Customer Reviews

The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

What you make of this book depends what you expected when you picked it up. The expression 'virus' rather suggests an analysis of how Hiterlism still infects the body politic. Up to a point, that is right. Wyden (who died before completing the text) does consider ultra right movements such as Haider's in Austria and is adroit in considering the continuing fascination for the Fuhrer amongst tourists and skinheads. But those references hardly add up to a comprehensive treatment. The author is far more successful in tracing the post war political careers or influence of card carrying nazis, for example Remer (who saved the regime in the failed July 1944 coup)and a veritable tribe of unpunished former SS who popped up all over the world in new guises. For my money, this book illustrates that Hitler's influence has certainly persisted since 1945 without really telling us why or to what end. Perhaps those loathsome internet hate groups have some of the answers.

I will admit, I was leery of the book when I bought it. Mostly because of the opening line in the introduction detailing how this was not a indictment of a "complex people." I was not pleasantly surprised.

Wyden, a German born American Jew who had worked in the the US Army's denazification program and later as a journalist takes the reader on a disorganized, disjointed journey though modern Germany (with random side trips to the US and Austria as well as to the past). Almost every sentence until the closing chapters of this book reeks of disdain for the "complex people" he was not indicting.

The Hitler Virus' first and major sin is it's disorganization as the reader is taken from chapter to chapter in random directions with no controlling vision of what he is trying to say. The few good chapters (dealing with David Irving and the children of Nazi parents) are dealt with much better in books he cites (Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust and Sichrovsky's Born Guilty).

The second deadly sin of this book is it's terrible abuse of statistics when he does use them. Numbers are clothed in yellow language meant to slant the reader without explaining other factors which can only be inferred. When the numbers are not as shocking as he'd like, Wyden often mentions how Germans are unlikely to admit unpolitic feelings to pollsters, which I thought was a novel defense of desperation.

The best example of this is early in the book:

"Another poll in the new millennium revealed that 79 percent of Germans see May 8, 1945, as a day of liberation rather than a day of defeat. However, if one considers different age groups separately, 87 percent of people under the age of thirty think that May 8, 1945 was a day of liberation, while only 67 percent of those over fifty do."

Perhaps, being an American, I tend to think of 67 percent as a high figure for any poll, and hardly worth an "only", especially given that if it was indeed taken at the end of the century than this poll would have included East Germans for whom the end of World War II was the start of a forty year nightmare, and certainly not a day of liberation.

Wyden also fails to place facts in context--in a chapter on Konrad Adenauer he proposes what he thinks will be a shocking revaluation that the post-war chancellor was not a true democrat. I haven't read any serious book on post war Germany that suggested he was. It is a well known fact that Adenauer hated consulting the Bundestag and would frequently end run the parliamentary process if he could.

Wyden though infers the chancellor was a nazi because of the brown past of several of his appointees. One has to wonder how one was going to find enough people qualified to run the government in post war West Germany with no brown past. After all, this was not an occupied state being freed.

Another proof Wyden gives to paint Adenauer brown is the fact that he pushed High Commissioner McCoy to commute the death sentences of several convicted war criminals. A point to remember is that the Federal Republic had outlawed the death penalty in the forming of the Basic Law and at the very least the chancellor had asked that the sentences be commuted to fall in line with this. This is not to say that is the only reason Adenauer lobbied for McCoy on behalf of the war criminals, but it is a side that Wyden simply does not inform the reader of.

Perhaps to me most insidious is not the German bashing, or the disorganization, or even the 'lies, damn lies and statistics' but the fact that this subject deserved better.

The only thing I agree with Wyden about is that Adolf Hitler is the big pink elephant sitting in the middle of German life, and of any conversation about history between Germans or with Germans and non-Germans. But sadly, Wyden abandons his stated goal, only talking about neo-Nazies and anti-emegrant feeling in passing and ignoring the basic hardships left behind in the old DDR which might foster a rise of a right-wing party.

Wyden treats Germans and Austrians as if they are interchangeable, and my great fear is that the lay reader which this book is aimed at will not understand the fundamental difference between the two German speaking nations. Farther afield are discussions of American hate publishers and Nazi collectors which seem to have only tangential baring on the issue of if the virus is alive in Germany today.

The only people who will be satisfied with this book are those who had preconceived notions about a people who's national guilt will last much longer than anyone has a right to demand of them. The author began his work by telling the reader he was close to the subject, what he did not tell his readers is that he was TOO close to his subject.

The nostalgia of many for Hitler and his Third Reich, the allure of his ideology, the sympathy of old and young in Germany and many other parts of the world for Hitler's lost cause, the strange attractions to many (including ironically Jews!) of Nazi memorabilia - all these are important sociological issues which merits a careful and forensic analysis. The demise of the extreme right spectrum of the world political stage since WWII also deserved scholarly treatment. What accounts for the strange, surprisingly international appeal of Hitler in this day and age!? This book offers none of that. Yes, as the author admitted, it is a deeply personal enquiry into the question of why Hitler as the ideologue and model has refused to die - notwithstanding that Nazism was literally bombed into the sub-basement at the end of WWII. It is personal to the extent of being badly organized, poorly conceptualized, and not held together by any coherent or well-thought out system or order. This is a very shoddy treatment of a historically and sociologically significant topic, nearly an insult. It reads like the author simply wrote out into full essay length his personal scrapbook. Only mildly entertaining in odd places. A grave disappointment. Adolf deserves a better class of analyst.

This was an interesting book, and I devoured it in one sitting. However, I have given it a poor rating solely for for its misrepresentations of Edgar Reitz' film Heimat, which are not incidental but go to the heart of his analysis in this chapter. I think that Wyden either did not watch the film before reviewing it to make his points or I don't know what. I know this type of thing is necessarily subjective, but still... could one legitimately say that Beethoven's 9th symphony is a "jolly ditty"?

I don't have the book in front of me for the quotes I want to bring out. Nevertheless I want to go ahead and post this, so please forgive the errors that will creep in.

i) Wyden says Eduard becomes mayor and then marries Lucie. He marries her first. His wife hectors him to be somebody, and he resultingly ends up as a mayor. Wyden makes it sound as if he had this type of ambition himself--definitely not the case.

ii) Maria is not the Wiegand's younger daughter, she is the only daughter. The female relationships are important in this movie, so it just seems sloppy to state that there is another daughter.

iii) Wyden states that Reitz uses color footage to show "explosions of swastika banners" or some such to make his "points." This gives a totally false impression, and I actually don't recall even one instance where such a scene occurs. The bursts of color are charmingly erratic, sometimes emphasizing some emotional point (e.g., the sparks when Paul hits the anvil upon his return home or when Maria feeds the fire upon Otto's return to her) and sometimes appearing for no apparent reason other than artistic whim. Perhaps the glowing red ruby eyes of the death's head rings that frighten Maria would have been a better example, but these are not so much representative of the official, "public" party as they are of individuals' "private" choices to accomodate themselves to Nazism. Also, there are colorized swastika armbands, but I believe that Wyden writes as though Reitz produced, however ironically, some "Triumph of the Will"-type spectacles, which is not the case.

iv)warfare/civilian atrocities downplayed: I know this is a controversial point with this film, so let me just bring out a spot where Wyden misrepresents the film. "One character views a [presumably partisan fighter or Russian civilian--reviewer] shooting at a neutral, sanitizing distance through a camera lens." IF he is speaking here of where Anton is participating in filming the execution of individuals in the snowy woods (and that is the closest thing to what he is talking about that I can think of), it is wrong to say Anton is looking through a lens--he is trying to fix a telephoto lens when the shootings take place. More importantly, the focus on the camera "used as a gun" serves to heighten the impact of this scene to an almost unbearable degree rather than to "sanitize" it. This is a blatant misrepresentation of this film.

iv) doughty characters, "muddle-through" attitude, etc. This trivializes the film, which is anyone's right, but I strongly disagree with this shallow assessment. Also "drowning in detail," etc.

v) "Heimatfilme" as a Nazi genre: I am not sure about this, but I believe that "Heimat" films were popular in the 1950s and are considered as a genre to be a "regionalistic" reaction to the emphasis on nationalism in the Nazi times. Wyden subtly implies that Reitz named his film after a Nazi-inspired film movement, not because he is a Nazi sympathizer, but as part of his attempt to "cover up," "reclaim," or go beyond, etc.

The Hitler Virus by Peter Wyden

Utterly fails to prove the existance of a virus

I was dissapointed by having hasted time reading this 340 page book. Why did I start reading such conspiratorial book, might you ask? Because one day while perusing the books in my town's library I saw this book and the whole premise intrigued me. As some Americans happen to be anglophiles or francophiles, I happen to be germanophile. The goods part about the book is that I learned some german words, I am more educated about the general culture and life in Germany (author talks about a lot of important personalities, and mass-media events in WestGermany), but I also started developing a bitter taste for the author's writing style and content.

Peter Wyden, speaks fluent German (albeit with a Berliner accent), and as a Jew he was forced to leave Berlin in 1937. What Wyden does in this book is try to prove evidence of his thesis: that "Hitler's spirit is alive and well" in Germany. He does this by employing the same tactics that he accuses the Nazi sympathizers of doing. Taking stories out of context, relying on bloated mass-media sensationalist stories (of which he is a great compilers, nevertheless), of failing to logically connect the dots (and this also involves American and British personalities in the post WW II era), injecting his own venom in how he spins various isolated stories. Wyden is a great story teller, a master of art and the pen is his sword.

I don't want to bash the deceised author, as I think just like his publisher (who finished his work) he is concerned for the current German youth population and what the general attitude and culture towards the dark "Adolf zeit" (Hitler years) is in today's Germany (book published in 2001). But the author's theory that many "hanker after their Fuehrer and apparently cannot let his spirit die" is a typecast generalization that the author wants to believe from the start of the book. He makes his case connecting random thoughts of historical accounts, public opinion polls (which are selected with a fine comb), annectodes of individual neo-Nazi or Nazi sympathizers. And to tie it all up, the author goes into the territory of individual vs. national guilt that Germans do not express and the apparent lacking remorse. Well, I wish I could exchange some experiences with the author (pre-mortem) that I had with regular German folks talking over dinner about the same subject. I wonder how the author would feel if he grew up in Cold war Germany where there is no sense of national pride, where you're not allowed to say the anthem fully, and where National Sozialismus is discussed at nauseum (in alsmost every class imaginable - biology, geography, history) and a western white-washed history is presented ?

Sadly, I feel the author is locked into his interpretation and understanding of the German psyche. From my exposure visiting and talking to Germans, this is not a easy territory to deliniate. The Germans are a complex people, just as the publisher notes, and one should not jump to conclusions just because of an isolated hate event or a pseudo-scientist denies the Holocaust. To better explain this, imagine that a British (who may resent the fact that the US is not part of the British Commonwealth and imperial legacy) or Japanese author (who is a convinced emperor=sun-god believer) would write a book presenting evidence that Americans are bigotted, racist, and even anti-Semitic during the 1930 and 40's. And the evidence presented is that the US had pockets of populations (even a demonstration in Madison Gardens, New York city) of Nazi sympathizers, that we refused emigration vizas to thousands of German Jews, that we discriminated blacks in the military and public life, that Japanese were interred in reservation camps on the west coast. All these true historical facts could be loosely used along with imflamatory newspaper front-page slogans, and an author's hidden agenda to portray the United States on par with any imperialistic and semi-democratic regime in the West at the turn of the 20th century.

Learning from history is a great thing. As the famous quote goes "the ones who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it." But to neglect journalistic rules and ethic and build a "virus" case that will ultimately polarize people instead of achieving some common good, speaks more about the author (Peter Wyden) than his subject (how Germans feel about Hitler and the Nazi past).

... At at time when revisionists are busily trying to rewrite everything from the horrors of the holocaust to the origins of the US Constitution as a Christian based document, it is refreshing to read the work of an author who was in fact born in Germany making him a German Jew. Mr. Wyland experienced first hand the rabid anti-semitism that was rampant in 1937 Germany when his parents fled to the United States. Mr. Wyland started "The Hitler Virus" in the 1970's, but other projects kept him from it's completion. The fact is his widow and editor finished up the final touches on the book after Mr. Wyland's death in 1998.

The book does at times meander but I suspect that is due to the fact the author didn't have the chance to polish up his manuscript before his death. If you want to understand many of the current political undertows sweeping the globe today, the Hitler Virus will give you insight into the insidious nature of hate, political extremism, and where with the help of religion horrors such as the holocaust occur. My only complaint is that once again only the Jewish victims of the holocaust are referred to. Once and for all people need to understand there were another six to seven million people killed in camps who were non Jews. They too deserve to be remembered.