Volume 28, Number 18 · November 19, 1981
Goodbye, Hitler
By Geoffrey Barraclough
The Nazi Question: An Essay on the Interpretations of National Socialism (1922-1975)
by Pierre Ayçoberry, translated by Robert Hurley
Pantheon, 257 pp., $6.95 (paper)
I have myself heard enough about Hitler and the Nazis for a long time to come, and this thought-provoking book by the French historian Pierre Ayçoberry, admirably translated by Robert Hurley, has only reinforced my prejudice. The Nazi Question is not, thank goodness, still another history of Nazi Germany; we have more than enough of those. Instead Ayçoberry conducts us on a systematic tour of our 'images of Nazism'—in other words, of the theories and hypotheses people have put forward to explain the Nazi phenomenon—and the result is devastating. Half-a-dozen analysts and historians emerge more or less unscathed; but a lot of established reputations (Hannah Arendt's, for example) get a savage mauling. Ayçoberry is an iconoclast, a destroyer not only of established reputations but also of cherished beliefs. By the time he has finished, little we thought we knew about Nazism is left standing.
Review, 2680 words
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