tell you about everything.
But I still feel that there is a danger of underestimating one of Hitler’s most demonic gifts: he had the con-man’s knack of making himself seem profoundly steeped in any subject just by the fluency with which he could learn a list of facts and reel them off to the susceptible ear of a worshiping disciple. There were Wehrmacht officers, some of them high up in the business of commissioning new weapons, who were amazed by how much Hitler knew abouttanks. But what he knew about tanks was a pastiche of stuff he had picked up from random study, and to the extent that his policies on armaments were carried out, they ensured the loss of the war. It seems a logical inference that many of the artistic subjects he touched on in conversation he knew more fleetingly than he made it sound. I have always found it hard to believe Hitler’s claim, which Spotts unquestioningly repeats, that he carried the five volumes of Schopenhauer’s collected works in his knapsack throughout his time in the trenches. I have those five volumes on my shelves, and they make quite a weight even in a thin-paper edition. But there can be no doubt about Hitler’s aesthetic passion: Spotts is dead right about that. Hitler was up all night studying Speer’s scale model of a future Berlin while the actual Berlin was being pounded to pieces around his ears. As can so easily happen for a man in trouble, art was an escape route.
While Martin Amis was preparing the manuscript of his novel The Zone of Interest , he caught me out in correspondence when I had to confess that I had not read Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler . I bought it, read it at the table in my kitchen, and was suitably impressed. Rosenbaum does a good job of balancing up the central theses ofthe two main postwar interpreters of Hitler’s personality: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock. Trevor-Roper, in his worldwide best seller The Last Days of Hitler , thought that Hitler did indeed possess a mysterious, charismatic secret: how else could he have still been obeyed when all his real power was gone? Bullock, in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny , thought that Hitler was a mountebank. Later on, Bullock took a second position, calling Hitler an actor who believed in his own act. The two professors were both on the case early (in the German cities the Trümmerwelt , the world of ruins, was still being cleared away), but between them they caught the Hitler story better than the supposedly major studies did later on: I haven’t read Joachim Fest’s Hitler biography since it came out in 1974, but lately I have slogged my way through Ian Kershaw’s massive two-volume effort (he is a thorough writer without being an attractive one), and I couldn’t find much that Trevor-Roper and Bullock didn’t catch more than half a century back. I must read Trevor-Roper and Bullock again. When I first read them I was still in my teens, and they helped to form my view of life, but old men forget. Sometimes slightly younger men get things wrong, however: Rosenbaum was born in 1946, so perhaps he has not quite had time to pickup the odd item of seemingly incidental, but in fact vital, information. When he says that the prewar newsreels were “speeded up,” and that this “jerkiness” contributed to the robotized atmospherics of Nazi maneuvers, he is making a false point. At the time they were filmed, prewar newsreels didn’t look speeded up, because they were projected at the correct rate. Later on, the rate changed. As a general rule, writers should be wary about making technical points.
Stephen Edgar, Australian Ace
MY FRIEND Stephen Edgar is the supreme lyricist among the current wave of Australian poets. Les Murray is the acknowledged master, the Magister Illyrio in our Free City of Pentos—here I attempt to forecast one of the Game of Thrones allusions that might be standard usage among the cultural critics of the generation to come—and I suppose that in the long run all of
But I still feel that there is a danger of underestimating one of Hitler’s most demonic gifts: he had the con-man’s knack of making himself seem profoundly steeped in any subject just by the fluency with which he could learn a list of facts and reel them off to the susceptible ear of a worshiping disciple. There were Wehrmacht officers, some of them high up in the business of commissioning new weapons, who were amazed by how much Hitler knew abouttanks. But what he knew about tanks was a pastiche of stuff he had picked up from random study, and to the extent that his policies on armaments were carried out, they ensured the loss of the war. It seems a logical inference that many of the artistic subjects he touched on in conversation he knew more fleetingly than he made it sound. I have always found it hard to believe Hitler’s claim, which Spotts unquestioningly repeats, that he carried the five volumes of Schopenhauer’s collected works in his knapsack throughout his time in the trenches. I have those five volumes on my shelves, and they make quite a weight even in a thin-paper edition. But there can be no doubt about Hitler’s aesthetic passion: Spotts is dead right about that. Hitler was up all night studying Speer’s scale model of a future Berlin while the actual Berlin was being pounded to pieces around his ears. As can so easily happen for a man in trouble, art was an escape route.
While Martin Amis was preparing the manuscript of his novel The Zone of Interest , he caught me out in correspondence when I had to confess that I had not read Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler . I bought it, read it at the table in my kitchen, and was suitably impressed. Rosenbaum does a good job of balancing up the central theses ofthe two main postwar interpreters of Hitler’s personality: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock. Trevor-Roper, in his worldwide best seller The Last Days of Hitler , thought that Hitler did indeed possess a mysterious, charismatic secret: how else could he have still been obeyed when all his real power was gone? Bullock, in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny , thought that Hitler was a mountebank. Later on, Bullock took a second position, calling Hitler an actor who believed in his own act. The two professors were both on the case early (in the German cities the Trümmerwelt , the world of ruins, was still being cleared away), but between them they caught the Hitler story better than the supposedly major studies did later on: I haven’t read Joachim Fest’s Hitler biography since it came out in 1974, but lately I have slogged my way through Ian Kershaw’s massive two-volume effort (he is a thorough writer without being an attractive one), and I couldn’t find much that Trevor-Roper and Bullock didn’t catch more than half a century back. I must read Trevor-Roper and Bullock again. When I first read them I was still in my teens, and they helped to form my view of life, but old men forget. Sometimes slightly younger men get things wrong, however: Rosenbaum was born in 1946, so perhaps he has not quite had time to pickup the odd item of seemingly incidental, but in fact vital, information. When he says that the prewar newsreels were “speeded up,” and that this “jerkiness” contributed to the robotized atmospherics of Nazi maneuvers, he is making a false point. At the time they were filmed, prewar newsreels didn’t look speeded up, because they were projected at the correct rate. Later on, the rate changed. As a general rule, writers should be wary about making technical points.
Stephen Edgar, Australian Ace
MY FRIEND Stephen Edgar is the supreme lyricist among the current wave of Australian poets. Les Murray is the acknowledged master, the Magister Illyrio in our Free City of Pentos—here I attempt to forecast one of the Game of Thrones allusions that might be standard usage among the cultural critics of the generation to come—and I suppose that in the long run all of
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