Far Away So Close: Loving to Hate Hitler

Abstract

‘The fellow is a catastrophe.’¹ Such was Thomas Mann’s pithy assessment of Hitler in 1938. As a ‘miserable, if also portentous phenomenon’, Mann asserts, Hitler should by all accounts draw hatred as ‘the only right reaction from those to whom our civilization is anyhow dear’. But Mann goes on to probe other ways of engaging with Hitler: more distanced, if no less emotional, forms reacting to the phenomenon. If the phrasing of the seemingly straightforward statement about Hitler as a catastrophic fellow isn’t enough, the title of the article in which it appears quickly reveals Mann’s layered, ironic approach. The essay initially appeared in Esquire under the title ‘That man is my brother’; the subsequent German version in the Paris-based Dutch émigré journal Das neue Tage-Buch apostrophizes the dictator as ‘Bruder Hitler’.² Both versions consider Hitler’s manifestly catastrophic impact as the flipside of his personality, which galvanizes not only hatred but also the ironic attitude — or, in Mann’s terms, the ‘emotion’ (Affekt) — of interest. Deliberately moving Hitler into uncomfortable intimacy through appellations such as ‘brother’ (Bruder) and ‘fellow’ (Bursche), Mann fixes upon the fascination that emanates from the ‘deplorable spectacle’ of the Führer. Neither his frightful psychological effects on the masses nor the ‘ever-widening circle of desolation’ around Hitler, he insists, provide a reason ‘why we should not find him interesting as a character and as an event’. Psychoanalyzing Hitler and considering him as a genius — not just a fellow, but a fellow artist, an ‘artist-phenomenon’ —, Mann ultimately grants this phenomenon ‘the need of a certain shuddering admiration’.