Abstract
Books on popular and well-researched subjects which claim to have discovered the simple answer that thousands of others have missed should generally be treated with scepticism. Ben Novak’s study of Hitler and abductive logic is no exception. Novak claims that most biographers and historians have confined themselves to asking what Hitler actually did without asking the really important questions: who was he and how did he do it? Historians have employed every conceivable theory to explain Hitler but, according to Novak, they have generally focused on people’s response to Hitler rather than on Hitler’s himself to ‘identify precisely what he did to elicit that response’ (p. 17).
Novak’s study sets out to identify ‘what personality or character trait: talent, skill or ability (natural or acquired); genius or method’ (p. 18) would help us explain what distinguished Hitler from other politicians, why he was underestimated, why he was successful, and how his life before 1919 connected with his career in politics thereafter. Inspired by a comment made by Konrad Heiden that Hitler’s ‘strength is utterly in his logic’ (p. 18), Novak suggests that Hitler’s success derives from the fact that he was a master of abductive logic. This is the key to Hitler’s personality that all previous scholars and writers have missed. The fact that this type of logic was not discovered until the early twentieth century and not generally known until the 1970s is not a problem. According to Novak, it existed long before, though it was not noticed, and stood alongside deductive and inductive logic. Rather than proceed from a general rule to a specific conclusion (deduction) or from specific observations to a general rule (induction), abduction proceeds from limited data to formulate what most of us would term an educated guess.
While this third logic was only formally identified in 1901 by Charles Sanders Pierce, Novak suggests that it was widely disseminated through literature in the later nineteenth century since it was central to the new genre of detective writing. And, crucially, it played a major role in Karl May’s immensely popular novels of the Wild West, starting with Winnetou (1893). Hitler’s enthusiasm for these novels is well known. According to Novak, his discovery of the secrets of the success of Old Shatterhand and his Apache mentor Winnetou in 1900, at about the time he entered the Realschule, enabled him to resolve his adolescent problems; Karl May’s visit to Linz in 1902 allegedly inspired the young Hitler to become an artist, firing an ambition that became fixed on the world historical stage and on politics after hearing Wagner’s Rienzi with August Kubizek in January 1905. What he learned above all from this apprenticeship was the art of abductive logic. Perhaps the best example was the one that launched Hitler’s post-1919 career: the claim that ‘behind the succession of defeats, humiliations, burdens and privations, behind the series of inexplicable traumas … was a conspiracy of Communists, Socialists, Liberal, pacifists and Jews’ (p. 37).
Novak concludes by giving four examples of Hitler’s masterly use of abductive logic after 1919, each of them examples of counter-intuitive thinking: the decision to charge attendance fees at the meetings and rallies of the early 1920s; the formulation of an aggressive and eclectic party programme; the creation of a party machine dependent on Hitler as leader; Hitler’s refusal to allow himself to be photographed, thus creating a mystique, generating curiosity about him, and enhancing the value of his image as he became more famous. In the last resort, what abductive logic amounts to is no more or less than ‘the means by which some people are enabled to successfully navigate through non-normal situations and turn them to advantage’ (p. 232).
Novak pursues his argument with relentless energy but he himself concedes that he simply cannot prove a link between the tradition of abductive logic and the life and career of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, ultimately, he is forced to rely on the same logic in formulating a view that, for him, makes sense of everything. While there is no doubt that Novak’s book contains some interesting pages, we should not yet abandon the works by Ian Kershaw and others that Novak finds so wanting.