On Cinema’s “Humanisation” of Hitler

In a feature essay in the Sunday Times (London) in February, reprinted in the Weekend Australian (February 28–March 1), the noted British journalist and historian Tom Bower declared how appalled he is at what he described as a tendency to humanise Hitler’s foot soldiers and, indeed, Hitler himself. The immediate occasion for his remarks was Kate Winslet’s Oscar for The Reader. But Bower worried that The Reader is one of a number of books and films that are setting a disturbing trend. His concern is surely misplaced. Hitler was human: that’s precisely the problem.

Bower described some of the worst of Hitler’s killers as “monsters without remorse”. Karl Wolff, Arthur Rudolph, Gustav Wagner, all Nazi killers whom Bower interviewed, were responsible for dreadful crimes, yet lived out their lives after the war without any apparent regret. They were a few among tens of thousands. Similarly, as he pointed out, the character Hannah Schmitz, whom Winslet played, was largely based on Hermine Braunsteiner, who committed brutal crimes for which she never repented. There were many, many others like this. Surely, Bower argues, we should not allow that they were just ordinary human beings in difficult circumstances—as he thinks we are invited to believe of Hannah Schmitz in The Reader.

Bower’s concern is understandable, especially in an era when mass entertainment and agitprop are more prevalent than serious history, and the United States or Israel are cavalierly compared with Nazi Germany. Yet his argument is poorly made and needs reframing. He deplored what he called “the gradual humanization of Hitler” and those who committed genocide under his leadership, but he would have done better had he complained of their crimes being whitewashed or forgotten. For they were human and we need to study them precisely for that reason. We need to remember what is possible for human beings and ponder the disturbing lessons of the twentieth century’s horrific totalitarian regimes.

By Bower’s own account, at least 135,000 Germans were directly involved in mass murder during the Nazi era. Daniel Goldhagen dubbed them “Hitler’s willing executioners”. But Bower testifies, also, that “most Germans during the war were aware of the extermination of the Jews and the vast majority believed the Jews deserved their fate”. Quite so, but doesn’t this present a problem for Bower’s “humanisation” argument? If Hitler was inhuman and should never be “humanised”, what of the 135,000; and if the 135,000, what of the “vast majority”? Are we really to say that the German people—or at least a whole generation of them—should never be “humanised”? What could this mean?

The problem with his argument, however, is not simply a matter of the scope of his claim, but of the very reasoning he uses to advance it. His reasoning seems to me to be rather odd and to suggest that he did not think deeply enough about what he was claiming. Consider, for example, the following remarks, apparently central to his view of the matter:

Just as the memory of Napoleon’s terror was forgotten once his contemporary victims had died—today he is judged by his love life, his legal code and his remarkable military successes—Hitler is also becoming an object of fascination rather than total vilification. His humanization, in the same way as Napoleon’s, will take generations, but the recent interest in his library and dress code are the first signs of the inevitable. The Reader is another creep in that direction.

Does Bower mean to suggest that Napoleon was actually as awful as Hitler and should never have been “humanised”? That we have somehow committed a travesty of moral judgment in remembering Napoleon on account of Josephine, or the reform of French law or the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, the retreat from Moscow and the epic of Waterloo? That in time Hitler might be remembered as favourably as Napoleon, or at least as having been a mixture of the great and the terrifying? Surely, even in making such a comparison, he was doing more to “humanise” Hitler than a film like The Reader, which recalls the horrors of his rule?

There are two important points to be made about Bower’s odd comparison of Hitler with Napoleon. The first is that Napoleon is one of a very large number of generals and statesmen with a great deal of blood on their hands, of whom mixed and even damning moral judgments might be made, but that Hitler does not belong in their company. The second is that Hitler does belong in a much narrower set of truly damnable figures of whom, alas, a good many ruled whole countries in the twentieth century. One would have expected Bower to make these two points, but he didn’t.

It is particularly odd to see Bower complaining about “the recent interest in [Hitler’s] library and dress code”. Timothy Ryback’s recent book Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life is, presumably, one of the books to which he is referring. Yet it is a useful study of the background to Hitler’s alarming and lethal cast of mind. It is hardly an apology for any of the enormities he committed when in power. Would Bower seriously suggest that we should shun the very idea that Hitler read books? What point is he trying to make here?

To deplore the publication of such books is rather like decrying the publication of, say, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s fascinating Young Stalin, which shows the future Soviet tyrant to have been a more complex and intelligent young man than either Sukhanov’s (and Trotsky’s) famous dismissal of him as a “grey blur” or any stance of “total vilification” would admit. The disturbing truth, as Montefiore argues, is that Stalin was a more gifted and astute individual than his enemies either appreciated or admitted. They suffered the consequences. Stalin, too, was a voracious reader, and only with close studies of his youth, his library and his papers are we steadily forming a clearer picture of how he achieved and exercised power.

If “total vilification” of Hitler and Stalin was all that was required in order for us to come to terms with the catastrophes of their rule, our task would be simple. We could pronounce our verdict and move on until it is thought necessary to instruct a new generation; whereupon we would simply utter the anathema all over again. But it isn’t like this at all, and Bower would surely admit as much if asked. Even very good histories are only a beginning or a resource for reflection and education.

As Oleg Khlevniuk shows, in the introduction to his newly published Master of the House: Stalin and his Inner Circle, when historians finally get access to long-sealed archives (as he did in Russia in the 1990s), all manner of long-accepted judgments turn out to be inaccurate and new insights are gleaned that are well worth our collective interest. But suspicions or impressions can also be finally confirmed by documentary evidence. Learning more about who Stalin was, what interested him, how he thought, what he actually did, turns him from a figure of dark legend into a real human being. Likewise, surely, with Hitler.Had Bower confined himself to the claim that films like The Reader go too far in softening the impression of what happened in Hitler’s Germany, or extenuating the judgment that might be made of his henchmen and willing executioners, he might have been on firmer ground. Yet his assertion that there is a trend here is surely questionable. Would he argue that a film like Downfall—brilliantly reconstructing Hitler’s last days in the Berlin bunker—was part of this trend? Surely not. Yet Bruno Ganz’s extraordinary performance as Hitler did “humanise” the tyrant. Usefully so, I’d have thought.

In deploring the alleged humanisation (whitewashing) of Hitler, Bower was missing the point. What is truly disturbing about Nazism (and totalitarian communism) is that they erupted in the very heartlands of Christian, bourgeois, industrialising civilisation. Had they come from outside and been a manifestation of some more evidently barbarous or even wholly alien force, we might feel more secure in our humanity. They did not and consequently we cannot. It was for this reason that Hannah Arendt wrote, in 1950:

The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.

Victory in the Second World War and even in the Cold War did not alter this; it merely enabled us to breathe a little more freely—and gave us the opportunity to take stock. And that is what Bower, if he had thought a little harder, would surely have called upon us to keep doing. For what we have learned from the twentieth century is that civilisation is a veneer over a complex human psychological and social reality and that barbarism does not belong to some primitive past, but is a reality menacingly latent within our collective humanity.

Plainly, this has been demonstrated again and again even in the past twenty years. Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002) and Romeo Dallaire’s agonised memoir Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003) are representative of a sombre and prolific literature reminding us of this. Does Bower really believe that the overall trend is towards making excuses for Hitler? Perhaps there are those, in Germany and elsewhere, who are doing so—just as there quite certainly are those in Russia these days who are vigorously and openly rehabilitating Stalin. But I would have thought that the trend—in terms of serious scholarship and collective opinion—is towards trying to understand, not excuse the phenomena of terror, genocide and total war.

Writing in the late eighteenth century, at the time of the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon complacently celebrated the fact that more than two thousand German towns, the Christian kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Poland, the offspring of the Teutonic knights on the shores of the Baltic and the “powerful and civilized empire” of Russia now stood between Western Europe and “the remnant of Calmucks or Uzbecks”, which could no longer “seriously excite the apprehensions of the great republic of Europe”.

Ah! But the indifferent painter from Austria or the cobbler’s son from Georgia, what of them? And what of the millions of Germans and Russians who embraced their murderous regimes? Or the very many citizens of other Western countries who saw merit and even the wave of the future in their leadership and manner of rule? The thing that should haunt all of us, in other words, is precisely the humanity of the millions who created and embraced totalitarianism and its atrocities in the European world only a few decades ago. If by humanisation, Bower meant whitewashing, then we should endorse his sentiments, because there is no case for whitewashing the horrors of Nazism (or communism) in the twentieth century. But total vilification is no substitute for what we really need in this grave matter: relentless enquiry into and profound understanding of how total war, genocide and terror overtook the countries of Goethe, Schiller and Beethoven; Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky. For if there, under the pressure of grievance, economic crisis or ideological fervour, where else might such terrors emerge?

Needless to say, this is by no means a question confined to Europe, or the West more generally. The Chinese are still trying to come to terms with their own experience of such upheavals—though the Communist Party suppresses enquiry into its past. The Cambodians have only recently put on trial a few of those guilty of the incredible “auto-genocide” under Pol Pot just over thirty years ago. Rwanda’s trauma, fifteen years ago, has become a byword. In short, it isn’t a question of the “total vilification” of Hitler or some more or less arbitrary number of his countrymen, but of a reckoning with our own humanity that is really on the table when we contemplate these horrors.

“How could it have happened?” we ask. As a morose character in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters remarks, “That’s the wrong question. Human nature being what it is; the question isn’t how it can have happened, but why it doesn’t happen more often. Of course it does, but in more subtle ways.” “Human nature” being the problem, total vilification of Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot is of no use to us. Indeed, the very phrase has a disquietingly totalitarian edge to it. In any case, they are all long dead; so whatever moral judgments we make are a rhetoric directed at ourselves, our contemporaries. And surely, once we acknowledge that truth, we must also acknowledge that a nuanced psychological understanding, an imaginative historical re-examination, a many-sided moral and social reflection, are going to be much more useful to us than simply traumatised rituals of denunciation.

Having written all that, perhaps it is necessary to conclude with at least a brief judgment about The Reader, which triggered Tom Bower’s concerned response. I saw the film twice and will probably see it at least once or twice more. I am intrigued by what it has attempted to do as theatre. I am impressed by the performances not only of Kate Winslet, but also Ralph Fiennes, the young David Kross and also Bruno Ganz. It is fascinating to see the man who played Hitler so compellingly, playing the part of a disillusioned, humane, post-Nazi law professor introducing his students to the work of Karl Jaspers and trying to induce them to reflect on the Nazi era in a thoughtful manner.

I cannot help seeing a certain parallel between The Reader and Hannah Arendt’s famous and controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). But of course Arendt’s book was an analysis of the real thing, whereas Stephen Daldry’s film of Bernhard Schlink’s novel is a work of theatre. The parallel is in the banality of Hannah Schmitz. But of course she was no Adolf Eichmann. She is neither a monster without remorse, nor a cold and unimaginative technician of genocide. She is a limited and very lonely human being, for whom it is impossible not to feel some empathy. This is all the more so because Kate Winslet is very winsome in the role.

If some tomfool of a school teacher were to present the film as an adequate documentary source on Nazism, I would be unimpressed. But I cannot share Tom Bower’s discomfort with it. Theatre is not history, and both are important to our civilisation’s necessary effort to overcome “the subterranean stream” of its past.

Dr Paul Monk is a Director of Austhink Consulting. His new book, The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures, will be published shortly by Barrallier Books.