Ron Rosenbaum returns to the show to talk about the new edition of his amazing book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (Da Capo Press)! We talk Hitler, the meaning(s) of evil, determinism and free will, Hitler-as-artist vs. Hitler-as-suicide-bomber, "degenerate art," the tendency to blame Jews for their misfortune, and how internet culture has warped the meaning of Hitler in the 16 years since Ron's book was first published.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 28 - Re-Explaining Hitler
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm Gil Roth and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life and the nature of evil, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show and find all our past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find those episodes, get on our email list and make a donation to the show at either of our websites, VMSPod.com, or chimeraabscura.com/vm. You can find us on Twitter at VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. As I mentioned at the top, our conversation this week is, well, it's about evil. The occasion for it is the new release of Ron Rosenbaum's 1998 book, "Explaining Hitler," the search for the origins of his evil. The new paperback edition from Decapo Press just came out this month and it includes a new preface and a big new afterward. And I'm sure you won't be surprised to find out that that includes a lot of points about how Hitler and evil are understood in the internet era. See, for you young listeners out there, 1998, when the book first came out, it was an era before we had YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and broadband and Instagram and all the other things you crazy kids use. But even then, they did know that most arguments on the internet eventually degenerate into someone being compared to Hitler. 'Cause, you know, some things never change. This is Ron's second visit to the virtual memories show. We kicked off the 2013 season with a conversation about his book, "How the End Begins," the road to a nuclear World War III. You can find that one in our archives, but I'm, well, I'm hard put to figure out which one of these is a more upbeat topic, frankly. Hitler or the bomb, I guess neither one's exactly heartwarming, but this conversation's a little more upbeat and fun, I guess, than that previous one. Anyway, Ron is one of my favorite writers. And in addition to explaining Hitler and how the end begins, he also wrote "The Shakespeare Wars," which explores conflicts and controversies around Shakespeare scholarship, which is a really fascinating topic once you get into it. You'll see. He's also at work on a couple of other books, which we talk about in the conversation, but I promise not to say anything about because you never talk about a writer's next book. That's one of my prime lessons of doing this show. Now, it's cheating, but my favorite book of Ron's is actually a book called "The Secret Parts of Fortune," which collects his journalism and essays over the course of about three decades. You can't go wrong with that book, and if you haven't read Ron's work before, get the secret parts of fortune and get started. At the end of this episode, I'll tell you where I first read his stuff. Now, Ron's work has appeared in Harpers, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Slate, and a whole lot of other magazines. Currently, he's a national correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine and was recently featured in the six-hour History Channel documentary, "The World Wars." His new book is, well, the reissue of his book is "Explaining Hitler, The Search for the Origins of His Evil." And now, the second virtual memories conversation with Ron Rosenbaum. (gentle music) - So what brought you back to "Explaining Hitler?" Came out in 1998, what led to reissuing it? - Actually, a professor who had signed, he signed "Explaining Hitler" to his class for years. He sent me an email saying that it was, the paperback was no longer in print. And so, in a kind of fast turnaround, my literary agent was able to get another publisher, DiCapo, to bring it out and asked me to do a new, well, the kind of afterward that I did. And I also wanted to do a brief preface too. So, it worked out well because I'm really glad that the book had been in print for 15 years, but it sometimes happens. And I'm really glad to see it back again. And as I explained in the preface, I didn't realize in the previous editions that the subtitle, the official title was explaining Hitler the search for the origins of his evil. The subtitle was not prominently displayed. It was only on an inside page. I somehow didn't even notice this, but it caused slight misunderstandings, I think, with people, not after they read it, really, but sometimes I would be carrying it and people would say, "Explaining Hitler, so what's your explanation?" As if that's what the title meant, while I really meant by the title that this was a book about the entire enterprise of attempting to explain Hitler, or as the subtitle said, the search for the origins of his evil, and not my explanation. And it's an important distinction because there's a lot of debunking of spurious explanations and a lot of serious engagement with the more interesting ones, but it's not me giving what I call the new preface, the Higgs boson of Hitler, unified theory of everything Hitler. And so, anyway, that's a story. - Well, how has the field changed since that book came out initially? What's gone on, or how have the explanations or our phenomenon of trying to explain Hitler changed? - Well, that's what I found that a lot of the same arguments, which I had chronicled in the original book, are just being, have just been continue to unspool or continue to evolve. And for instance, the question of what was going on in Hitler's mind, his thought world. So I phrase that Albert Schweitzer first used, I think, in his book, "The Quest of the Historical Jesus." And it was an influence on me when I was first doing the book because the mystery of Hitler's thought world is really at the heart of things. You know, as I had a number of things I had visceral feelings about, but I opened the afterward with what I think is an important further re-emphasizing of one aspect of the theory of Hitler's thought world. By Sir Richard Evans, who is the author of the three volume study of Hitler and one of the most basically authoritative voices. And he came out in a fairly radical way in a New York Review of Books essay in saying that was basically titled "What Was the War About?" And it was really a question of why Hitler lost the war. And he felt, I thought it was important that someone like Evans felt it was important to make the case that Hitler lost the war, not because of any strategic mistakes, not because of intelligence deficit or armaments inferiority, but because of his war aims and because his key war aim, because the war he most wanted to fight was the racial war, as Evans calls it, the war against the Jews. And in making that his key war aim, he sabotaged, in a way, the actual war. There are a number of instances that historians have cited to give examples of that. He, when the Russian front was crumbling and he needed transport trains to supply his front lines in the East, he refused to stop the use of the trains that were sending the Jews to Auschwitz and the death camps to support the military because it was more important for him to keep up the murder of the Jews almost, or actually, than keeping up the battle lines against the Russians. And I speak of another example that's cited by Alan Bullock when I spoke to him, one of the earliest Hitler explainers who sort of came to this view as well, that Hitler became possessed with his own sense of destiny, of chosenness himself. And he felt he could, at a certain point, after his early victories, that he could not be defeated. And so he forbid his army from making even tactical retreats, which crucially, in the Battle of Stalingrad, caused the loss of his entire six army, and basically it was a turning point in the course of the war, because Hitler would not allow a tactical retreat from his surrounded six army. And anyway, the importance of this is that there's been a long argument about what really motivated Hitler. And, you know, for a while it was called the intentionalist versus the functionalist argument, the intentionalist believing, as I do, and Evans does, that the racial war was preeminent. And the functionalist who felt that, well, the Jews just had to be disposed of some way. It was no, it wasn't necessarily, extermination was not the highest priority. But in fact, I think the evidence that has developed in the last 15 years supports the theory that it is, was. - The other aspect of the book is, beyond the question of what the war was for Hitler, is the question of what evil is, and whether Hitler personifies it, or, well, the question of what evil is, and how we do that. - Yeah, I've come to feel that evil is a really tricky word to use, because to some people it can seem like you're referring to some numinous dark for some supernatural influence, et cetera, et cetera. There are some people who don't believe that evil exists, and more and more, as neuroscience takes over the humanities, people want to ascribe what we usually call evil acts, to a neural defect, a DSM-5 maladjustment, or something like that, a kind of deterministic view that, well, these people are, there's something wrong with their brain that forces them to act this way, which in effect removes free will choice, because people don't choose evil. Evil is chosen for them by their neural defects. - In history, within the context of the book, it also seems a lot of the attempts at explaining Hitler are also these ways of justifying behavior, perhaps, of the German people, or finding a way to ascribe what happened to the Jews somehow, that there's always some explanation for evil, and that it's a question of what happens when you try to explain those things. - Yes, I think the thing to focus on is evil acts and evil ideas. In other words, it's very difficult to find a reason for calling a person evil, and the debate over whether to call Hitler evil is an interesting one. I, clearly, there are evil acts. I've come more and more to feel that evil acts are the result of evil ideas, elimination of anti-Semitism, that kind of thing, but that still leaves some room, I believe, for a personal choice, for the absolute self-responsible decision. A self-responsible decision to do something evil, a knowledgeable, knowing decision to do something evil. I mean, in the book, when I talk to H.R. Trevor Roper, it's dead now, but brilliant historian, despite having been fooled by the Hitler diaries. - Some people want to believe. - Some people want to believe. - Yeah, his was one of the first books to be written after the end of the war. It was in the bunker right after the German defeat, and his book on the last days of Hitler still remains quite interesting, but when I met him at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London, I had this sort of temerity to ask him what I thought was a simplistic question. Did Hitler know he was doing wrong as he was committing these crimes? And Trevor Roper snapped back, absolutely not. He was convinced of his own rectitude, and this is basically the problem of evil that goes back to Socrates who said that it's really impossible for people to be knowingly evil because everyone who commits evil acts thinks they're doing good. And in fact, the case could be made that Hitler thought he was doing good. He thought he was reading the world of a plague, that being the Jews. - Did you reach that conclusion over the course of either the first writing of the book or over the last 15 years? - You know, I felt that I come to feel in the course of writing the book and even more strongly, in the course of the last 15 years, that one can make a case that there's more, that evil can in here in the human mind. Rarely, you know, we mostly see it in literature, Yago, Richard III, but if you want to believe in free will, you almost have to believe in evil because that means, you know, without free will, there's no choice to do something that we conventionally think of as evil. And I came finally back to in the afterward to the new edition prompted by the revelation of the lost treasure of the degenerate artist, or what Hitler called it, the degenerate art exhibition. You know, this guy in Germany, Gerlitt had basically stolen all these amazing art treasures, Picasso, Matisse, all these people. That Hitler had corralled in 1937 into what his propaganda people called an exhibit of degenerate art basically showing how the artistic world had departed from the purity of Harry and art, which was hideous, but nonetheless worshiped by Hitler. Anyway, I came to believe that in artistic consciousness, there is a kind of validation of the idea of free will, that the choices that an artist makes are not completely traceable back to a particular set of neurons firing and driving him or her to make those choices. They're choices made from the complete consciousness of the person that art in a way validates free will. And in some ways, thereby validates the notion of evil. And I came back to the idea of Hitler as an artist, which was really what he most sought to be throughout his life, beginning in Vienna. He failed, but he thought of himself as an artist. He thought of himself as someone who had an artistic consciousness. And it was certainly within the first edition, that the section on "Beryl Lang" really goes into that notion of Hitler as artist and the Holocaust as, you don't wanna see a great artwork, but a massive, a massive evil work of work. - I know, I think you can even take it further and think of Hitler as a kind of demonic sculptor, sculpting the human genome, carving out the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the Slavs, hoping to arrive at some purity of form that he felt the would thereby be attained. - Of the various theories that you cover over the course of the book, one of the big questions that comes up again is why Germany? Why, what was it about that nation at that time that was so willing to begin the process of collecting the Jews and murdering them? Do you find, did you come in? - Well, I think it's an interesting argument and I would say the most salient case that Germany was to blame was made by Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler's willing executioners. And Goldhagen did a lot of valuable research into 19th century scientific racism, quote unquote, as it was called, in a whole slew of idiotic, Germanic, so-called racial scientists who sought to prove that Germanic, and superior to all else and needed protection, et cetera, et cetera. Goldhagen went too far, I believe, because he, well, in two ways. First he ignored, in concentrating on 19th century scientific anti-Semitism, he almost obscured the huge fact of 19th centuries of Christian anti-Semitism throughout Europe. And so he does that, he ignores somewhat or downplays Christian anti-Semitism in favor of this scientific racism thing of it. Also, he makes a scientific racism aspect so such a powerful, so powerfully embedded in German culture that it's almost as if Germans growing up in the early 20th century had no choice but to be illuminationist anti-Semites. They were, therefore, and therefore, in fact, they had no moral responsibility, really, no agency because it was so deeply embedded in their consciousness. And I think that's taking things too far. And the other thing about why Germany is obviously World War I was horribly traumatic, both the war and the aftermath of the war for the entire nation. And so it left the nation vulnerable to opportunistic people like Hitler who would suggest a reason for the sorrow and the trauma that they were going through. On the other hand, I think the fact that basically all of Europe, except Portugal, I think, cooperated with Hitler in rounding up the Jews and sending them to the death camps in some ways makes it more a universal European problem than a purely German one. - Is Christianity inherently anti-Semitic? - Well, there are strains of Christianity that are certainly Luther was forever ranting that the Jews should be burned alive and basically murdered and that they were created by the devil. And obviously, Lutheranism has become more civilized, but that was a very Germanic strain of thought. And there are interpretations of Christianity, particularly the supersessionist ones, which says that Christianity is basically designed to supersede Judaism and the Jews are at fault for rejecting Jesus. I mean, one of actually one of the most interesting essays I came upon in writing the book was by George Steiner, the British intellectual. I think it appeared in a Kenyan review and it was called Why the Jews Rejected Jesus and he basically said that went through the explanations and said the Jews didn't want to, were the children of Eve, the people of curiosity, they didn't want to feel the story came to an end. And Steiner also had it. I thought it was one of the most interesting though, probably two speculative reasons for the source of anti-Semitism, which he called the threefold blackmail of transcendence and the Jewish invention of conscience that Jews had aroused the hostility of the rest of the world through three people, Moses who asked for perfect obedience and perfect obedience being impossible, made everyone feel bad. Jesus, another Jew who asked for perfect love and perfect love being virtually impossible made people feel, made them feel their conscience was troubled by this and hate the Jews for doing it. And finally, Karl Marx, who asked for perfect justice and that was impossible and caused all sorts of problems for people. So it's an interesting theory. I think it's a little too intellectual-- Schematic, sort of. Yeah, but there's, it may be something there. Do you approach a Judaism change through the course of this? Do you feel, in a sense because of the word and if we do, and if we don't, we'll always be Jews in some respect. Do you feel any need one way or the other to either become more observant or to assert your own approach to being a Jew and what it means? Well, for a long time, I've been an atheist, not an atheist, more an agnostic leaning towards atheism. I'm not an observant Jew. I had a very reformed Judaism, light Sunday school kind of education it never took. I just don't believe the Bible is the word of God. I think it's the word of a lot of confused people. And it doesn't inspire me, it depresses me. You know, I'm not like a biblical Jew. However, I love the Jewish people. I love Jewish culture and certainly writing about the destruction of the horrible destruction of the beautiful golden world of Yiddish culture in Poland that Isaac Bacheva singer writes about. And the destruction of the European Jews and European Jewish civilization certainly affected me. I was in Copenhagen a few years ago, visited the Jewish Museum there and they had a short film about the history of Jews in Denmark. And there was a stretch generation upon generation, they become assimilated, they're bourgeois members of society. And then the shettled Jews who were being pushed out of Russia showed up and all of a sudden they were all Jews again. That's the sort of dark version of the Jews showed up and all of a sudden people are pointing the fingers. Oh yeah, the Leviteses are also Jewish and we become Jews, whether or not we're observant I guess is the question of what does it mean to us as we understand. That's true although in some way that cast unfair blame, both on the Eastern Jews, for being different and on the Westernized Jews as if they were oblivious to anti-Semitism, I distrust explanations that somehow blame Jews for their own misfortune. - And that comes up often in the book. People seem to find explanations for Hitler that somehow involve his ill treatment by a Jew, whether it's a doctor or, these are all mythical, of course a doctor or the mythical prostitute he mythically cast or allegedly catch a syphilis from. And some of the theorists behind that are Jews. Also, what do you think that accounts for this almost self-blame for the show up? - Well again, I resist blaming Jews for blaming Jews. - I'm very meta way of looking at this. - But it's not only Jews who seek a Jew to blame, it's Hitler himself in mine comf who claims do-beously that once in Vienna his eyes were opened when he saw a black cafftan Jew and suddenly it was like seeing an alien or something like that and that crystallized his anti-Semitism and the search for a Jew to blame. It's like a search for the comfort of logical certainty but it also contains the seeds of making the Jews responsible for Hitler. It's sort of shocking. One of the things I discovered was Simon Wiesenthal the famed Nazi hunter was obsessed with the idea and you can find this in his autobiography. And he came from Vienna that Hitler had an encounter with a Jewish prostitute when he was living in Vienna and either it went badly or he got syphilis or something like that and that's what's responsible. And there's another, there's an Australian guy who wrote a thick book trying to claim that Ludwig Wittgenstein who may or may not have been in middle school with Hitler and was not, I mean his family had converted from Jewishness to Christianity but somehow Hitler obscurely resented Wittgenstein so much that that was the source of his anti-Semitism but none of these theories have, and then of course the main bogus theory perpetrated by the psychoanalyst Alice Miller unfortunately popularized by it even though it's actually, I first saw it in a Saudi American anti-Semitic newspaper but it was an English language newspaper in Jeddah but in any case the theory that Hitler thought that his grandfather was Jewish and that he might have Jewish blood and that's proved that he was not Jewish or not influenced by this alleged Jewish blood. He had to make himself the worst anti-Semite in the world and in fact I investigated the whole Jewish grandfather thing and there really is no evidence for it. - Did you believe evil is committed for its own sake? I don't think we quite got a, you talk about evil ideas and herring within people but that sense of like you talked about within R to Iago Richard III, but also. - I mean I don't think I've come to sort of concrete certainty about the matter but I do believe in free will and non-deterministic consciousness and if you believe in that it opens the way to believe that people can deliberately commit evil acts. - Now the biggest change from the 15 years or so since the first edition came out is the explosion of the internet and with the explosion of the internet comes a lot of anti-Semitic. We were just seeing the Hitler was right hashtag in relation to Gaza and Israel this week. How did that play into or how does that affect sort of the impressions of both the Holocaust and Hitler as you've been observing them over that time? - Well I think the most shocking thing and it's probably due to the internet is the incredible rise and wide spread belief in Holocaust denial. I mean it used to be just skinheads and David Irving and a few pseudo people who's called themselves scholars, the kind of people. But then you found that an entire nation, Iran, it's government, it's leadership, believed in Holocaust denial. And enough so to convene a convention of disreputable quote scholars on quote in 2006 to examine the question. And they have not contrary to misleading reports in the media and deceptive reports from some Iranians. They have not abandoned their Holocaust denial, they're the main leader of the-- - The commanding of the Supreme Leader. - On his website he called the Holocaust a myth. And even the moderate Rouhani has adopted this entirely sinister, disingenuous pose of, well let's leave it to the historians as if it were still an open question. Plus, surveys show that Holocaust denial, belief in the protocols of the elders of Zion, all these anti-Semitic myths are, I mean, a poll show that people throughout the non-Western world, a majority often subscribe to them while it's spread in the Western world as well. It's the most dismaying kind of thing. - It's almost like a negative capability, both the ability to believe the Holocaust didn't exist and the Jews had it coming, that sense that-- - Well, one thing that used to be true that most Holocaust deniers would, in private as reported by defectors from that camp, in private, they would celebrate the fact that the Jews were murdered and just use Holocaust denial as a way of tormenting the Jews further by basically accusing them of lying and I call it twisting the knives and the souls of the dead and it's contemptible and actually, to me, that was an example of evil. But now I think there's a large portion of Holocaust deniers who actually take it seriously despite every species argument being refuted. - One of the interesting concepts you brought up in the new afterword for the book is the idea of Hitler as suicide bomber. I don't know if you'd like to sort of elucidate on that and which I think-- - Yeah, I think it grew out of my thinking about what's Richard Evans had wrote, that it was bolstered some other thinkers I'd previously written about, that Hitler was waging a racial war. That's why he lost the war and the fact that he was willing to sacrifice victories over the allies in order to kill the Jews really meant that he won that war. He won that war six million to one and yes, he committed suicide. But then as I thought about it, well, gee, he committed suicide. 50 million people died in the war that he started. In some ways, thinking about it in terms of true believer, martyrdom, theological imperative to kill the infidel. You could look at Hitler as a suicide bomber that he blew up Europe in order to kill the Jews within it. - The other question I have about the book is the continued use for the cover of the baby picture of Hitler, which I think is, I thought I had read is actually banned in a German edition that's not something that can be used as art in that country. - Well, it's interesting. I found the book has been translated into 12 languages, I believe. So there are 11 other editions. And I found that almost without exception, the other nations, not because of legality, but they would not use the baby picture on the cover. They would use Hitler shaking his fist, Hitler giving a Nazi salute with the armband and the swastika, et cetera, et cetera. - Hitler being Hitler. - Hitler being Hitler. But to me, it was important, the baby picture was important because it raises the central question I was addressing, which is how we get from here to there, how we get from this innocent child to the genocidal monster. And basically, all attempts are at explaining Hitler are attempts to explain the baby picture. And in fact, at the heart of my dispute with Claude Lonsman, the director of Showa, was embodied in a way at his attack on the baby picture. I mean, he didn't attack the baby picture. He was aghast that there was a baby picture or that what it represented, represented the idea that you would have to somehow explain why this child became a monster. And for Lonsman asking the question why inevitably devolves into explanation, explanation devolves into exculpation. He did it because of this, he did it because of that, he did his brain, sickness, whatever. And therefore, you get into the realm almost of the phrase to understand all is to forgive all. And no one wants to be in the position of forgiving Hitler, it wasn't his fault, it was his brain made it do it, whatever. So yeah, I think the baby picture is an embodiment of the entire question. - That's a pretty amazing book, returning to it after 15 years and realizing how in-depth your work was and how many the variations of arguments and seeing how they proliferated from post-war era onwards is it's pretty daunting and amazing work. - Thank you. - Any other books of yours? Well, I'm hoping secret parts of fortune gets reissued at some point because of that. - Well, there's still a Kindle edition. And so. - I still have a few copies left on my shelf, I like to give out to friends, but they're diminishing now, so. - Well, but still, you could get an electronic edition right now, all you people listening. - It's a terrible question to ask what you're working on. So instead, how has your approach to journalism changed? In the, let's say the post-secret parts of fortune era, which once again coincides with a sort of internet explosion. I know you're working particularly with Smithsonian Magazine doing interview profiles. How has it evolved? How has the work evolved for you over the decades? - Well, I think since the Hitler book and the secret parts of fortune, which was a collection of my best long form journalism and essays, I've been focusing more on books than on magazine stories, although I've written a lot of essays for a slate. And of course, it was the whole observer period, New York observer period where I did a cultural column, the edgy enthusiast. And I found in terms of books that an interesting thing happened. I dropped out of Yale graduate school. I was in the English department and I just could not bear being a graduate student. So I dropped out after a year and really sort of revolted against academia and wanted to hang out with cops criminals and write stories about long form narrative stories about America, about crimes, about strange things. The blue box story I did for Esquire that gave Steve Jobs his start, which you can read if you get the Kindle edition of the secret parts of fortune. I found that as I started writing books, I sort of circled back not to academia but to doing journalism about scholarship, about scholarly disputes. That's what the Hitler book was about in a way, not just scholars, but artists and filmmakers and philosophers and theologians, but even more intensely, the Shakespeare book called the Shakespeare Wars, I found great delight in discovering genuine scholars, often directors rather than academics or actors or voice coaches or people like that. And the really interesting disputes they engaged in. And my nuclear war book, which was the subject of your previous podcast with me, was in some way, in some way it was asking more metaphysical questions about nuclear war and what it meant and what our moral obligations were. And so I would say that is the path, the things I've done for Smithsonian are often with, if not scholars, then people like Oliver Sacks or Robert Caro or people whose intellect I admire who I consider geniuses. And then I sort of enjoyed writing a serbic essay is for slate on subjects ranging from my notorious attack on the work of Billy Joel to my explanations of JD Salinger. So I like combining, but even so, I've found that I've always in doing an essay, I've always found I like doing it as storytelling and starting out with a question and exploring my own and others thinking about it and weighing and assessing it and coming down on one side or another, but not just noodling in my head, but looking at covering the territory in some way. - Again, treating it as reporting, as well as, again, that sort of academic close reading you've mentioned when we last spoke, who are you reading? - Oh, I hate when people ask questions. - Okay, nevermind. - I freeze up. - Last great book you read, I don't see that does it too. - I get back to you. - Is there a novel in you at all at this point? - And I've written fiction early on, but I really discovered much to my disappointment in a way, but maybe it allowed me to do what I was better at that I just don't have belief in my own attempts at fiction. I found the characters I create, the dialogue would be wooden or they'd be versions of me. I love non-fiction. I love the voices of people I discover. I love the strangeness of it. And I found that, well, it's something Philip Roth said, although, of course, he continued to write great fiction that reality just outstrips most fiction. And I find that true today. I mean, the people I enjoy most are great non-fiction writers. Although, okay, here's a book that I just finished that I would recommend to everyone. I have a great fondness for the Chandler Hammett School of the hard-boiled detective, not detective, but hard-boiled. - No crime. - Yeah, and I just read "Get Carter" by Ted Lewis. And most people are familiar with the Michael Caine movie, which is directed by my conscious, which is so great. And the novel is so gritty. And it's really, I resent when people say something is Chandler-esque. But this is, I would say, you know, equal to just about any Chandler, except the good, the law goodbye. So, and it hasn't been in print in the U.S. for a long time, and it's just coming out this fall from so-called crime with an introduction by my colleges. The guy who wrote it died at age 42, it's amazing, but it's a book about the underside of the UK during the '60s and '70s that is, you know, the underside of the cool Britannia '60s Brit pop surface that is often taken for reality. - One of my favorite flicks, so I'll take a look and see if I can grab the book. - Do you have any work coming out soon, besides the Smithsonian pieces that you do right here? - Well, I have two book contracts that I'm behind on. - Okay. - Is it fair to ask about those? - You know, I think the better part of discretion is... - In case your editor is listening. - Yeah, I mean, they are just about finished in case my editor is listening. - I was thinking more if you have long essays coming out in any other venues or is there any journalism? - You know, with two book contracts, with writing the new edition of this, with the Smithsonian profiles, I feel like I've been there and done it for most long-form stuff. And, you know, you can spend six months, really, and you should spend six months doing a great, long-form reporting piece. But in that time, you could, if you were efficient, which I'm not, you could write half a book. And so I'd prefer to put my energy into books. - Understood. And last two questions come from my brother, who's an English teacher, Bleak House or Middle March? - Well, you know, I don't think they're really comparable, but I would say, I'd say Bleak House is one of the great achievements in the language and it changed my life. - How so? - The changing the life part. - Yeah, I went through a period in my late 20s when I read all the Dickens. - It's like your pal David Gates, who seems to do that every year, I think. - Well, so he says, yeah, you know, really, it was, you know, if you're really gonna do Barnaby Rush, then it's gonna take you more than a year. But nonetheless, it's the right impulse. But at that time, it changed my life because there was a, I found, there was a kind of spirituality in Dickens that I don't know, reached me in some way. Of course, I loved the masterfulness of his narrative voice. And I really sort of learned to write in a way by having a volume of Dickens open next to my typewriter and the energy in his prose, you know, was just like a constant jolt of red bull. Not that I have ever tasted red bull, but I never asked it. - It's like battery access. - Okay, it was, anyway, it was a jolt of energy. And fleekhouse in particular, I remember, it just so deeply affected me. I was reading it with a girlfriend of mine at the time and we were both like weeping together over passages. So anyway, not at all to disparage middle march, but fleekhouse represented something more to me. - I understand. And my brother's other question, who does Keats become if he doesn't die early? Does he become Shakespeare? Does he become Wallace Stevens? - I hope he doesn't become the late Wallace Stevens. I don't know, I think it's unanswerable. I would certainly say, you know, there's something, you know, this kind of unrivaled exquisite-ness to his work, but-- - Do you wonder what age would have done to? - Yeah, and does he become Shakespeare? I mean, Shakespeare was really totally doing something entirely different because he was doing drama. And Keats was doing lyric, although he, I suppose he attempted some long, dramatic poems, but they were best for their exquisite texture within rather than their multi-vocal drama that Shakespeare did. But it's an interesting question. I certainly would love to have known. - And you can make that the subject of the third book. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Ron Rosenbaum, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. - Oh, thank you, Gil. I enjoyed the conversation. ♪ We are a sample by one word ♪ ♪ I've got a hundred times ♪ ♪ You go back to that ♪ - And that was the return of Ron Rosenbaum. If you didn't read "Explaining Hitler" the first time it came around, then you really ought to pick up the new edition. And even if you did read it before, the afterward and the portability of this one compared to the old hard covers, really worth buying the new edition. It's from DeCapo Press and just came out this past month. Ron's writing has appeared in a lot of places. You can look him up on the internet. He doesn't have a site of his own, but you can find his work on slate.com. You can also find ebook editions of some of his journalism at www byliner.com/profiles/Ron-rozenbaum. Rosenbaum has spelled R-O-S-E-N-B-A-U-M. You can also find him on Twitter at Ron Rosenbaum1, the number one, because the other Ron Rosenbaum is some guy who lives in Virginia and gets mad when people keep making these obscure literary references on his Twitter site. If you're looking for a place to start with Ron's work, just by the ebook edition of The Secret Parts of Fortune, which collects his journalism and essays from the '70s, '80s, and '90s. My first experience with Ron's work was the essay Long Island Babylon, which I think was originally called Satin Lives when it came out in the New York Times magazine. You might find a different jumping on point, maybe his great JD Salinger piece, his Kim Philby, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or Danny Castillaro's stuff, all depends on where you're coming from, but I think you're gonna find an awful lot to treasure within Ron's work. And once you get started, I bet you'll get hooked and move on to explaining Hitler, Shakespeare Wars, how the end begins. You'll start hunting down his byline wherever you can find it. So that's it for this week's virtual memories show. I'll be back next Tuesday with another return guest, the book critic Michael Derta. We met up at ReaderCon in Massachusetts a few weeks ago and had a fun follow-up conversation from the one we did back in September of 2012. And because I'm like Hitler and trying to cover up all traces of my past, I plan to go back and remaster that original podcast I did with Michael because it's really unlistenable. I didn't understand what I was doing with audio processing and I'm gonna go back and redo that one and post it at the same time that the new one comes out next week. In the meantime, please hit up our websites VMSPod.com or chimeraobscura.com/vm so you can make a donation to this ad-free podcast. Well, I don't make any money from this show. I don't take any ads. I've got a day job, but just for references sake, just doing this episode probably cost me about 40 or 45 bucks in addition to web hosting costs and other things. Just for driving into the city, parking, gas, et cetera. So if you wanna help out with some of that, go to one of our sites and make a donation through PayPal. I'll send you a new short story I wrote. You can also find our past episodes on either of the sites and get on our weekly email list where I'll tell you about the new episode as well as new work coming out from past guests. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at growth, g-r-o-t-h at chimeraobscura.com or at VMSPod on Twitter or at our Facebook page, Facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And also go to the iTunes store, look up the virtual memories show and leave a review and rating there. More of you who do that, the better the chance that we're gonna get featured when somebody searches for the meaning of ultimate evil or something like that. Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. (upbeat music) ♪ I'm back to ♪ ♪ We only a simple body world ♪ ♪ I got a hundred times ♪ ♪ You go back to life ♪ ♪ Go back to life ♪ (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [ Silence ]