Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler appears here not as an inhuman monster set apart from ordinary humanity, but as a disturbing case of what the book calls the human, all too human. Its argument turns on a reversal: the danger is not that political evil lies beyond familiar human motives, but that hubris, attachment, and the desire for power can remain recognizably human while acquiring catastrophic political force. Hitler’s significance in these passages is therefore interpretive rather than biographical. He tests the claim that condemning evil as alien to humanity is enough to understand it.

The Human and the Inhuman

The book introduces Hitler through a contrast between the ordinary opposition of humanity and subjectivity and a more unsettling possibility: that, at the limit, what remains when familiar human identity breaks down is a pure subject. Antigone, Juliette, and Sygne serve as literary figures for that limit. Against them, the book asks what is missed when the Nazis are simply dismissed as inhuman and bestial. Such a dismissal can turn political evil into an exception to humanity, leaving ordinary human motives—and their capacity to become destructive—unexamined.

This framing does not soften the judgment of Nazism. Instead, it changes the question: if Hitler is treated as wholly outside the human, the qualities that made his political hubris intelligible may be obscured. The book argues that the Nazi problem lies precisely in its being human, all too human. Hitler becomes a test case for whether ethical and political criticism can face evil without making it safely alien.

The Nightmare and Nietzschean Becoming

A reported story from Hitler’s table conversations gives this argument its strangest scene. In the early 1940s, Hitler is said to have awakened from a nightmare in terror, with tears streaming down his face. He then described a vision of future overmen so utterly ruthless and indifferent to human pain that he found them unbearable. The anecdote reverses the expected roles: a figure associated with extreme evil recoils from a future imagined as lacking compassion.

The book reads the episode through Friedrich Nietzsche’s movement from the Lion to the Child. Hitler’s horror is philosophically suggestive because it registers, in the book’s account, the distance between the reflective nihilism of the present and an imagined innocence of becoming beyond justification. The nightmare does not make Hitler a champion of that future or establish a hidden moral virtue. Rather, it dramatizes the difficulty of reaching beyond inherited moral values while still being caught within the attitudes that judge and justify them.

In this reading, the Lion cannot create new values. Its task is to clear the ground through an active overcoming of morality, including the will to truth’s own claim to authority. The Child, associated with a new beginning and a sacred affirmation, belongs to what might follow. Hitler’s reported fear thus serves as a paradoxical illustration of a philosophical transition, not as an exonerating account of his politics. The book uses the anecdote to make the problem of becoming beyond morality vivid while retaining the distinction between that problem and any endorsement of Hitler.

Comedy and Political Hubris

The account of comedy clarifies why Hitler’s humanity is presented as a source of ridicule rather than sympathy. Comedy commonly brings vulgar, ordinary life into collision with an elevated symbolic mask: a leader entering a formal gathering might slip on a banana peel. But the comic force does not lie only in the fall. If the leader preserves his dignity and continues as if nothing happened, the contrast between the mask and the mishap persists. If dignity collapses entirely, the scene becomes sad or tragic instead.

Drawing on Alenka Zupancic’s Hegelian account, the book describes a more exact comic reversal: the dignified role itself is exposed as an idiosyncratic weakness. The Miser, Drunkard, and Seducer are comic figures because their excessive attachments make them recognizably human. The comic procedure does not merely puncture a grand persona with ordinary life; it reveals that the supposedly elevated task or passion may itself be an all-too-human fixation.

Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator supplies the political example. In the book’s reading, Hitler’s hubris is not beyond the range of ordinary human weakness. It is an excessive, all-too-human idiosyncrasy, and that is what makes the figure ridiculous. Hitler is placed in the comic series of the Seducer, Miser, and Deceiving Servant: not because their actions are equivalent to his politics, but because comic structure reveals how an excessive attachment can be both a source of self-importance and a form of human limitation. The result is a burlesque figure of the Evil Dictator, not a denial of the consequences of dictatorship.

Heidegger and the Political Reading of Nazism

The book also examines Martin Heidegger’s relation to Nazism as a problem for philosophical explanations of political evil. In a 1936 course on Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger wrote that Hitler and Benito Mussolini were both essentially determined by Nietzsche, though in different ways and without Nietzsche’s authentic metaphysical thought directly shaping their politics. The book argues that the central issue is not simply the passage’s mildness toward the two leaders. It is the unresolved question of what a politics formed by Nietzsche’s authentic metaphysical thought would be, and whether such a politics is possible at all.

A related criticism concerns Heidegger’s effort, before 1934, to imagine academic disciplines acting with awareness of their ontological foundations, with philosophy guiding the particular sciences. The book presents this as an attempt to close the gap between ontological truth and the practical, ontic level of institutions and action. Heidegger later acknowledged that the gap could not be eliminated: the sciences do not think, and this is part of their productive strength. The political danger, as the book frames it, is the temptation to impose an actual political order as if it could embody an ontological truth without remainder.

The book finds a further ambiguity in defenses of Heidegger that claim his thought reveals the roots of Nazism in modern subjectivity. That account risks making people who resisted Fascism in the name of humanist values seem, at a deeper level, complicit in its horrors, while Heidegger’s own active involvement appears to yield superior insight. The book presses the difficulty directly: if Heidegger’s experience of Nazism enabled him to grasp modern subjectivity, that explanation still has to account for his inability to resist Nazism’s attraction. Hitler’s place in this argument is therefore bound up with a criticism of theories that turn proximity to political horror into philosophical authority.

Action, Authenticity, and Political Contrast

The book challenges the claim that Hitler displayed exceptional daring or an iron will capable of changing history. It reports a contemporary form of praise in which ski champions and trainers in Slovenia and Croatia condemn Hitler for the deaths of millions but credit him with pursuing his aims forcefully. The author rejects even this qualified admiration. Hitler’s actions, in this account, were fundamentally reactive: they were arranged so that things would not really change. Political forcefulness is not by itself evidence of a genuine act.

As a sharply contrasting example of an act that attempted the impossible, the book identifies Stalin’s forced collectivization in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The comparison is not a defense of its horrors. It follows an argument attributed to Alain Badiou: Stalinist Communism remained related to the Truth-Event of the October Revolution, whereas Fascism was a pseudo-event, an imitation of revolution staged as authenticity. The distinction is expressed as a preference for disaster over a false event: a disastrous political order can remain related to the truth it betrays, while a staged event can imitate revolutionary substance without possessing it. Hitler thus figures not as the model of decisive transformation, but as the leader of a politics the book characterizes as reactive and falsely authentic.

A comic comparison makes the contrast between Hitler and Stalin more concrete. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Hitler enters a room, receives the Nazi officers’ salute, and answers by saluting himself. The book identifies this as pure humor, not something that could happen in reality. Stalin, by contrast, could and did join others in applauding himself. Prisoners in Gulags such as Norilsk and Vorkuta even sent Stalin birthday telegrams wishing him well and success for Socialism. These examples distinguish a fictional comic gesture from political practices described as real; they also lead the book to claim that Stalinism, unlike Nazism, retained a thread connecting it to civilization and universal Reason. That comparative claim does not erase the terror of either regime. It shows how the book uses Hitler as one pole in an argument about political authenticity, ordinary human complicity, and the peril of mistaking forceful performance for genuine change.