Authors: Ron Rosenbaum
ISBN-13: 9780060953393, ISBN-10: 006095339X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: June 1999
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Ron Rosenbaum grew up on Long Island, New York. A graduate of Yale with a degree in English literature, he left Yale Graduate School to write full-time. His essays and journalism have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker; he's done eight cover stories for the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of four previous books, including one novel and three collections of his essays and journalism, most recently Travels with Dr Death and Other Unusual Investigations.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian Thomas Powers called him "one of the few distinctive voices of modern American literary journalism." His work has been characterized by the essayist Phillip Lopate as combining "the skills of a terrific investigative reporter and an accomplished literary stylist with an idiosyncratic streak all his own."
More than ten years ago, he began investigating certain unresolved controversies among Hitler biographers, and ultimately embarked on an odyssey that took him from Vienna and Munich to London, Paris, and Jerusalem. The book that emerged combines original research and dramatic face-to-face encounters with historians, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians as they attempt to account for the elusive figure of Adolf Hitler and the meanings projected upon him by his explainers.
Currently Ron Rosenbaum writes for the New York Times Magazine, and The New York Observer, and teaches a course on literary journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of journalism.
Investigating the heated controversies over Hitler -- his ancestry, his sexuality, the nature of his consciousness -- Rosenbaum astutely explores the mind of Hitler and the minds of his explainers, illuminating with original reportage and archival research the depths of one of history's greatest enigmas.
Uniquely illuminates one of the darkest corners of modern experience.
Introduction: The Baby Pictures and the Abyss | ||
Pt. 1 | The Beginning of the Beginning | |
Ch. 1 | The Mysterious Stranger, the Serving Girl, and the Family Romance of the Hitler Explainers | 3 |
Ch. 2 | The Hitler Family Film Noir | 16 |
Ch. 3 | The Poison Kitchen: The Forgotten First Explainers | 37 |
Pt. 2 | Two Postwar Visions: Sincerity and Its Counterfeit | |
Ch. 4 | H. R. Trevor-Roper: The Professor and the Mountebank | 63 |
Ch. 5 | Alan Bullock: Rethinking Hitler's Thought Process | 78 |
Pt. 3 | Geli Raubal and Hitler's "Sexual Secret" | |
Ch. 6 | Was Hitler "Unnatural"? | 99 |
Ch. 7 | Hitler's Songbird and the Suicide Register | 118 |
Ch. 8 | The Dark Matter: The Sexual Fantasy of the Hitler Explainers | 135 |
Pt. 4 | Hatred: Complex and Primitive | |
Ch. 9 | Fritz Gerlich and the Trial of Hitler's Nose | 155 |
Ch. 10 | The Shadow Hitler, His "Primitive Hatred," and the "Strange Bond" | 179 |
Pt. 5 | The Art of Evil and the Future of It | |
Ch. 11 | To the Gestapo Cottage; or, A Night Close to the Fuhrer | 201 |
Ch. 12 | David Irving: The Big Oops | 221 |
Pt. 6 | The War over the Question Why | |
Ch. 13 | A Tale of Three Kafkas: A Cautionary Parable | 239 |
Ch. 14 | Claude Lanzmann and the War Against the Question Why | 251 |
Ch. 15 | Dr. Louis Micheels: There Must Be a Why | 267 |
Pt. 7 | Blame and Origins | |
Ch. 16 | Emil Fackenheim and Yehuda Bauer: The Temptation to Blame God | 279 |
Ch. 17 | George Steiner: Singling out the Jewish "Invention of Conscience" | 300 |
Ch. 18 | Singling out Christianity: The Passion Play of Hyam Maccoby | 319 |
Ch. 19 | Daniel Goldhagen: Blaming Germans | 337 |
Ch. 20 | Lucy Dawidowicz: Blaming Adolf Hitler | 369 |
Notes | 397 | |
Acknowledgments | 425 | |
Index | 429 |