On the outskirts of Branson, Missouri — an Ozarkian showcase of nature's prodigies mortgaged circa 1990 to piratical commercialization — there at least lies one gem of civilization's crowding, a Books-A-Million store. While browsing there last week I bought Volker Ullrich's second volume of his biographical study, Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945.
Being abysmally backlogged on the subject's historiography I was unfamiliar with Ullrich's work, so before buying I sought assurance by doing some spying: a thumbs-up consult with the much-respected Jennifer Szalai, The NY Times' 2020 reviewer of Downfall.
And that's when things got weird. As I stood in the bookstore aisle reading the review, the names, personalities and potential downfalls of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump began to blend into one; by the time I finished reading, my imminent purchase seemed more a biography of the latter.
No cynicism implied when I note this likely was the reviewer's intent: The bio's English translation appeared three months before Election Day 2020. Nor do I overlook the stacks of Trump-cum-Hitler books already in existence — whether directly or indirectly, those which reveal the frightening similarities of the two men's innermost persons and outermost ugliness.
Yet Hitler: Downfall struck me as the most aggressive mirror to-date. I should qualify that; my assessment is based more on the Times review than the book itself, only a slim portion of which I've had time to read so far. On the other hand, book reviewers know how to read and they know how to compress what they've read into its most salient themes.
Biographer Ullrich, then, could assert only with a great deal of giggling that when he wrote that Hitler's "impulsiveness and grandiosity" and "bullying and vulgarity ... accounted for [his] anti-establishment appeal" (the reviewer's words), it just never crossed his mind that Trump fits that bill to a T.
The doppelgänging tale soldiers on commensurately. Only fools believed that "Hitler would rise to the occasion" of national leadership and become "a dignified statesman"; that older-school conservatives could control him; that "purge[s]" wouldn't ensue; that although clever in "seizing power," he was in no way "too restless and reckless to govern."
Hitler's mammothly disqualifying traits were no secret. And that's what makes both the historical and contemporary so infinitely distressing. All that was known and once again known notwithstanding, "An utter impossibility had become the indomitable reality," wrote Salzai. Hitler then undertook his "standard approach" — "lying" and "blaming others" for any failures, the one "option" he always "preserved."
Whenever Hitler felt "boxed in" he "lashed out — compulsively, destructively." He "was a scattershot, undisciplined leader, prone to tardiness and meandering monologues." And if none of that bangs a gong in the reader's mind, this should: "He had the instinct of a crude social-Darwinist..., experiencing the world only in terms of winning and losing."
More than the features of the past comes through in Ullrich's bio. (Again, I proceed largely from its review.) The thunderbolts being: "Hitler had peddled so many lies that the fantasy he created was stretched impossibly thin" — from there, "the very qualities that accounted for the dictator’s astonishing rise were also what brought about his ultimate ruin."
His ruin was celebrated universally, yet the horror preceding his downfall was that humanity's ruin was universal as well. The hellishly global circumstances of Hitler's end will see no replication in Trump's (the odds otherwise, a million to one), and even better, Der Führer's thousand-year Reich of 12 years survived, we might guess, roughly eight or 10 years longer than Trump's upcoming blunderfest.
Still, I anticipate that some rather precise replication will come to pass. Take, for instance, these joyful words by Szalai about Hitler's final days: "For all his pretensions to invincibility, he ended up a broken, sickly man." Her sentence continued but at the stopping point of our joy: "[The führer] confronted the reality bearing down on him by killing himself in his bunker."
We can't have it all.
***
For those of you now inclined to buy Ullrich's biography I'll add this note about what in particular intrigued me enough to buy it (the overriding themes we've covered), which, I suppose, could be called a kind of inside-baseball historiographical thing. Or maybe not; depends on how much one is interested in, and has read on, the vast subject of Nazi Germany.
As I looked around for information on Ullrich's professional background, I noticed this observation in a review of his short biography of Germany's 19th-century unifier (Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor): "Ullrich has a mildly revisionist point to make." From what I could see in the Times review of Downfall, he had another bit of revisionism in mind.
This one perhaps not so mild, but I can't say, I've not yet read the entire book. Szalai quoted Ullrich quoting Hitler: "I have overcome the chaos in Germany, restored order and hugely increased productivity in all areas of our national economy." Szalai followed with, "he bragged [this] to the Reichstag, even if the actual situation was considerably less stellar than he proclaimed."
That's an indispensable point. Among today's Americans there exists something of a vague, gossamer belief in Hitler having made Germany's trains run on time, and from that the belief extends into Naziism's economic vitality throughout most of the 1930s. In short, it took a strongman.
The longer, accurate version is that the belief is baloney. It's been a while since I read R. Gellately's Hitler's True Believers, but as I recall, the work effectively disabuses the notion of happy German workers, by and large, in the 1930s.
Ullrich's second volume, Downfall, begins by addressing the immediate prewar period, about whose "actual situation" Szalai wrote: "Years of enormous military expenditures had pushed Germany to the brink of economic collapse. Hitler had made a mess, and a war would clean it up."
That may indeed have been a factor in the führer's mulling over the launch of war and its timing, but not one essentially comparable to his geopolitical objectives — not, anyway, one I've encountered in recent, uncommonly fine treatments such as M. Hastings' Inferno and A. Roberts' The Storm of War.
So I'll be interested in reading how Ullrich makes his case. Otherwise, intended as strong subtext or not, his linkage of Hitler and Trump's freakish personalities and destructive "leadership" styles is impossible to refute.
And still damn near impossible for me to accept is that we the God-blessed and singularly exceptional people of these United States of America just voted to put that monstrous linkage right back in the White House.
Comments