Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

Title: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil
Author: Ron Rosenbaum
Publisher: John Murray
Published Date: 1998
Format: Hard Cover
Pages: 444

Condition Very Good condition, in Very Good Condition Dust Cover.

Book Description
Hitler did not escape the bunker in 1945, but, more than half a century after his death, he continues to escape explanation. To many of the most powerful minds of the century, the mind of Adolf Hitler remains a frustrating, disturbing, even frightening mystery.

Ron Rosenbaum has spent nearly a decade investigating the attempts of historians, psychologists, philosophers, artists and theologians who have struggled to understand the man who stands at the dark heart of our century. In fascinating face-to-face encounters with brilliant and controversial explainers such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Daniel Goldhagen and George Steiner, he reveals the way that the meanings we project upon the enigma of Hitler reflect hidden, often unacknowledged, beliefs about human nature and about the nature of evil. Rosenbaum shows how attempts to explain Hitler run the danger of allowing Hitler to escape responsibility and demonstrates how some of Hitler's explainers still fall under the Hitler spell.

In a unique work of literary journalism the author combines original reportage, intellectual history and impassioned argument to illuminate the surprising and revealing ways in which the quest to explain Hitler has become a quest to understand ourselves.