Katherine Addison's Blog, page 49

UBC: Hayman, Hitler & Geli

Hitler and Geli by Ronald Hayman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book has three major problems, one historical, one methodological, and one conceptual.

The historical problem is unfortunately inherent in the subject matter. We just don't know enough about Angela Raubal to provide material for an entire book. (Weirdly, this is the same problem I had with Michael Wallis's biography of Pretty Boy Floyd, Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. ) She was a woman in Nazi Germany, she was only twenty-three when she died, and almost everything she herself put to paper was destroyed. And all the information we do have about her is warped by its proximity to Hitler, who provides a distorting vortex for anything that gets near him.

There's only two things you can do with this problem. One is write a short book, more of a monograph, and we now consider that a non-viable option unless you are an academic and only interested in academic publication. The other is to find something else to fill your empty pages. In this case Hayman's got Hitler standing right there, and I have Ian Kershaw's 2 volume biography of Hitler (Hubris and Nemesis). I know how much space that bastard can take up.

Hayman provides a weak, surface-y biography of Hitler, obviously and strongly influenced by The Psychopathic God (itself a problem we'll come back to in a moment), which really does nothing for his argument and feels very much like filler. I admit and agree that the lack of material on his subject matter is a problem that he is not responsible for--and just because we don't know very much about Geli Raubal is NOT a reason not to write about her--but I don't think his solution was a good one. He might have done better to do some social history about women's roles and options in Weimar Germany, especially as it transitioned into Nazi Germany. Angela Lambert does an excellent job in her biography of Evan Braun of showing that even without Hitler, Braun had no good path open to her, because no woman in Nazi Germany did. Hayman doesn't show much if any awareness of that side of the problem--it's unfortunately probably not inaccurate to say that he's more interested in Hitler than in Raubal. (If I don't call him Adolf, I don't call her Geli. Fair is fair.)

The second problem, the methodological, is also inherent in the first. Almost all of Hayman's evidence (and sometimes "evidence") for his argument about Hitler and Raubal's relationship and her death is secondhand and hearsay. It's what surviving members of Hitler's inner circle wrote about Raubal or told interviewers about Raubal. And sometimes what they're saying is what somebody else told them about Raubal. In all cases, they can't be trusted because they have their own narrative and their own interests and (post-war) self-exculpation--and those are serious problems because again, Hitler is a distorting vortex. (Henriette von Shirach is probably the closest thing he has to first-hand testimony, and regrettably, I don't think you can trust her as far as you can throw her.) Hayman does not discuss (or seem to be aware of) this problem about his evidence, which makes it even less trustworthy, especially when what he's using as evidence is rumors and gossip about Hitler's sex-life.

And that leads us to the third problem, the conceptual one, which is what Hayman thinks and how he thinks about, well, Hitler's sex-life. As I said, he's clearly heavily indebted to Waite, and the distinctive thing about Waite is his careful, ponderous, by-the-book Freudian analysis of the second-hand evidence, hearsay, and rumors about Hitler's sex-life. The cryptorchism, the impotence, the "deviant sexual practices": Hayman reproduces it all without apparently noticing that we have no evidence of any of it. We have only what people say other people said about Hitler (the pornographic drawings that we have not one single example of) and what can maybe be inferred from what Hitler said about himself, and that kind of inference is a very dicey proposition, even with someone as sublimely un-self-aware as Hitler. Nobody who might have had first-hand experience of Hitler in the bedroom survived the end of the war.

The major conceptual problem comes in the discussion of Hitler's "sado-masochism"--which I put in quotes because Hayman is using Freud's model, which sees sadism and masochism purely as perversions and sicknesses, and shows absolutely no awareness that our thinking has advanced since Freud and that there are other, better, more nuanced and sophisticated models available for thinking about BDSM. (This is the same thing I bitched about at length in my review of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator.) The problem with Hitler's sexual practices, insofar as we have genuine evidence about them, isn't the sadism or the masochism or the urophilia per se; it's that he was forcing unwilling women to participate in fulfilling his sexual needs. (Hayman labels Eva Braun a "victim of Hitler's sado-masochism" and it's not at all clear that's true, either from his perspective of "sado-masochism" being a crime or from the position I would prefer to discuss about consent, just as his calling Renate Mueller a victim of Hitler's "sado-masochism" is pretty misleading. She certainly did not enjoy her relationship with Hitler, whatever it consisted of, and hers is the clearest evidence* we have, as best I can tell from Hayman, about what Hitler's sexual practices were, but the fact that she was victimized by Hitler's government and committed suicide because she thought--rightly or wrongly--that the SS were coming to arrest her is not a direct result of "sado-masochism," Hitler's or otherwise, though you can certainly make an argument it's a direct result of Hitler's paranoia.) It's consent issues, in other words, that we need to be looking at if we want to talk about Hitler's monstrosity, and those need to be carefully separated from sadism/masochism and dominance/submission. And I could really have used Hayman to have--and to impart--a better supported understanding of how all of these things were understood in 1930s Germany instead of going for sensationalism. (And there's another thing he could have been doing instead of rehashing Hitler's biography.)

But where he really goes off the rails (for me) is in his attempt to do a Freudian analysis of Hitler's career as a dictator and mass murderer, trying to use "sado-masochism" as an explanation for Hitler's aggression against his European neighbors, for his orders to massacre the Poles and the Russians and the Jews of all nationalities, for his scorched earth tactics at the end of the war. And trying to argue that Hitler's "sado-masochism" infected all of Nazi Germany, that that's the explanation for totalitarianism and the rule of terror. Leaving aside the question of how much influence Hitler's personal style had (and I'm willing to be persuaded it had a LOT, but I need some evidence), this argument is completely ignoring the entire history of the German right-wing at least back to World War I, if not much, much farther. The things that Hayman points to as the results of Hitler's "sado-masochism" are things--like everything else about Hitler--that were lying around waiting to be picked up and turned into weapons.

So. Hayman's argument is that Hitler murdered Raubal (or, more likely, would have been convicted of manslaughter), and where the book is actually interesting is in his analysis of the lies the top Nazis were telling (half an hour after they said it was suicide, they were trying to announce it was an accident) and where they contradicted each other and what we can learn from those contradictions. It's not clear whether Raubal died on the day before her body was found or the day before that. It's not clear whether her face was bruised, not clear whether her nose was broken. It's not clear whether Hitler was in the Munich flat when she died or--as everyone loudly insisted--on the way to Nuremberg. Her motive for suicide was thin at best, and the letter she broke off writing in the middle of a word was full of plans for a visit to Vienna. The path the bullet took through her body (entering above the heart and lodging at her left hip) was very peculiar and an almost impossible angle for a suicide to achieve, even if she would have wanted to. Everyone very carefully forgot to look for powder burns on her skin and clothes. Her body was whisked away to be buried in Austria before anyone could suggest an autopsy or an inquest.

It's hard to tell what's genuine hinkiness and what's the effect of Hitler's distorting vortex (and again, Hayman's refusal to admit the vortex into his analysis is a serious problem), but I ended up being fairly convinced that Raubal did not kill herself, even if I didn't buy any of the rest of Hayman's argument about Hitler.

And in the end, I suppose that's my most central disappointment in this book: it's about Hitler when the person I'm interested in is Raubal.


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*The "evidence" we have from Renate Mueller is what the OSS Source Book says (quoting someone, but Hayman's citation isn't clear enough for me to figure out who) that a director named Adolf Zeissler said (and goodness knows when he said it, since it could be any time from 1936 through the end of the war) that Renate Mueller told him in 1936, four years after her experience and at a time when, blacklisted and a morphine addict, she had no incentive to be, and cannot be counted by any stretch of the imagination as, a reliable witness. Hayman does not talk at all about the problematic nature of his evidence here. Or anywhere else.



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Hugo

The nominees for the 2015 Hugos have been announced. The Goblin Emperor is on the list for Best Novel.

I find this all very very weird. Good weird! But weird.

Nebula Awards Weekend

So, yes, I will be attending the Nebula Awards Weekend this year. I will be attending as Katherine Addison, given that Katherine Addison is the one nominated for the award, not Sarah Monette.

As you might expect, this is a rather peculiar feeling.

UBC: Chisholm, DiGrazia, and Yost, The News from Whitechapel

The News From Whitechapel: Jack The Ripper In The Daily Telegraph by Alexander Chisholm

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is for you if you want primary sources and you are either:

(A) interested in Jack the Ripper
(B) interested in Victorian journalism.

Otherwise, this book is probably NOT for you, since it is a compilation of The Daily Telegraph's coverage of the five canonical murders of Jack the Ripper (Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, Kelly). The editors have included commentaries about each murder, which I found to be little more than a distraction, but might be helpful for someone just getting their feet wet in Ripperology.

I gave this book five stars because it is an AWESOME primary source for both Jack the Ripper and late-Victorian journalism and I deeply appreciate the work the editors did to put it together, but this is very much a YMMV kind of review. If you aren't the target audience in a very small niche market, it's probably not going to be your cup of tea.

I loved it.



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Nebulas (Nebulae?)

The Nebula nominees for 2014 have been announced.

The Goblin Emperor is one of the nominees for Best Novel (!!!!!).

Congratulations to everyone on the list!

Cool news & Buy Read Talk Redux

The Goblin Emperor is the ALA's best Fantasy for Adult Readers on their 2015 genre fiction reading list.

This seems like a good time to link back (once again) to my Buy, Read, Talk post, because it bears repeating: if you want to support an author whose work you love, buy the book--or ask your library to buy the book, that's equally awesome--and tell people about it. I'm not talking specifically about me here (though obviously I'm not gonna say no), but about any author; this is the most widely applicable piece of advice I think I've ever given.

UBC: Lambert, The Gates of Hell

The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage by Andrew Lambert

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Lambert wants to prove that Sir John Franklin was neither weak nor indecisive nor a poor leader. Unfortunately, every time he put forward evidence of same, to me, it looked like evidence that Franklin was exactly the things Lambert was trying to prove he wasn't: weak, indecisive, and a very poor leader, especially in a crisis.

Also, this book is not about "Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage." For one thing, part of Lambert's thesis is that Franklin didn't set off into the Arctic to discover the Northwest Passage at all, that he was collecting geomagnetic readings--if he was trying to find anything or reach anything, it was the magnetic north pole. But more importantly, this book isn't really about Franklin's last voyage. It's about Franklin's career beforehand, and about the search for Franklin afterwards--and decidedly about the scientific obsessions of the day--but there's almost no discussion of the voyage of the Erebus and the Terror and what happened to their crews. Since--carrion crow that I am--I was looking for a book about the catastrophe of 1845, I was disappointed that the title of the book and the content of the book did not match very well.

But I wouldn't even have minded that if the book had been a better book. I found Lambert to be a poor historian: e.g., after quoting at length Thomas Arnold's horrific letter to Franklin about Franklin's appointment as governor of Van Diemen's Land: "If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict's child should ever be a free citizen; and that, even in the third generation, the offspring should be excluded from all the offices of honour or authority in the colony" (95), Lambert, while asserting that "Arnold's potent mix of evangelical faith and moral purpose would be the key to Franklin's government" (95), entirely fails to mention whether Franklin agreed with him about the inheritable nature of iniquity or whether the ideas in this letter had any discernible influence on how he governed. And, honestly, I am going to regard with skepticism any historian of nineteenth century British naval history who can write the sentence, "For a man of faith, used to the honest, open and frank world of naval service where the national good outweighed personal ambition, the experience [of governing Van Diemen's Land] was traumatic" (137)--especially given how the behavior of many of the naval officers in this book blatantly demonstrates its falsity.

Although I grant that there's nothing he can do about the overwhelmingly masculine nature of his subject matter, I was annoyed by his treatment of Jane Franklin, whom he called variously "Jane," "Lady Franklin," and "Lady Jane"--while never taking the liberty of calling her husband just plain "John." It's a small point, but indicative of the potential for much larger problems. He was also utterly uninterested in anyone who was not a commissioned officer, which replicates the social biases of his subject rather than examining them.

Ultimately, I found this book frustrating. Lambert is trying to exculpate Sir John Franklin from the judgment history has made of him, and he has written a poor work of history in the (failed) attempt.



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If you're thinking about such things

The Goblin Emperor is eligible for awards this year. That's all I'm going to say on the subject.

Kasserman, Fall River Outrage

Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England by David Richard Kasserman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It's sad that there are enough of these books to constitute a sub-genre of historical criminology: man with status murders woman without status, is tried for it, and is acquitted, with more or less legal shenanigans accompanying. The absolute bar-none best of them is The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cohen, but I have a small collection, and really, about all I can say about Fall River Outrage is that it's a perfectly acceptable, middle-of-the-road member of the genre.

I picked it up mostly because I was amused/intrigued by a book about a murder in Fall River, MA, that wasn't about Lizzie Borden; after a kind of rocky start (Kasserman is not good at the--to be fair--quite difficult job of describing the complicated action of the discovery of a body, particularly with the jurisdictional nightmare that Sarah Maria Cornell's murder turned out to be), this is a very interesting slice of mid-nineteenth-century New England sociology and an okay report of the two trials and acquittal of Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for a murder it's pretty clear he committed. (Kasserman is/was an anthropologist who came to the Cornell murder by way of an interest in the New England cotton industry, so that ordering of priorities is not wrong.)

Like all of these books, therefore, it's in some ways a frustrating read. I've never read one of them where I actually had any reasonable doubt about the guilt of the murderer, so watching the son of a bitch get off is maddening. For this book, that's balanced by the panorama it provides of the Methodist Church in New England in 1832--and really, if I'm going to recommend Fall River Outrage, that's what I'm recommending it for.



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3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma (1957), dir. Delmer Daves, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin
3:10 to Yuma (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale

This isn't a review (if it were, I'd say that the original is probably the better movie, but I enjoyed the remake more), but a post I'm making because I want to talk about storytelling.


The basic story behind 3:10 to Yuma poses a hell of a challenge to a director and actors, because it requires two trajectories:

(1) obvious and fairly easy, Dan Evans has to go from frustrated, desperate, and frankly pathetic failing rancher to the guy who has the balls to get Ben Wade on the 3:10 to Yuma.

(2) more subtle and much more difficult, Ben Wade, without changing his fundamental nature, has to come to like and admire Dan Evans so much that he gives him a piece of his loyalty.

Essentially, Ben Wade puts himself on the 3:10 to Yuma, and the fundamental task of any version of this movie is to make that piece of quixotism believable.

What frustrates me about the remake is that it panics. Right at the end, it clearly goes, oh shit what if they don't GET it? and makes Dan Evans play True Confessions, both with the story of how he lost his leg and with the reason he's out here ranching in Arizona when he sucks at it. This is a clumsy and painfully obvious maneuver, and it isn't necessary, because Russell Crowe has handled it. Russell Crowe has shown us, every step of the way, why Ben Wade has ended up loyal to Dan Evans. And what Crowe hasn't handled on his own has been taken care of by the chemistry between him and Christian Bale. By the end of the remake, I believe that Wade and Evans are angry, violent, semi-hostile, but genuine friends. I believe that Crowe's Wade, charming sociopath that he is, would (brutally, efficiently) turn on his own men in answer to Charlie Prince gunning down Dan Evans. I believe in his loyalty to Evans. I don't need explanations, and neither does Ben Wade.

(My problem with the original is that it spends too long meandering around in set-up, back and forth between Bisbee and Evans' ranch, in the flat cinematics of its day, so the half of the movie before we get to the hotel room is uninteresting. The remake, at least, is fun to watch all the way through. I've never pretended to be high brow.)

In general, the remake is a lot more nervous about its story than the original, and it clutters it up with everything it can think of: Pinkerton men and Apaches and the Chinese railroad workers and extra characters (the dreadful and doomed Tucker, the substitution of Alan Tudyk's charming veterinarian for the town drunk, the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son*). It also works a lot harder to make its "good" characters sympathetic, just as its "bad" characters are unsalvageably beyond the pale. The original, which is much in the same mold as High Noon , is much more cynical--much less worried about whether we like any of these people. Weirdly, the remake is doing everything it can to avoid the exact thing that is iconic about 3:10 to Yuma: the two adversaries trapped in a hotel room, waiting for a train, poking at each other's sore spots to pass the time, Wade, like Satan in the Garden, trying to tempt Evans to fall, and somehow being tempted into falling himself.

(You can also do all kinds of homosocial readings here--Evans/Wade/Prince is totally a Sedgwickian homosocial triangle except that Wade is also a man, which makes it even MORE homosocial--and the word "love" could be brought into play also, although I'm reluctant to do so, both because it brings all kinds of connotations with it and because I'm not sure I want to imply that Wade and Prince--given how carefully the movie shows us, over and over, that they kill gleefully and without remorse, that they are BAD MEN--are capable of love.)

The original hits this Sartre-esque hurdle head on, and Ford and Heflin do a pretty damn good job. Their problem, really, is that you have to believe Wade's conversion takes place essentially in this hour in this hotel room, and that's just hard to swallow. In terms of plausibility, the remake, by stretching out the journey from Bisbee to Contention and having Evans and Wade rescue each other back and forth, does provide better set up. But the original is focused in a way the remake is not (and it's such a pity the remake is not, because if any two actors could handle focused, it's Crowe and Bale); it uses the claustrophobia of that hotel room, and it uses its willingness to let Dan Evans be a not-completely-sympathetic character--and it uses Ford's Ben Wade, lying on that bed like a lion on a rock, patting his prey with one paw to watch it quiver and jump--to generate tension that the remake just can't. And it sidesteps the obvious emotional notes that the remake jumps on with both feet (Doc Potter's obvious death, every time Charlie Prince reinforces what we already know about Ben Wade's gang, every idiotic and unnecessary thing the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son does, especially Dan Evans' death scene), right up to the end, when it suddenly resolves all its minor notes into a thundering major chord: Wade asks for, receives, and is worthy of Evans' trust; the rain comes.

This is, of course, exactly opposite the remake, which chooses the very end to go from its cheerful, comic book violence, action movie ethos into cruel irony: Evans succeeds and is gunned down by Charlie Prince. Charlie Prince succeeds and is gunned down by Ben Wade (Crowe and Foster play that moment perfectly), the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son has his tragic, too-late realization of his love for his father, blah blah questionable redemption blah, and we end the movie knowing it was all utterly pointless, because Wade's just going to escape again anyway. That's true in the original as well, but in the original, Evans is still alive, he's earned his $200, and the rain has come.

Okay, so this kind of ended up being a review anyway. But I'm really more interested in the way the shared underpinnings of the story bloomed in such different ways, even while Wade and Evans (and Prince) remained essentially the same in the middle of it. And I'm interested in the difficulty in telling the story of that crucial arc, the change in Ben Wade, which isn't a change from bad to good--

I like the way that gets rejected in the remake:

WADE: They're gonna kill you and your father, William. They're gonna laugh while they do it. I think you know that.
WILL: Call 'em off.
WADE: Why should I?
WILL: Because you're not all bad.
WADE: Yes, I am.
WILL: You saved us from those Indians.
WADE: I saved myself.
WILL: You got us through the tunnels. You helped us get away.
WADE: If I had a gun in them tunnels, I would have used it on you.
WILL: I don't believe you.
WADE: Kid, I wouldn't last five minutes leading an outfit like that if I wasn't as rotten as hell.

and Wade's reaction to Evans' death is exactly the reaction that it should be for a very bad man who has come to be loyal to someone unexpected, not the reaction of a man with goodness in him.

--but a shift in loyalty from Prince to Evans. In 1957 Westerns aren't interested in interiority; Ford's Wade may or may not understand his own motives--he just acts on them. Crowe's Wade understands himself perfectly, and neither condemns nor forgives. He knows why, but he will never tell. He's what makes the remake interesting as opposed to merely fun to watch--Will's both right and wrong. Wade does save them from the Apaches; he is capable of good. But he's also the man who murders Tucker with a fork.

One of the things I talked about in my dissertation was the way that revenge tragedies make the audience complicit in revenge: the revenger is the protagonist; we're rooting for him to succeed, and in the upside down morality of the play, we rejoice when he does. Except that revenge tragedies are cruel; they turn themselves rightside up again, and we realize that we are rejoicing in murder. The remake manages exactly the same thing, because the audience, being able to read the genre conventions, knows that Tucker, like Potter, is doomed. He's going to die. And he's so brilliantly hateful (thank you, Kevin Durand) that we want him to die, in the way that we can want characters in books and movies to die because they aren't real.

But then the camera shows us what Wade did to Tucker with that fork, and we are reminded that inside the secondary world of the movie, Tucker is real, and his death is real, and Wade really murdered him with a two-pronged fork while the rest of them slept.

And Wade is not sorry.

Charlie Prince is the embodiment of the paradox, because he's charismatic and funny and he burns people alive. Every time he's on screen, pretty much, the same thing is happening: he charms us and he murders, sometimes in the same breath. And that's the thing, much much more so than the original, that the remake puts Evans against. Evans, who is dead-pan solemn and joyless and burning up inside with the need to save his ranch (the ranch being symbolic, of course, just as the brooch is). The original's Evans is much more of an Everyman caught in a hellacious trap by his own (somewhat unexpected) moral strength; the remake's Evans is a man trapped in the Slough of Despond grasping desperately for his last chance to make it to the Celestial City (I am NOT going to map this movie onto Pilgrim's Progress, I swear to God I am not, even though Potter is clearly Faithful). Bale's Evans carries that kind of allegorical charge (possibly just due to the fact that Bale only has one intensity setting, which is eleven), and I suppose, if you want to switch gears entirely, you can argue that the movie is really about Will (who is the first character we meet, after all) choosing between Wade (BAD) and Evans (GOOD), which--oh dear--does make that damn final scene made a little more sense.

Never mind that. I say the movie is about Wade and Evans, and about a bad man coming to give his loyalty to a good man. I think the original movie holds out the possibility of hope that Wade might reform (the rain comes); the remake does not.

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*Unrelated to the rest of this, I just want to bitch for a moment about the way that Alice is supplanted by Will in the remake. Alice Evans in the original has a lot more to say and a lot more agency, and in a movie with only two women in it (and the other one is really only there to be a sort of inadvertent Delilah and trap Wade with her Feminine Wiles), that seems kind of important. The idiotic and unnecessary teenage son, who is having the bildungsroman of idiotic and unnecessary teenage sons since the dawn of time (and Jesus Christ the Mary Sue-ism: he gets the drop on Ben Wade and either outbluffs him or genuinely has the balls to shoot him dead? For real?), honestly never feels important to me. And Alice still does.