[转帖] Know a man by his books见书知人
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【2008.10.2】Know a man by his books见书知人
Adolf Hitler
阿道夫希特勒
Know a man by his books
见书知人
Oct 2nd 2008
From The Economist print edition
HE WAS better known for burning books than reading them. But surviving portions of Hitler’s private library reveal the German dictator as an ardent bibliophile, owning classics, history, travel writing, biography, studies of the occult and much else.
他烧书名声比读书的名声大，但是从保存下来的希特勒部分藏书来看，这位德国独裁者竟也是个藏书家。他的藏书从古典文学、历史著作到游记、传记、神秘学等等，五花八门，种类繁多。
Timothy Ryback’s main find is the portion of Hitler’s huge book collection that ended up in an obscure section of the Library of Congress. Other books emerged from American officers who took them as souvenirs. The Soviet army had the best pickings: the library in Berlin’s Reichskanzlei, 10,000 volumes, was shipped off to Moscow in 1945 and has not been seen in public since (tantalisingly, it surfaced in the 1990s in an abandoned church but disappeared again).
Tim Ryback在德国国会图书馆某个阴暗地方发现了一部分希特勒的海量藏书。另外一些书则从二战时期的美国军官那儿得来，当时他们将这些书当作纪念品带回美国国内。前苏联军队得了最好的一份，1945年他们将总理图书馆中一万卷藏书运回莫斯科，之后这批书便销声匿迹，不知去向（惹人猜疑的是，它们曾于上世纪90年代现身于某个废弃的教堂里，之后又再次不知所踪）。
But there is enough to go on. The author neatly weaves together Hitler’s political career with his book-collecting habits, tracing the well-thumbed volumes that Hitler consulted during the writing of “Mein Kampf”. Mr Ryback’s knowledge of German literature and the politics of the Nazi era makes him well placed to follow clues and draw inferences, both from the time and place of acquisition and from the marginalia that can be found in the books. Hitler was not only an avid reader but also an inveterate underliner. Perhaps the most chilling example of that is in Paul de Lagarde’s “German Essays”. Underlined is: “Each and every irksome Jew is a serious affront to the authenticity and veracity of our German identity.”
但是对于Ryback先生而言，他手中掌握的书已经足够。他在书中细致入微地将希特勒的藏书习惯融进他的政治生涯，两相比照；他还搜寻了希特勒写作《我的奋斗》时期经常翻阅的书籍。由于Ryback先生谙熟纳粹德国的文学以及政治，故而从希特勒购买书籍的时间、地点以及书中旁注寻找线索、下起推断来，他都游刃有余。作者告诉我们希特勒不仅读书热心，而且还有在书上划线的习惯，其中就有一处看得令人胆寒，那是在Paul de Lagarde所著的《德国随笔》中的一句，“可恨的犹太佬严重侮辱了我日耳曼忠厚老实的民族性格。”
As the author points out, Hitler had a magpie mind. He speed-read books looking for material that he counted as useful—meaning anything that fitted into his mosaic of misplaced historical analogy and pseudoscience. What didn’t fit was discarded. This, as Mr Ryback writes, was the essence of Hitler: “Not a profound, unfathomable distillation of the philosophies of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, but instead a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which gave rise to a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.”
如作者所指出，希特勒的头脑十分混杂。他草草翻阅各种书籍就是为了找到对他有用，可以为其歪曲的历史类推以及伪科学所用的材料，其它一概弃之不顾。Ryback先生认为希特勒根本“没有对叔本华或者尼采的哲学有多么深广的研究，而只不过是从一些廉价的宣传小册子和一些隐秘书籍里东抄西拣，混成他的大杂烩理论。他的那种浅薄空洞、工于心计、恃强凌弱的虚伪都从这些理论而来。”
Mr Ryback has done a good job maintaining a balance between dispassionate inquiry and moral revulsion. Yet the result is still slightly creepy. Flicking through a copy of what is probably the earliest acquisition in the collection, an architectural history of Berlin that Hitler bought in November 1915, he discovers between pages 160 and 161, “a wiry inch-long black hair that appears to be from a moustache”. It is suddenly all a bit too close for comfort.
Ryback在书中将客观研究与道德谴责之间的关系拿捏地很是恰当，可是结果又不免令人毛骨悚然：就在作者翻阅希特勒购于1915年11月的一本柏林建筑史（该书可能是藏书中最早的一本）时，书中160与161面中间有“一根一英寸长的硬毛，看起来应该是胡须”，令人突然一下感到相当得不自在。
Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped his Life
By Timothy W. Ryback
Knopf; 304 pages; $25. To be published in Britain by The Bodley Head in February
Buy it at
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发表于 2008-10-6 22:48
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