EXPLAINING HITLER: THE SEARCH

FOR THE ORIGINS OF HIS EVIL

BY RON ROSENBAUM, MACMILLAN, pounds 25

WE SEE Hitler through a glass, darkly. If his political career sets up a latter-day mirror for princes, its reflections are multiply puzzling. At one point in his sometimes engrossing book, Ron Rosenbaum describes the Ashmolean Museum's facade as "soot-begrimed" and "gargoyle- encrusted". The adjectives might also apply to his subject. Even Hitler's reception is prone to local variation. Men get named "Hitler" in Nepal, where the great dictator is celebrated much as Victorian liberals feted Garibaldi.

Rosenbaum's subtitle is "the search for the origins of [Hitler's] evil". It's far from obvious, though, what this search could be. In the Protagoras, Plato argues that nobody knowingly chooses the bad, but mistakes it for the good. Hitler's "evil" presumably signifies his responsibility for the human cost of his years in power. But to describe him as responsible is already to say that he originated those bad effects. If something else originated them (the Versailles Treaty, German anti-semitism, or Adolf's childhood traumas), then it's no longer Hitler's evil that we're talking about. The question disappears, or answers itself.

Still, many find the question too nagging to ignore. As Nietzsche said, if we know the why of life,...