive Side of the Nazi Regime” are worth a ton of that uncritical denigration, self-exculpation, and “explanation” to which we have recently become accustomed.
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