Fresh Ideas: The study of Hitler's 'secret face'

Putting it simply and perhaps crudely, historically Latvia as a nation has always looked to the "West," meaning Europe, which represented culture and learning. The "East" meant Russia, which represented everything savage and backwards, notwithstanding Russia's glorious contributions to music and literature.

Germany was part of the West, but when my parents and I immigrated to the United States in late 1949, no one in America, it seemed, thought of Germany as in any way representing culture or learning.

I, accustomed to eavesdropping on adult conversations, was convinced that Joseph Stalin was as inhumane as Adolf Hitler. Both men murdered and tortured. The world knew how many Hitler had killed, for Germans had a penchant for record-keeping, whereas Russians apparently couldn't be bothered to keep track, or were too wily to leave a paper trail.

Stalin hid behind a folksy, curmudgeon image. Hitler, on the other hand, seemed an outright freak of nature. Stiff and graceless, obsessed with the occult, he seemed neither cultured (despite his 16,000-volume library), nor a military genius.

But the world wanted to know how he came to be what he was. I thought I had found the answer to the question when I was in junior high and read an article about the relationship between physiognomy and character. Someone had taken a mirror and placed it perpendicular to a photo of Hitler's face, setting the mirror along a line down the center of his face, so that Hitler's "left" side was actually doubled (or his right side) and this doubled face was pronounced Hitler's "secret" face, a face distorted and terrifying.

If Hitler had a "secret" face, then surely everybody else did, too. Without a second's pause, I grabbed a mirror, held it down the center of my face, and looked in another mirror to see what my "doubled" face looked like. I checked out my "right" profile and my "left." One was definitely more skewed and uglier looking than the other. Yee gads. Was I a Hitler in the making?

No, my mother said. No one has a perfectly symmetrical body or face. Asymmetry is not a sign of evil.

Yet the evil we attribute to Hitler seems to nullify any and all theories of pathology put forth by historians, psychologists and sociologists. It is our own irrational impulses that keep us fixated on the demonic, as if the answer were in some dark magic instead of the darkness we surely fear lies in our own hearts.

Timothy W. Ryback's new book, "Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life," is yet another key meant to unlock the "secret" face of Hitler.

- Ursula Carlson, Ph.D., teaches writing and literature at Western Nevada College.