I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined) Read online

  I do not bring this up to dispute or support Fackenheim’s claim, but to acknowledge how casually entrenched this belief has become within every context of Hitler’s role in popular culture. It is, really, the only way to talk about Hitler in a casual manner. You can’t compare other people to Hitler without immediately seeming unhinged and unreasonable (whenever this happens — be it in the real world of politics or in the comments section of a website — the debate immediately becomes unserious). If you’re going to make jokes about him, you need to go full-on absurd: “As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know Hitler was a Nazi,” Woody Allen writes in his short story “The Schmeed Memoirs.” “I thought he worked for the phone company.” Hitler is still a historical figure, but he’s predominantly a placeholder for cognitive darkness; he’s the entity we use in the same way people once employed the devil. But the devil is no longer a villain in pop culture. The devil is sympathetic. He’s charming. If you’re making a movie about the devil, you cast Al Pacino. In the pop world, the devil is mostly depicted as a fair-minded gambler; if you’re a good enough musician, the devil will give you a golden fiddle and concede his defeat, allowing you to peacefully live the rest of your days in rural Georgia. There really isn’t “another category of radical evil.” That category has a population of one.

  There’s a song from 1963 that inadvertently proves this.

  The song is titled “With God on Our Side,” written and performed by Bob Dylan (the fact that Dylan is the singer is extremely important, since he’s just about the only unassailable figure in pop culture). The song is primarily a criticism of how history is dictated by whoever ends up winning and the problematic certitude of Judeo-Christians who believe God always supports whatever it is they happen to be doing. There are, I suppose, two ways to interpret the lyrics of this song. One would be to take them literally (also known as “the wrong way to interpret this song”). The other would be to view them as ironic (which suggests that Dylan believes God is on no one’s side, and that there is really no side for God to take). It’s the difference between thinking the song praises God and thinking the song isn’t about God at all.

  There are two verses that particularly matter to me, at least as they apply to Hitler. One of these is the fifth verse, which goes like this:

  When the Second World War

  Came to an end

  We forgave the Germans

  And we were friends

  Though they murdered six million

  In the ovens they fried

  The Germans now too

  Have God on their side

  It seems obvious that Dylan is expressing bewilderment over the fact that the country we hoped to destroy during the war had become a key American ally less than twenty years later. He’s referring to people like Wernher von Braun, the physicist who developed the V-2 rocket for the Nazis in 1937 before taking a job with the U.S. military in 1945. Dylan’s ethnic Judaism probably contributed to this sentiment. There’s really only one way to read and understand the words of this verse; they are not ambiguous. When talking about the world of Hitler, even Dylan — the most unreliable narrator in rock history — strives for clarity. But compare those words with the language he uses in the eighth verse, which is the most memorable passage from the song:

  Through many a dark hour

  I’ve been thinkin’ about this

  That Jesus Christ

  Was betrayed by a kiss

  But I can’t think for you

  You’ll have to decide

  Whether Judas Iscariot

  Had God on his side

  This section is far more complicated (and consciously so). It might be an edgy attempt to make people consider the absurdity of assuming God is on their side simply because they want that to be true (and Dylan uses Judas as the ultimate example of God’s misappropriation). It’s equally possible that the message is literal but paradoxical: If Dylan is working from the perspective that Christianity is a positive thing, then Jesus Christ had to be crucified in order to rise from the dead (which would mean Judas truly did have God’s support, simply because there was no other way). The fact that Dylan is telling listeners that they must decide this question for themselves might suggest that he feels this problem is unknowable; the fact that he mentions Judas Iscariot (the most overtly negative stereotype of Judaism within the New Testament) might imply a theological critique. Regardless, the eighth verse of “With God on Our Side” allows for something the fifth verse does not: acceptable misinterpretation. It’s totally okay to hear those lines and get the wrong idea (in some ways, being wrong actually makes the work more interesting). You can inflexibly believe Dylan is somehow relating to (or sympathizing with) Judas, and the song is still a classic. But there is no way Dylan could have allowed for the possibility of any misinterpretation in the aforementioned fifth verse. Imagine, just for a moment, that the fifth verse read, “We forgave Hitler” (or if the eighth verse implied that — in his darkest hour — Dylan found himself wondering if even Hitler had God on his side). It would not matter if his larger artistic intent was exactly the same; if any percentage of his audience erroneously believed that Dylan was authentically confused about how he should feel about Hitler, his career is changed forever. Some would compare him to David Allan Coe, and “With God on Our Side” would eventually be covered by Skrewdriver. Even in a country that is 80 percent Christian — and even though Christians traditionally view Judas Iscariot as the most deceitful soldier in Satan’s eternal army — Judas is not Hitler. He’s not even close. He seems maybe one third as bad, even if the Gospels’ description of his life is taken to be 100 percent accurate.

  Nobody ever talks about building a time machine in order to go back and kill Judas.

  I have a friend with numerous historical obsessions, one of which is twentieth-century dictators. Sometimes we get boozed up and chat about “the Big Three”: Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tsetung — the Beatles, Stones, and Zeppelin of despotic human misery. The average American doesn’t tend to know much about Stalin outside of his Ruthian statistics: He killed between twenty and fifty million people during his time as leader of the Soviet Union, which (in the saddest possible way) makes him “underrated.” It’s believed Stalin caused the death of five million people in the Ukraine alone from imposed starvation. It’s possible Mao killed even more humans than Stalin (journalist Jonathan Fenby once suggested the total might be around seventy million), but his reputation is somehow obscured (if not necessarily improved) by all the bizarre eccentricities we know about his personal life: A book written by Mao’s longtime physician Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, exhaustively chronicles the leader’s unwillingness to brush his teeth, his maniacal fixations on sex and swimming, and his desire for luxuries that were alien to his starving countrymen (during a 1958 tour of a desperately poor Chinese province, Mao’s motorcade was followed by a watermelon truck). Every so often, someone will make the argument that Stalin and Mao were just as bad as Hitler, and that the reason certain tyrants are hated more than others illustrates a larger problem with how history is understood, particularly by white people. It’s not a terrible argument, but it doesn’t change reality — as an anecdotal culture, we know more about Hitler than we do about every other despot combined. It’s possible that the information we have about Stalin and Mao is less than the amount of disinformation we have about Hitler. For example, many people seem to believe that Hitler had only one testicle (and that this monorchism explains his diabolical nature). Some historians have spent years investigating this belief, and most conclude that it’s an urban legend. But this is further evidence of Hitler’s exceptionalism: I can’t think of any other public figure whose scrotum feels historically meaningful (or disputed).

  Just start with his appearance: At what age could you have drawn a recognizable sketch of Adolf Hitler? I could have done so when I was six. But what percentage of North Americans could even identify a photo
of Stalin (much less sketch a version of their own)? The vision of Hitler is so engrained in people’s minds that NBA legend Michael Jordan was roundly ridiculed for appearing in an underwear commercial with a mustache that vaguely resembled the one worn by Hitler. Have you ever wanted to upset people at a dinner party? Mention the fact that Hitler was a vegetarian. A handful of guests will immediately lose their minds. They will go on to cite the numerous revisionists who now claim that Hitler was not a true vegetarian and that his dietician secretly added bone marrow to his vegetable soup. [It has never really been clear — to me, or to anyone else — what the debate over Hitler’s diet was supposed to prove. I honestly think it began as an absurdist way to tease vegetarians, a group not known for their winning sense of humor. However, all the impassioned denials from the vegetarian community make me wonder if people took this joke as a serious attack on their lifestyle. When someone tries to argue that Hitler occasionally ate meat, is the subtext that no true vegetarian could possibly commit genocide? Is there some unspoken fear inside vegetarians that prompts them to worry that what they are doing is somehow wrong, despite the fact that it (assumedly) feels morally correct? Does it mean that Hitler was so evil that it’s wrong to eat like him?] We know quite a bit about Hitler’s alleged love life. In fact, we know so much about it that the data is useless: It ranges from the possibility that Hitler was asexual to the idea that he was involved with seven “suicide maidens,” six of whom successfully or unsuccessfully committed suicide as a result of Hitler’s ultra-depraved sexual desires (the lone non-suicidal maiden is alleged to be the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose relationship with the führer is usually described as intense but platonic . . . and, judging from her films, extremely long and slightly boring).

  A lot of what we “know” about Hitler seems unimportant. It often seems closer to gossip than history. But Hitler’s social role requires gossip; unlike Mao or Stalin, he needs to seem extra-alive and uniquely human. This is because we do not hate Hitler as an abstraction; we hate him as Hitler. It’s not enough to be against his principles or the specter of Nazism. Hitler is hated as a specific person, if only to remind us that the Holocaust occurred because of a specific person’s work. Now, I realize the same argument could be made for almost every man-made tragedy throughout time; in every case, some specific individual was ultimately writing the checks. But Hitler allows us not to worry about all those other dictators in any specialized sense. Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans. Other genocides can be viewed as sinister in concept and heartbreaking in practice, but without any pressure to understand and personify the men who made them happen. Mao and Stalin (and Hirohito and Amin and Leopold and Robespierre) are dead, both literally and figuratively. They are historic caricatures. They can disappear. But we need to keep Hitler alive. Hitler needs to be a person we hate on a one-to-one basis. He’s the worst. That’s his job.

  During the druggiest periods of his life, David Bowie loved talking about Hitler. “Rock stars are fascists,” he told Playboy in 1976. “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.” This is not a compliment, but rather a criticism — in typical Bowie fashion, he consciously made a statement he knew would be misconstrued by anyone who didn’t read the entire interview. In 1971, he wrote a song called “Quicksand” that certainly seems to be about Hitler, sung from the deranged perspective of Hitler’s inner monologue during the final moments of his life. The chorus features some of Bowie’s most unsettling lyric writing, sung with a fragility that’s both spectral and matter-of-fact:

  Don’t believe in yourself

  Don’t deceive with belief

  Knowledge comes

  With death’s release

  What this means is debatable; I think Bowie is simultaneously painting these sentiments as pathetic (when applied to Hitler) and uncomfortably true (when pushed through the worldview of the songwriter). They become even more accidentally insightful in light of the discovery of the diary of Guy Liddell, the deputy of Nazi counterespionage. Liddell’s 1945 journal recounts one of Hitler’s final rants, when the dictator allegedly claimed, “Everyone has lied to me, everyone has deceived me, no one has told me the truth. The armed forces have lied to me and now the SS have left me in the lurch. The German people has not fought heroically, it deserves to perish. It is not I who have lost the war, but the German people.” He then experienced a nervous breakdown, setting the table for Bowie’s speculative fiction. It’s a complicated, not wholly implausible scenario. But this much is clear: Even an artist like Bowie — a subversive contrarian obsessed with Berlin — could not fully don the mask of Hitler. The closest he comes is imagining the dictator’s remorseful dying thoughts, when even Adolf realizes he was wrong about everything.

  There is, I suppose, another reason I was hesitant to write about Hitler (and this has nothing to do with any fear of reprisals): Hitler contradicts the thesis I’ve been promoting for 193 pages. I keep hammering this point about how villains are inevitably the people who know the most and care the least. But Adolf Hitler is the opposite. Hitler cared very, very much about many perverse things. He cared about the supremacy of Germany. He cared about exterminating the Jews. He cared about Luz Long’s long-jump performance at the 1936 Olympics. He cared like crazy. But I don’t think he knew the most, or even very much, about things that mattered. This applies to big questions (“Is it wrong to kill off an entire race of people in order to solve unclear problems?”) but also to practical matters (“Should we fight a land war in Russia during winter?”). I’m not suggesting he was an imbecile; it just seems like his success was mostly a product of his prowess as a public speaker. [Whenever sane historians try to paint an objective portrait of Hitler, the only two non-negative words they feel comfortable expressing are efficient (which immediately becomes darkly pejorative within the context of the Holocaust) and charismatic. Hitler remains the best argument against charisma.]

  Hitler cared so much, in fact, that his imagined emotion is now hilarious. Probably the single funniest Internet meme of the early twenty-first century were numerous parodies of the climactic scene from the 2004 film Der Untergang, a cinematic depiction of the last days of the Third Reich (the film’s title translates as Downfall and was based on Joachim Fest’s book Inside Hitler’s Bunker). I assume anyone reading this book will have seen at least one of these clips: Amateur editors take the scene — spoken entirely in German — and change the subtitles so that Hitler is losing his mind over the cancellation of Ugly Betty or the ineptitude of the 2008 Detroit Lions. I’m not sure why this is so funny, but I think it has something to do with the fabricated idea of Hitler’s personality — it’s funny to think of Hitler as this emotional, uniformed lunatic who is (above all) superficial. It’s not just that an apoplectic Hitler is frothing at the mouth and screaming at his underlings; it’s that he’s frothing and screaming about the film adaptation of Twilight or his inability to get an iPhone. These memes aren’t criticisms of Hitler, because they’re too ridiculous — however, we don’t need Hitler to be criticized in any new way (because he’s already the universal placeholder for evil). What we need are new ways to make Hitler seem present. He just needs to be there. The rest we can do on our own.

  THE PROBLEM OF OVERRATED IDEAS

  Writing about other people is a form of writing about oneself. This isn’t true for everyone, but it’s true for me. Why pretend?

  In 2004, I wrote a column for Esquire that was headlined, “The Importance of Being Hated.” It was the kind of piece that was (sort of) funny and (sort of) true, and the combination of those two qualities somehow metabolized and made the funny parts funnier and the true parts super true. The crux of the essay dealt with the difference between a “nemesis” and an “archenemy.” Not many people remember this column, but — if they do, and if they want to talk to me about it — they inevitably remember the last half of one specific paragraph:

  I’ve had the same archenemy sinc
e eighth grade: He’s a guy named Rick Helling, and he grew up in Lakota, North Dakota. Last year, Helling pitched a few innings for the Florida Marlins in the World Series; in 1998, he won twenty games for the Texas Rangers. I went to basketball camp with Rick Helling in 1985, and he was the single worst person I’d ever met. Every summer, I constantly scan the sports section of USA Today, always hoping that he got shelled. This is what drives me. I cannot live in a world where Helling’s career ERA hovers below 5.00, yet all I do for a living is type. As long as Rick Helling walks this earth, I shall never sleep soundly.

  The reason this is (sort of) funny is because it’s idiotic, and I’m (sort of) positioning myself in the role of idiot. It obviously makes no sense to hate someone I knew for only one week, twenty years ago. I never truly knew Rick Helling at all, and — even if I had — I knew him when he was an eighth grader. It’s also more than coincidental that the person I elected to classify as my archenemy is the only major league baseball player I ever happened to encounter as an adolescent. But the reason it’s (sort of) true is because it’s sort of true. I have never gotten over what a sublime jerk Rick Helling was during that week at basketball camp. I still think about it today. He shot three-pointers constantly and never passed to anyone. He was physically stronger than every kid his age, yet aspired to be a point guard and refused to play under the basket (this drove me especially crazy, as I envied his size and power). He was obsessed with talking about sex (which I suppose made him a normal eighth grader, but which I found disturbing). He constantly complained about the officiating and totally ignored the advisement of our coach. Mainly, he was an egocentric bully: One afternoon, the camp directors created a two-on-two tournament, and they tried to make all the teams as equal as possible. They paired Rick with some microscopic rich kid who was probably only at camp because his parents wanted him out of the house; I remember that the kid always wore a massive wristwatch (even during games) and looked like he’d spent the last six months recovering from cancer in rural Ethiopia. I doubt if he secured one rebound that entire week. But Helling was so goddamn good, it didn’t matter — the kid with the wristwatch would just pass him the ball immediately and watch Helling play two-on-one. They made it all the way to the title game, only to lose by a basket . . . at which point Helling punted the ball into the rafters and started stomping toward his pip-squeak teammate like a grizzly bear gorged on bath salts. Had the camp counselors not intervened, that child was destined for the morgue (although at least he’d have known the exact time of his death). When I think about Rick Helling, these are the things I think about. It’s the reason I ambushed him in Esquire, despite the fact that a) I didn’t really care that any of this had happened, and b) I was pretty confident that Rick had no memory of who I was.