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.OWIN / STKINKRS'S HK1.1COF1KRS
51
he Jew, especially his chosenness? Would tha t Hitler, the Hitler
o r whose philosophy destruction was the powerful cornerstone,
ave
condemned
Stalin for killing 30 million? Whatever the ir
ifferences, H itler would have congratulated Stalin for tha t feat.
Would that Hitler have taken credit for the establishment o f
he State o f Israel? On the contrary, the very existence o f the State
f Israel would have been considered by the Hitler o f 1945 the
ost consternating sign o f his u tte r defeat. As John Toland , in his
assive biography o f Hitler pu t it: “T he greatest irony o f all was
ha t the driving force o f his life — his ha tred and fear o f Jews —
as thwarted. He had in tended the elimination o f six million Jews
o be his greatest gift to the world. It would lead, instead, to the
ormation o f the Jewish state.”8The creation o f the State o f Israel
f te r all his efforts would have been H itler’s private hell.
IRECT BORROWING
So where did the A.H. o f the fiction get all his ideas from? What
as Adolf Hitler been doing du ring the thirty-five years that sepa
ate his real death in the bunker in 1945 from his reb irth in
teiner’s fiction? He has been reading George Steiner. It is from
he Steiner o f
In Bluebeard's Castle
9 tha t Hitler learned that Moshe
8 Toland, p. 891.
9 See especially, George Steiner, “A Season in Hell," in his ///
Bluebeard's Castle
,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971, pp. 27-56. The coincidence of
Hitler’s words with Steiner’s writings has been commented upon by others,
notably Hyam Maccoby,
Encounter,
58,5(May 1982):27-34, Steven Whitfield,
Moment Magazine,
(December, 1982):45-47, and Alvin H. Rosenfeld, op. cit.,
p. 172. I quote at length from Rosenfield’s piece: “What one does hear,
surprisingly, is a language that is recognizably Steiner’s own, taken as it is from
key sections o f
In Bluebeard's Castle
and some o f the author’s other expository
writings. The ideas set forth by the Hitler o f
The Portage
— ideas that link Nazi
doctrines o f covenantal election, racial purity, historic destiny, and the like
with biblical sources — have been presented by Steiner before in some of his
noil-fictional work. Now there is nothing wrong with returning to such work
and mining it for a later novel, but to carry over not only the thinking but the
distinctive idiom o f one’s earlier writing and ascribe it to Hitler is something
else again, and something strongly unsettling. . . In addition, the seeds for
Hitler’s diatribe against the God o f the Book o f Job can be found in an article
by Steiner
inThe Listener
o f October 18, 1979, pp. 508-511. Finally, in an inter
view conducted by Bill Moyers for WNET-TV on May 22, 1981, Steiner’sJew
ish erudition (about God being a God of vengeance unto the thirtieth genera
tion) is as approximate as A.H.’s. (For the last two references I am indebted to
Sonja Stollman.)