The Spinoza Problem

by Irvin D. Yalom

(April 20, 1945) Rosenberg celebrated him on the occasion of his fifty-sixth birthday by hailing Adolf Hitler as the “Man of the Century.” Ten days later, as the approaching Russian army was only a few blocks away from Hitler’s underground bunker, the Führer married Eva Braun, distributed cyanide capsules to the wedding party, wrote his will, and shot himself after his wife swallowed cyanide. Twenty-four hours later, in the same bunker, Goebbels and his wife killed their six children with morphine and cyanide, and then he and his wife committed suicide together. Even so, the Völkischer Beobachter presses continued to roll until the German surrender on May 8, 1945. When its offices were overrun, the Russians found a couple of predated editions. The last undistributed issue, dated May 11, 1945, contained a survival guide entitled “Subsistence in German Fields and Forests.”