Word: hitleritis
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There is sufficient documentation to authenticate Wagener's life and writing, a comforting thought after the embarrassment of the bogus Hitler diaries and other artifacts fobbed off as pieces of the true Hakenkreuz. The only caution is that Hitler's commentaries and fanciful redundancies on history, race and destiny were reconstructed by Wagener 14 to 17 years after the events he describes. But since Hitler made a lasting impression on millions, it is not farfetched to assume that a disciple who spent hundreds of hours basking in Führerspeak could reproduce the substance and tone of his master's voice...
...this reason alone, the memoirs are a valuable contribution to 20th century demonology. Unfortunately for Wagener, fate continues to be unkind. His book drags him from the mercy of oblivion to play the part of history's fool. The Hitler he intended to re-create is not a tragic hero but a monumental bore. Gaseous generalizations and crackpot theories pour forth Like beer at an Oktoberfest. He thrills to something called the Odic force, "power rays" that flow from healthy bodies. He invokes Einstein's mathematics to justify his own mystical yearnings and "inner vibrations." He attempts to cross socialism...
...would like to have a family, children, children! Oh, God, you know how much I love children . . . But I have to deny myself this happiness. I have another bride--Germany! I am married: to the German Volk. " This high-minded sentimentality contrasts grotesquely with private reality. The extent of Hitler's love affair with his niece Geli Raubal may never be clear, but there is enough evidence to indicate that his half sister's 23-year-old daughter was not happy with her Uncle Adolf's attentions. In 1931 Raubal shot herself through the heart. Hitler attended the autopsy...
Wagener prefers to probe weaknesses that excuse his own fall from power. He sees Hitler as a poor administrator and a bad judge of human nature. It follows that his Volk hero is surrounded by "simpletons, mindless scum, and flatterers," most notably Himmler, Goebbels, and Göring, who greets Wagener in a red dressing gown and scarlet slippers with turned-up toes. To anyone familiar with office politics, this is a calculated rudeness. Wagener does not seem to get the message. Ever the intellectual snob, he sees Göring as a mental patient rather than a shrewd realist who knows...
Wagener seems unable to make this distinction. He mistakes Hitler's flights of quasi-history and pseudo science for higher truth. It is a form of mental alchemy that confuses metaphor with fact. Somewhere in the Führer's murky idea of Europe's gene pool, the Volk await a new golden age. But first he must burn away the dross of Bolshevism and Jewry. The verbiage grows wild and the mind bloats. Wagener's unintended legacy is a lesson on how a haunted medieval mind could effectively debase reason in the name of reason. --By R.Z. Sheppard