Adolf Hitler

John Toland Adolf Hitler (1976)
I've read this as research for something or other which will hopefully be in the bag by the time you read this, and which was itself indirectly inspired by Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, a sort of book burning game show hosted by the enduringly unpleasant Carr. The show was produced by Channel 4 who purchased one of Hitler's watercolours for £11,500 so that a studio audience could decide whether or not to have it destroyed, thus posing deeply philosophical questions about whether it's possible to separate the art from the legacy of its creator. I don't suppose anyone suspected that so thoughtful a presentation could ever be viewed with such controversy.

Naturally the internet exploded in response, and I would regard most of the criticism I've seen as entirely justified, although it has since emerged that the painting which ended up shredded was almost certainly a fake. My personal view is that whether or not it is possible to differentiate the art from the artist doesn't really matter, but that book burning or equivalent is never a good look because it's better to understand evil, or that which we have come to perceive as evil, than to settle for screaming this is evil in the face of anyone who happens to ask; because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana wrote, although admittedly I actually thought that one was a Jim Jones original. The thing about destroying the evidence, particularly in the case of Adolf Hitler, is that it facilitates mystery and even mythology, neither of which are much use in preventing the re-occurrence of the same shit.

Further to this, we seem to have a great many monsters these days, and whilst it's difficult to deny that Hitler became the very definition of monster, it limits the possibility of him ever having been just some bloke. This means that we've somewhat lost the ability to spot the emergence of monsters in our own time, because we can't accept that people very much like ourselves were complicit in the deaths of six-million or more Jews; and so those describing immigrants as cockroaches, for one example, are often overlooked as simply persons with strong opinions who just happen to love their country.

Additionally, Hitler's monstrous qualities should be self-evident without having to have it spelled out for us in the name of viewing figures. Lazy fuckers attempting to score points by drawing our attention to monsters whilst screeching don't you think this is terrible? Well, don't you? Don't you? have really begun to bore me shitless. So, I said to myself, let's discover Hitler.

Toland's biography seems to be viewed as the best of the bunch by someone on the internet, so that's why I picked it. The review I read emphasised Toland's attempts to maintain an impartial view, which sounded promising given that I'm reasonably familiar with the arguments against. The arguments against, as summarised and simplified by a million wearying science-fiction scenarios, are that he was a bit of a loser, a sad, sad man who couldn't paint, was chucked out of art college and spent his youth as a homeless for a while - the wrong sort of homeless, rather than the noble victim types we tend to prefer - and he made for a cowardly soldier during the first world war. Also he hated Jews despite probably being half-Jewish, only had one bollock, suffered from uncontrollable farting, couldn't get it up, and no-one liked him. Ha ha. What a loser!

Unfortunately none of this turns out to be entirely true. Although he was repeatedly rejected by the art schools to which he applied and thus never actually had the chance to be chucked out, and he was mostly self taught, the notion that he had no artistic ability whatsoever is patently untrue - which could also be said of many of us. He was distinguished and even decorated for his soldiering during the first world war, and was popular amongst his comrades. His ballbag seems to have contained the traditional quota of bollocks so far as we are able to tell, and the story of his unidentified paternal grandfather being Jewish seems to have been a story told by his enemies, and as is probably obvious, he made quite a few of those.

More curious still is the question of his antisemitism which, from what Toland describes, seems to have been poorly defined at best. He had Jewish friends in his youth, and was eternally grateful to the Jewish doctor who treated his mother's cancer, and his antisemitism seems to have been conditional, something on roughly the same level of my own grandmother's culturally characteristic regard of black people - gushingly favourable if a black person had been friendly to her in the supermarket, but otherwise synchronised to whatever she'd read in the Sun that week. I haven't read Mein Kampf and have no desire to do so, but it sounds very much like an expression of the early Nazi party's struggle to gain the popular vote - a convenient fulcrum by which to get bums on seats with a promise of saving the country from those bad people over there, specifically by associating the perceived threat of Communism with something a bit more tangible, namely funny foreigners. This isn't to diminish the awful influence of Mein Kampf, but it seems significant that Hitler himself came to regard his book as incoherent populist drivel which nevertheless got the job done. More startling still is that as the party graduated to being the only option on the ballot sheet, the awful treatment of Germany's Jewish population was never quite subject to full support, meaning the reduction of the historical narrative to racist Germany unanimous against former friends and neighbours isn't entirely accurate, and more closely resembles the sort of bullshit that - for example - the western Muslim community has had to endure in recent times. In other words, never mind the claim that it couldn't happen here, because it actually is happening, meaning we as a society need to be seriously fucking vigilant about what comes next.

At least during the thirties, it seems the Reich was keen to downplay the antisemitic aspect of its program in pursuit of a more respectable image, one less likely to sour diplomatic relations with other countries, hence Hitler's disowning the thuggish brownshirt element around 1934 in furthering the support of the respectable middle and upper classes. The Kristallnacht of 1938 in which Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship were ransacked or destroyed seems to have been mainly a spontaneous uprising by the brownshirts, and one about which many of the higher-ups felt distinctly uncomfortable, and which Göring* in particular regarded as insane given the significant role of Jewish business within the larger German economy.

So the antisemitism would seem to have been an expedient use of existing prejudices which spiralled out of control as the Nazis, and particularly Hitler, fell more and more in love with their own mythology. I state this not to diminish its significance, but rather to illustrate that the pattern is something we should immediately recognise rather than dismiss as something which can't happen again because we're much nicer these days.

Toland suggests that had Hitler died in 1937, he probably would have been remembered mostly as a great statesman and orator, which doesn't seem such a stretch given that we've tended to overlook antisemitic or similar tendencies amongst other historical leaders simply because, for whatever reason, we haven't chosen to remember them as monsters.

The strangest, most unexpected detail I take from this biography has been that Adolf Hitler was personable, funny, reasonably intelligent, self-effacing and likable providing you were on the right side of the argument. He was clearly a little odd and self-absorbed as a young man, which hardly makes him unique, but rendered him prone to mysticism and an intuitive faith in what he thought should be right to which he adhered regardless of objective reality. It's therefore not entirely surprising that he more or less completely lost it by the end, thus becoming the monster we remember.

Toland's biography is nine-hundred pages, which is a long time to spend immersed in the most terrible period of human history, but it's mostly fascinating - excepting a few instances of inner circle politics and policy wibbling back and forth for more pages than seems quite necessary. Surprisingly, everyone comes out of it a little better than you might expect, which is also chilling because, as I say, these people were not exceptional and most of them seem unfortunately familiar. It is specifically this rendering of the Third Reich and its cast of colourful characters as approximately regular people which leaves this era seeming, if anything, more horrifying than has been made apparent by the contemporary denouncement of monsters; because it isn't Darth Vader or the Daleks. It's us, regardless of how righteous you may deem yourself to be. We did this.

This must not happen again.

Someone somewhere will read the above and find themselves unable to tell the difference between what I've written and an affirmation of Adolf Hitler being a great man who simply made poor choices, probably additionally pointing out that actually he was a monster; and so it will happen again.

*: I think it was Göring. It's difficult keeping track of them all.