The Nazis just weren't the thing Tom Smith

I have started subscribing to The New York Review of Books on my kindle fire and so far I would say it's worth the freight.  Reading it is to me like visiting an exotic world peopled by creatures whose interests and priorities are alien to mine or at least weirdly skewed.  While I have enjoyed some productions of modern dance, for instance, there is something about the world of dance, its sciences and preoccupations that bores me deeply.  Yet people who care about "dance" for some reason seem peculiar enough to me to arouse at least a temporary curiosity.  And the NYRB covers dance as well as just about anything else that might count as culturally worthy in Manhattan.

This issue has a review by the distinguished historian Max Hastings of two new biographies of Himmler and Heydrich, respectively, called appropriately enough "the most terrible of Hitler's creatures."  The review is worth reading, though a subscription is required to read the whole thing.  Most interesting to me is Hastings's invocation of the old trope that the Nazi leaders were notably just irredeemably vulgar, uncultured, unintellectual and of utterly mediocre accomplishment.  I say old because I remember at least one scene from some WWII movie from the sixties or seventies in which some upper class German lady decried the awful petit bourgeois-itude of that little man Hitler.  I remember being impressed by that affectation for a while when I was ten or so.  But it hardly seems a credible attitude for an adult, let alone a distinguished historian to adopt, though the NYRB seems be a venue where academics and intellectuals let their (in the case of the more elderly males) completely metaphorical hair down.  

We learn, for example, that the violin playing of Heydrich, who came from a musical family, was "sentimental."  As if one could hardly expect the Butcher of Prague to intrepret the violin repertoire with much sensitivity.  I find this ridiculous, as ridiculous as if the book had been reviewed by some fashion maven who wondered how Heydrich could wear his dashing SS uniform so well, or by a person of the dance who wondered how Heydrich could cut the rug so appeallingly, and yet be so evil.  You may say this is a common enough sort of academic and intellecutal snobbery but it still rankles. It recalls Hannah Arendt's tedious point about the banality of Adolph Eichmann's evil, the sort of point that could only be made by the sort of person who was excessively dazzled by cultural accomplishment in the first place.   

It might be, or at least one hopes, that the sort of cultural and academic snobbery that those of us in the academy are only too familiar with might be dying out.  Perhaps Professor Hastings is an old European of the sort who dreamnt of the redeeming power of high culture, a dream I would have thought WWII left little of.  Some of this I suspect too is a holdover from the European and therefore also to some extent American yearning of the professional middle class for aristocratic privilege and distinction. Many, many academics must be the children of striving but not wealthy parents who went to university on scholarship and fought to attain the higher rank to which they felt their talent entitled them.  It must be natural to believe that having those talents makes one not just more talented but ineffably better, the way a true aristocrat is ineffably better than a mere merchant, tradesman, lawyer or doctor.  The problem with this worldview is its falsity.  Heydrich may not have been a truly accomplished musician, but people seem to think Heidegger was a most accomplished intellectual and for all that he was a Nazi, if not so successful at it as Himmler or Heydrich. Somewhere in this as well is the problem for, let's call them liberal intellectuals, that any overt claims or commitments to morality (especially religious morality) as such would be highly problematic.  They are evidently much more certain about what makes a man vulgar and a boor than what makes him evil, though to be fair I think they would agree that notorious Nazis do qualify. Though evidently not so certainly that the case isn't sealed by noting, as Hastings does, that Himmler was a rather unfortunate looking man and his wife was vulgar and no beauty. (Yet Heydrich seems to have been good looking enough, especially if you go for icy Nordic types.)

Another fallacy that I suspect lurks behind Hasting's puzzlement, and I infer that also of his probably sympathetic readership, over the political success of Himmler and Heydrich, who lacked so completely all of the adornments of high culture, is the presumption that political systems somehow reward genuine human accomplishment.  (Or perhaps one should day "genuine".)  How different this presumption is from the hard-eyed worldview of the American founders for instance, or radical Whigs more generally, who saw politics and government as an arena of amoral factional conflict and inevitable corruption.  The latter strikes me as far more true to the facts, not just as to government but to many other human realms as well.  Probably including even the dance.  Evil should seem banal only to those who were wrongly dazzled by some glamour or other in the first place.

Comments

[Lou Gots]

I have yet to read Hastings on Heydrich and Himmler. His books Retribution and Inferno, were excellent. I would concur that most of the Nazis, including those two, were vulgar clowns. The Nazis are seriously overrated in terms of military virtue. Hitler took long chances, and sometimes, in war, who dares, wins. The Nazi system, however, was deeply flawed by errors of scale. They had no idea what they were doing, and tried to rum a large nation and its armed forces by a half-baked fantasy system derived from a corporal's view of war.