Looking Back (in amazement and revulsion)

In recent weeks, I have been reading about the Mitford sisters, enjoying the lively memoir by Jessica Mitford, Daughters and Rebels (1960), which led me to look at the lives of the other five daughters and the notorious family  that made weekly headlines in British newspapers in the Thirties.

Just this week, the last of the Mitfords, Deborah (Dowager Duchess of Devonshire) died at 94. She was the youngest daughter of Baron Redesdale and lived a quiet life presiding over the grand country home, Chatsworth, where she collected Elvis memorabilia. Several of her sisters  carried eccentricity to much more alarming heights. Four wrote books about the family, creating the Mitford Myth.

Jessica became an American and a Communist (and later a civil rights activist) after running away to Spain to fight in the civil war with Churchill's nephew, with whom she eloped; this happened just after her sister, Unity, became "Hitler's English girlfriend," having become a pistol-carrying Nazi, complete with black leather outfit and swastika.  The most glamorous sister, Diana, also met and adored Hitler: she left her husband and two sons for the fascist leader Oswald Mosley. She was married in home of Joseph Goebbels in 1936, with the Fuhrer in attendance. Diana and Mosley were interned in prison during World War II for treason.

So much for the three main ones. Two lived quietly. Another, Nancy Mitford, wrote fourteen books, including fiction based on the family and its tyrannical father, whose hated of foreigners and overall bigotry was something the children absorbed in various degrees yet also rebelled against.  Each of them carried the title The Hon. before their names, but few were honorable: they come across as arrogantly assured of their own privileges and opinions.

Like their parents, they never apologized for what they did because they felt they were always right. I refer mainly to Diana, the worst of the bunch, who until her death at 93, never altered her view that Hitler was wonderful. Her obit called her "A charming, unrepentant Nazi who was fatally loyal to her Blackshirt husband."  She and Unity, who shot herself in the head when England declared war on Germany, were described in one book as representing the "frivolity of evil."

As I look at this family and this period, when so many in the upper classes in Britain were also fascist or pro-German and anti-Semitic  (even when England went to war against Nazi Germany), I have many questions about what the origins of such attitudes.   How much of the Mitfords' hate came from their upbringing, how much from their upper-class milieu, how much from their need to be independent?  What leads talented, bright, attractive people to such dangerous extremes?

Jessica, whose life is the most colorful and amazing, sensibly says, "We delighted in matching wits with the world and this became a  way of life, an ongoing battle against our class."

Although these class distinctions are less sharp in today's world, similar kinds of anger and hatred are alive and well in Europe today, where again anti-Semitism is on the rise and where terrorists are poised to strike at what we call the civilized world.  Can we not learn lessons from recent history? If not, we need the humility to recognize, unlike those now-dead English aristocrats, that we are not always right.

Evil and the Will

In the back of my mind recently, when I wrote about a strong-willing Irish friend, was the more serious, eternally mysterious question of human evil and to what extent it results from our free will.

Of course, Hitler comes to mind. Just recently, I found an article by Ron Rosenbaum, author of a new edition of Explaining Hitler.  Having studied his subject more thoroughly than most people, Rosenbaum concludes that what made Hitler want to do what he did remains ultimately unclear.

Will power he had in abundance, and hatred. Some (Alice Miller, the Swiss psychoanalyst, among others) have argued that young Adolf's upbringing--being beaten by his father--led to violent hatred and shame, compounded by the defeat of Germany in World War I.  Others have seen Hitler as a demon or monster or madman who ultimately wanted to destroy himself and ruin his beloved Fatherland.

It is interesting for me, having taught a course in evil that put emphasis on the choices we make, to find Rosenbaum concluding that it wasn't a combination of external forces that led Hitler to become Hitler: "it required him to choose evil. It required free will."

The full source of the "continuous series of choices" that Hitler made in his life may never be understood. The author says we may never know what effect an alleged hypnotist had on Hitler after the first war. So rather than indulge in endless speculation, Rosenbaum, lacking definitive proof of the potent combination of personal and social forces that drove him to annihilate millions, concludes that "we may never know with certainty what made Hitler Hitler."

This means that some basic issues about the war and the Holocaust remain uncertain since Hitler's racial war was unlike any other. Hitler arrived on the world scene at just the right moment, in a country eager for authoritarian control and willing to participate in his evil monstrosity.

And yet the greatest evil of the modern era remains, like so much human evil, a mystery.