Stages of Savagery

By Mayo Mohs

HITLER

by JOACHIM C. FEST

Translated by RICHARD and

CLARA WINSTON. 844 pages. Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich. $15.

"One of Hitler's crimes still continues," a publisher recently complained. "Every year we have to wade through another biography about him!" Year after year the Hitler Welle, or "Hitler Wave," sweeps from Europe to the U.S., bearing book after book by aides and generals, resisters and reconstructed Nazis. Just as the jaded reader is about to shout "Hitler, go home!" along comes a study like this one. Massive, yet gracefully written, it is the best single volume available on the tortuous life and savage reign of Adolf Hitler.

Fest, 47, an editor of the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, grew up in Hitler's Germany, was drafted at 15 and captured by American troops at Remagen Bridge. Inevitably, his book covers little new ground. But he tells the Hitler story as no non-German could: dispassionately, but from the inside. When he blames the German people for Hitler, as he does, the charge rings true.

Fest weaves a judicious path through the mountain of raw materials that confront any biographer of Hitler. The book is crammed with pertinent quotes and facts. The author has a nice eye for the single sentence that ties together a skein of reasoning. Discussing how Hitler stirred the masses while retaining a certain messianic remoteness, Fest cites the dictator's response to a solicitous woman: "Yes, I am very lonely, but children and music comfort me."

Role Playing. Such self-conscious role playing was the very fabric of Hitler's life, says Fest. The book, not surprisingly, often presents the Fuehrer in the ebb and flow of rich personal melodrama. Early on, the reader meets the "idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves," and the proud, self-pitying, angry young would-be artist in Vienna, suing his dealer over an imagined embezzlement. After the abortive beer-hall putsch in Munich in 1923, Hitler scurries to safety--and to despairing Hamletesque thoughts of suicide. After he had won the Reich chancellorship a decade later, he posed as the "lonely wanderer out of nothingness" who had come to power. Finally there was the "imitation Wagnerian end" in a bunker in burning Berlin.

In the book's best chapter, "View of an Unperson," Fest explores the ways in which Hitler's own mesmerizing public spectacles--especially the death-heavy memorials to Nazi martyrs --were grand variations of the Wagner operas he admired so much. Indeed, concludes Fest, Hitler was neurotically fearful about being caught offstage--or off guard: he covered his mouth when he laughed. "He had scarcely any but staged relationships," writes Fest. "Everyone was either an extra or an instrument."

Fest punctuates his chronological drama with a kind of intermission--"interpolations," he calls them--in which he examines such historical topics as the "great dread" that afflicted Germans during the chaotic Weimar era. Hitler's foolish and criminal rush into war ("War is life," he said), and the Fuehrer's relationship to the forces of German history. The author rejects the line of thought that explains Hitler by tracing the Fuehrer's philosophical antecedents back through centuries of Teutonic mysticism and blood-dimmed sense of divine mission. He also rejects the simple-minded apologists who see Hitler as a modern political excrescence that somehow grew, cancerously, upon an unwilling German civilization. Hitler, insists Fest, was simply in the right place at the right time. His frustrations mirrored those of the defeated nation. His anti-Semitism hardened and focused a disease that was then almost pandemic among his bitter, nationalistic countrymen. His vision of a "new" order, disciplined and majestically functional, had in fact just the nostalgic touch that Germans would respond to amid the social and moral chaos of the Weimar Republic.

Mad Artist. Fest's Hitler is less the traditional devil than the mad artist--close to but much deadlier than the maniacal globe juggler in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator. Hitler sought power not for power's sake, Fest argues, but to accomplish his own grandiose vision of reordering the world. He trained like a messiah: he became a vegetarian, for instance, not on principle but to cheat the early death he expected and thus gain more time for his mission.

His virtually lifelong refusal to take a wife was transformed into an almost wedded passion for the crowd. Fest subscribes to the idea that Hitler's speeches were a conscious wooing of the masses--to the point of emotional orgasm. The adoration of the crowd in turn would send the Fuehrer into rapture. "What would my life be without all of you!" he once shouted at a meeting, like a rock star stirring up his fans. Indeed, without a crowd to please, he often sank into the kind of moody lassitude that sometimes plagues out-of-work actors. At Berchtesgaden, to the utter boredom of his staff, he would show favorite movies (among them Gone with the Wind) over and over again.

Despite such lapses into inaction, Fest concludes that Hitler was a man of incredibly strong will. "He made history with a highhandedness that even in his own days seemed anachronistic," writes Fest. "It is unimaginable that history will ever again be made in quite the same fashion--a succession of private inspirations, filled with coups and veerings, breathtaking perfidies, ideological self-betrayals, but with a tenaciously pursued vision in the back ground." Fest believes that "objective factors" in today's politics -- presumably such things as international interdependence, vastly increased communications, and resources for popular resistance -- would prevent another Hitler from achieving such singular power. A comforting thought, if true. But time is long and virtue fleeting. Men's capacity for evil--as well as for heroism--does not seem to change.

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