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When Adolf Hitler appeared "live," what did the German masses see and hear? Now that Hitler is no longer alive, what is left of him? I want to reconsider the often noted fascination of his presence as well as the lasting presence of his fascination. Hitler remains, in historian H. R. Trevor-Roper's words, "a frightening mystery." 1 To speak of Hitler, I wish to suggest, is above all to speak about an entity that, in crucial regards, was never all there. Let us explore the problematic continuing fascination of Hitler, a fascination, that is -- and indeed in large measure was -- the fascination of a fake.
1. Quoted in Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House, 1998) 68.
Scenes from a Debacle
During the course of 1982, Richard Hugo's novel The Hitler Diaries arrived in American bookstores. In this thriller, the secret journals of Hitler's valet suddenly surface in New York. They contain lurid details about the dictator's sex life, and accounts of clandestine meetings and confidential dealings. A second diary appears; it is from 1942 and allegedly in Hitler's own hand. Magruder and his partner, Hirsch, contemplate whether they should publish this document even though they suspect its provenance to be dubious:
"You could try finding out whether it's authentic."
"I think I know the answer to that one. It may be more interesting to discover just how good a fake it is. But then what? ... It still beats every book on record I ever heard of."
"Let's say we can persuade people the diaries are genuine: then what do we have?' He thought for a minute and then said, 'You know, if I had to think of a book that everybody in the world would want to read, then this would be it." 2
2. Richard Hugo, The Hitler Diaries (New York: Morrow, 1982) 32.
Hugo's pulp fiction was, for all its bad taste and commercial sensationalism, bizarrely prescient; it soon found itself in competition with the breaking developments of a strikingly similar news story.
On April 22, 1983, a press release from the prominent West German weekly magazine Stern caused an international sensation. The magazine announced that one of its...