Cultural Amnesia (65 page)

By imposing a racial definition, Hitler did not reveal a reality: he created one, out of his own poisonous obsessions.
Similarly, the pundits on the revisionist side of the
Historikerstreit
in the 1980s had already been discredited by what Golo Mann had written before they
were ever heard from. Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber wanted to call Hitler’s wars of extermination inevitable because Hitler was only reacting to what the Soviet Union had already done.
Golo Mann had established in advance that there was no such historical tendency except in retrospect. In retrospect, the reader of history is apt to wish that less history had been written, but
we are unlikely to feel that when reading Golo Mann. Second only to Thomas in the Mann clan, Golo wrote even finer expository prose than his father. It is sad that Thomas Mann did not live long
enough to see the full glory of his most loyal son, but perhaps he guessed that it would come. We are all allowed to predict the future: it is one of the imagination’s privileges. But
predicting the past is a mischievous habit, and Golo Mann was the first to spot just how pervasive it was becoming, as historians presumed to impose upon events a baleful shape that had stolen
into their minds: a shape
that was a self-protective reaction to the events themselves—one more version of the small man’s revenge for helplessness.

It was no belief: it was a crime committed because of bad
literature.

—GOLO MANN,
Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945
, P. 138

Golo Mann is the greatest German historian of the twentieth century by a long mile,
but when he said this he gave a hostage to fortune. He was trying to say that the Holocaust didn’t have to happen. He was certainly right about the bad literature. Anti-Semitism was the
claim to profundity of almost every literary halfwit in Germany during the years when Hitler, posing dramatically in front of a cheap mirror, was rehearsing his role as the man with the magnetic
eyes.

Unfortunately Golo Mann’s idea about the bad literature gave precursorial support to Daniel
Goldhagen’s suggestion, forty years later, that a whole culture, saturated with what he called “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, had necessarily been bent on the annihilation of a
race. Both opinions, Golo Mann’s and Goldhagen’s, need to be discounted; and Mann’s, unexpectedly enough, is more insidious than Goldhagen’s, which has the sole merit of
refuting itself. Mann’s doesn’t. Some of the top Nazis can indeed be portrayed as opportunists who did not really believe their own doctrine. By the end, Himmler and Goering were both
ready to do a deal to get out; Goebbels, though a dedicated fanatic at the last day, was merely hopping a bandwagon on the way in; and there is even a possibility that Heydrich’s hidden
motive might have been to offset the rumours about own Jewish background by building up a sufficiently impressive record of eliminating everyone else with the same drawback. (A rumour was all it
was, but he might have been able to imagine circumstances in which a rumour would have been all it needed to do him damage.) One question remains, however, and it is about Hitler. If
Hitler’s anti-Semitism wasn’t a belief, what was it?

The less attention we pay to Hitler’s mysticism, the more we must pay to his practicality. In the days of the ugly
birth of the SS, Hitler just wanted the new elite corps to be a bodyguard. It was Himmler who wanted the SS to be a new order of Germanic knights. At Wewelsburg,
his castle in
Westphalia, Himmler played King Arthur. Each of his twelve companions at the round table had a suite decorated differently: thoughts arise of Las Vegas and the Playboy Mansion West. Hitler
thought all the mystical stuff was nonsense. His fanaticism was entirely on the practical level: what one might call, must call, a true belief. Unencumbered by any metaphysical junk apart from
his deluded root perception into the Jewish origins of Bolshevism, Hitler’s convictions were unshakeable. Himmler’s, on the other hand, were flexible. The same man who talked sinister
tripe about a Nordic peasant aristocracy in the east was ready to listen when the Sicherheitsdienst, after two years of intense research into the blindingly obvious, concluded that the
extermination policies in Poland and Russia had defeated the political purpose. No doubt with a sinking feeling, Himmler saw the point. But there is no reason to suppose that Hitler didn’t
see the point as well. He just didn’t let it impress him. For him, the exterminations
were
the political purpose. Self-defeating or not, mass murder
was his belief. And he didn’t get it from bad literature. Most of the bad literature he read was by Karl May, inventor of a Western hero called Old Shatter-hand, who was deadly in pursuit
of Indians and rattlesnakes, but not of Jews—a species thin on the ground among the cactus and the sagebrush. Any other literature, no matter how bad, Hitler only pretended to read. He
probably didn’t even read the anti-Semitic pamphlets. What he did do was listen to their authors shouting racist filth. They shouted it because they believed it, and he got the idea
immediately because it is not an idea. It’s a belief, and precedes its attendant ideas as the stomach ache precedes the vomit.

HEINRICH MANN

Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), four years older than Thomas Mann but doomed never to catch up,
won few of the literary rewards that came the way of his world-famous younger brother. Heinrich’s voluminous fictional writings earned him a reputation as the German Zola but were
rarely taken seriously as works of art. Though he was never less than a celebrity, he had to watch the laurels he would have liked for himself go to his less prolific but better organized
sibling. He did, however, achieve one thing uniquely his: he gave the world a universally appreciable mythical figure. His novel
Professor Unrat
(1904)
featured a respectable schoolmaster who was lured to destruction by a seductive female creature of the demi-monde. Filmed in 1930 as
The Blue Angel
, the
story made Marlene Dietrich a star and, through her, gave Heinrich Mann a purchase on the international popular psyche that Thomas Mann would never equal: Aschenbach, in
Death in Venice
, is for an intellectual audience, whereas Dietrich’s soubrette
fatale
works her destructive magic in
all men’s minds to this very day. Critics who dismiss Heinrich as glibly prolific should be reminded that Thomas, though Heinrich’s slapdash facility dismayed him, was always
generous enough to praise his brother’s talent
when he saw signs of its coming into focus. Thomas’s main trouble with Heinrich was Heinrich’s erratic
behaviour, which was only intermittently embarrassing when they were both still in Germany, but became a real problem when they were both in exile. Heinrich did not take easily to being a
displaced person. In Europe he had enjoyed less prestige than Thomas but at least he was well-known. In America he was a nonentity. Whereas Thomas’s books became more famous than ever
in translation, Heinrich’s got nowhere. He ran easily through the money that he borrowed from Thomas, drank heavily, and his unwise choice of mistress led to the kind of social
awkwardness that Thomas—always conscious of his exalted position in the glittering refugee society of wartime Los Angeles—found threatening. Just because Thomas was snobbish,
however, is no reason to suppose that Heinrich was some kind of wonderful free spirit. He was the kind of knockabout bore who makes things worse by apologizing for it. But perhaps his erratic
sensibility gave him insight. At any rate, it was Heinrich, and not Thomas, who guessed as early as 1936 that the Nazis had an atrocity in mind beyond all reasonable imagining.

The German Jews will be systematically annihilated, of that there
can be no more doubt.

—HEINRICH MANN,
Die Deutschen und ihrer Juden
, COLLECTED IN
Politische Essays
, P. 146.

A
S ALWAYS IN
any German
writings of the modern period, everything depends on the year. In 1936 there were very few intelligent people who wanted to believe that Heinrich Mann’s prediction was anything except an
hysterical exaggeration. And indeed it was a guess; but what he guessed was the truth. He was able to do so by taking a general view of how the repressive laws had been applied with increasing
severity. He deduced the destination from the momentum. Among the people who were already suffering so severely from those restrictions, there were not yet many who were ready to draw the same
conclusion.
Victor Klemperer’s diary from the same year provides an instructive comparison. Klemperer could guess things would get worse, but he didn’t yet see
that the progressive turning of the screws could end only in death. There were Nazis who didn’t see it. The idea of resettling the remaining Jews on Madagascar or some similarly outlandish
destination had not yet been abandoned. Historians who, for various reasons, would like to believe that the idea of extermination was hatched much later would never countenance 1936 as a year in
which the threat could be realistically conceived of. In Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler, the Holocaust is not precisely a side issue, but it would be fair to say that it is not
presented as Hitler’s main initial aim. Once in London I met Fest at a launch party and mentioned this essay by Heinrich Mann. Fest said that he had never heard of it, and that he found it
hard to believe it had been published in 1936.

Looking back on Fest’s books, it might seem strange to suggest that he soft-pedalled the Holocaust. Fest’s
picture of Heydrich in
Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches
(The Face of the Third Reich) remains the most penetrating we have, and in his study of the July 1944
plot against Hitler’s life,
Staatsstreich
(Coup d’état), he pays proper tribute to the twenty or so conspirators who told the Gestapo
that revulsion against the treatment of the Jews was their main reason for getting into it. Nevertheless, over the broad span of his writings, Fest’s concern with the Nazis’ most
defining crime has an oddly soft focus. In the case of his Hitler biography, the soft focus can only be called damaging, and it is hard to see how his hefty book, apart from its chronological
completeness, is much superior, for its psychological insight, to Konrad Heiden’s pioneering work (
Hitler: Das Leben eines Diktators
) published in the
same year as Heinrich Mann’s essay, 1936. Hugh Trevor-Roper, among post-war historians the first in the field with his
The Last Days of Hitler
, was
necessarily unarmed with the subsequent scholarship but still got closer to the nub of the matter. (In 2002 Fest reprised Trevor-Roper’s crepuscular theme with his short book
Untergang
, which had some nice maps of the bunker: but I saw no reason to think that Trevor-Roper’s pioneering study of the man cowering inside it had been
replaced.) Coming after Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock did the first full-length biography that mattered, and it continues to matter most. Bullock reprised his theme with the relevant portions of his
stereoscopic
Hitler and Stalin
, but students should not excuse themselves from reading his first monograph: one of the essential books
of the modern world. J. P. Stern’s short book of 1975 (
Hitler: The Führer and the People
) offers useful sidelines, but he stands on
Bullock’s shoulders. Ian Kershaw’s recent two-volume effort has not really replaced Bullock, who packed longer judgement into a shorter distance. Though simplicity of heart must
always present the danger of obfuscation, there is an even greater danger in too much finesse. While their foul subject was fresh, the first post-war English historians, in early before the smoke
had cleared, smelt the Devil. They were right. The lasting merit of Heinrich Mann’s prescient statement is that it disarms the defence mechanism by which—even today, and looking
back—we would rather classify murderously threatening language as mere rhetoric. As the historians’ picture of Hitler becomes more and more elaborate, there is a greater and greater
tendency to suppose that his lethality grew upon him in the course of events. But it caused the events.