LIONEL ABEL
365
Portage,
Alvin Rosenfeld, has made two points against the book
which Boyers has certainly not answered satisfactorily. These argu–
ments are: (1) that Steiner has lent Hitler theological-political no–
tions about the Jews of a kind that Hitler was incapable of formulat–
ing, which there is no evidence that he ever held, and which Steiner,
in fact, expressed as his own before writing
The Portage,
and (2) in the
expression of these views Hitler has been granted, dramatically
speaking, "the last word."
Boyers in his book presents a single argument to answer
Rosenfeld's objections. His claim is that Steiner showed Hitler as a
transvaluer of values; is not this in fact what Hitler was? Boyers puts
the matter thus:
The Portage
had to end with Hitler's speech because it is the object
of the novel to show what the power of transvaluation is all
about. The last speech demonstrates that a Hitler can ap–
propriate a Steiner for his purposes .
Now this will hardly do. For the very opposite claim has been made
by Rosenfeld, namely that Steiner has appropriated Hitler to his,
Steiner's, purpose, that being in Boyer's very revealing words, to
show". . . what the power of transvaluation is all about." What is
more, the Hitler of Steiner's narrative is not at all the Hitler of
history, but a Hitler altered to fit Steiner's plot. The Hitler of history
refused to live outside of it, preferring to die in his Berlin bunker,
rather than seek safety in obscurity like Eichmann and Mengele .
If
Steiner has been unfair to Hitler in his narrative, he is at
least equally unfair to Hitler's victims, the Jews, in ending
The Por–
tage
with Hitler's speech . This raises a further question: does Steiner
perhaps think that Hitler had "the last word" in his argument with
the Jews, not just metaphorically, but in the fullness of historical
fact?
In the speech Steiner has written for him, Hitler describes his
political ideology as an
effect
ofJewish ideas, and his political actions
(which determined the scope of the Holocaust) as the
cause
of the
state of Israel. Now if these notions can be taken as true, if Nazism
can in any serious sense be judged to be a product ofJewish ideas, if
Hitler in any important respect can be said to have brought forth the
state of Israel, then I should say that Hitler has indeed had "the last
word" in his argument with the Jews and, in addition to having put
