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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Critics have been far too quick to dismiss this controversial new book alleging that Hitler was gay.
Jan 14, 2002 | German historian Lothar Machtan has been taking some lumps for his controversial book "The Hidden Hitler," and a great many of them are well deserved. Machtan sets himself up early in opposition to such writers on Hitler as Ian Kershaw (whose conclusion was "Take away what is political about him, and there's little or nothing left") and promises to show us "the whole man," not just the dictator.
Machtan doesn't succeed at this -- it would probably be more correct to say that he never really attempts it. If Machtan had simply called the book "The Homosexual Hitler" and stuck to that theme he would have had a better book and one less deserving of many of the brickbats being thrown at it.
Of course, that would have made it no less controversial, and the unfair knocks being directed at Machtan outnumber the legitimate ones. For instance, in the Oct. 25 Washington Post Book World Geoffrey Giles reprimands Machtan for coming "perilously close to blaming the entire Holocaust on Hitler's alleged sexuality." If this accusation were true, Machtan would be deserving of the same kind of mockery that has always greeted historians who have tried to explain authoritarian personalities in terms of their sexuality (Jonathan Swift satirized the lot of them when he suggested that Alexander the Great tried to conquer the world because all his unused semen had gone to his head).
But that's not what Machtan is trying to do; what he is trying to do is prove that Hitler was a homosexual. Not a maniac or a paranoid -- Machtan doesn't waste steam on what we already know -- but a homosexual, and the major resistance to this idea is coming, understandably, from homosexuals -- who are anxious not to see Hitler's name with "gay" in front of it -- and from sympathetic liberals.
I'm both sympathetic and liberal, but Machtan's case is simply too strong to be brushed aside. In a recent edition of LGNY.com, Paul Schindler points out that when "a print ad for the book that has run in the New York Times bears the headline, 'The first book to reveal Hitler's secret life and its calamitous public consequences' ... it's hard to escape the conclusion that anybody connected to the marketing campaign must have recognized that such a tease certainly suggested a link between homosexuality and the 20th century's most despicable crimes. In fact, media reaction to the book has played up exactly that link."
Schindler is right; he's also right when he holds the author and his publisher at least partially responsible for teasers like the one used on an Oct. 15 interview with Machtan on the "Today" show, which told viewers they were about to see an interview with an author whose book claimed that "Hitler was actually gay, and that his homosexuality was at the root of his evil." Everyone involved in selling the book should have been more responsible. But bad marketing doesn't make a bad book.
The problem here is that Machtan's book is being judged by its hype. And when you look past the hype to the book's central thesis you are left with the unshakable conclusion that Machtan is on to something. You may well ask why, with the thousands of books written on Hitler, no one else has caught on to this. The answer is that much of what Machtan says has been written about before and that many people have shared his opinions for decades. (Did anyone think the image of Hitler as flaming queen came solely from the fertile imagination of Mel Brooks?)
Several of Machtan's most reliable sources (including the classic biographies by Joachim Fest and Alan Bullock, as well as Bullock's dual biography of Hitler and Stalin) have raised many of the same points as Machtan has, though their authors chose not to emphasize them or pursue them at length. Why? Possibly for no more reason than that their author's interests lay elsewhere. As Voltaire is said to have said, history does not change, but what we want from it does.
