Hitler’s core notion, ‘living space’, announced with settled pomp in Mein Kampf (1925), was from the start a ridiculous anachronism (the reasoning is ‘pre-industrial’); and its sine qua non, the quick win over Russia, was ruled out in advance by demographics and geography. When the dissident diarist Friedrich Reck, who came from an old military family, learned of the attack on Russia (June ’41) he reacted with ‘wild jubilation’: ‘Satan’s own have overreached themselves, and now they are in the net, and they will never free themselves again’. Thus in Haffner’s words, the ‘programmatician’, as Hitler liked to call himself, ‘programmed his failure’.
Both Haffner’s books give you the rare excitement of impending (if perhaps fugitive) clarity; and read in tandem they do seem to inch us a little closer to coherence. But we are continuing to beg an enormous question: the question of sanity. After all, Hitler’s other core notion, the one about the Jewish world conspiracy, comes straight out of a primer on mental diseases — it is the schizophrenic’s first and most miserable cliché. In the street, then, gutter Judaeophobia (or at best the unnatural ‘indifference’ adduced by Ian Kershaw), a fulminant nationalism, and herd docility punctuated by ‘mass intoxications’; in the Chancellery, the slow felo de se of a mind now putrescing with power. And madness, if we impute it (and how can we exclude it?), is bound to frustrate our investigation — because of course we will get no coherence, and no legible why, from the mad.
What is the unique difficulty in coming to terms with ‘that which happened’ (in Paul Celan’s coldly muted phrase)? Any attempt at an answer will necessarily be personal, and for this reason: ‘the Nazi genocide’, as Michael André Bernstein has written, ‘is somehow central to our self-understanding’. Not everyone will feel that way about the events in eastern Europe 1941–5 (and I am reminded of W. G. Sebald’s dry aside to the effect that no serious person ever thinks about anything else). But I accede to Bernstein’s formulation; it is surely one of the defining elements of the singularity.
My own inner narrative is one of chronic stasis, followed by a kind of reprieve. Here is an illustration. I first read Martin Gilbert’s classic The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy in 1987, and I read it with incredulity; in 2011 I read it again, and my incredulity was intact and entire — it was wholly undiminished. Between those dates I had worked my way through scores of books on the subject; and while I might have gained in knowledge, I had gained nothing at all in penetration. The facts, set down in a historiography of tens of thousand of volumes, are not in the slightest doubt; but they remain in some sense unbelievable, or beyond belief, and cannot quite be assimilated. Very cautiously I submit that part of the exceptionalism of the Third Reich lies in its unyieldingness, the electric severity with which it repels our contact and our grip.
Soon after this negative eureka (I have not found it, I cannot understand it), my eye was caught by a new edition of Primo Levi’s The Truce (his comedic and affirmatory companion volume to the darkness of If This Is a Man). And here I came across an addendum I hadn’t seen before — ‘The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions’, which covers eighteen pages of small print.
‘How can the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?’ asks question number seven. In reply Levi lists the most commonly cited root causes, which, nevertheless, he finds ‘not commensurate with, not proportional to, the facts that need explaining’. He goes on:
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a proposal or human behaviour means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him. Now, no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human… [T]here is no rationality in the Nazi hatred; it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man…
Historians will consider this more an evasion than an argument. To non-discursive writers, though (and we remember that Levi was also a novelist and a poet), such a feint or flourish may be taken as a spur. Here, Levi is very far from hoisting up the no-entry sign demanded by the sphinxists, the anti-explainers. On the contrary, he is lifting the pressure off the why, and so pointing to a way in.
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My special thanks go to Richard J. Evans for checking my typescript, for drawing my attention to some historical implausibilities, and for tidying up several grave errors in the novel’s garnish of German; and thanks also to my friend of almost half a century, Clive James, for his suggestions and his thoughts. As I said to Professor Evans at the outset, my only conscious liberty with the factual record was in bringing forward the defection to the USSR of Friedrich Paulus (the losing commander at Stalingrad) by about seventeen months. Otherwise, I adhere to that which happened, in all its horror, its desolation, and its bloody-minded opacity.
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