Hitler’s Brain–The Mind Of A Megalomaniac:
In the spring of 1943, Walter C. Langer, a psychoanalyst at Harvard, received a query from William J. Donovan, the head of the U.S. government’s Office of Strategic Services, the covert-operations predecessor to the CIA. Donovan was interested in commissioning Langer to prepare a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler.
“What we need is a realistic appraisal of the German situation,” Donovan told Langer. “If Hitler is running the show, what kind of a person is he? What are his ambitions? How does he appear to the German people? What is he like with his associates?” The OSS chief wanted to understand Hitler’s “psychological make-up—the things that make him tick.” Donovan was especially keen to know how Hitler might respond to increasing adversity.
Hitler was used to winning. From 1933 to 1943, the Nazi leader had marched from one stunning political and military triumph to the next, securing the chancellorship, crushing the German constitutional order, annexing Austria, dismembering Czechoslovakia, and then invading Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, countries across North Africa, and Russia. Until 1943, Hitler had seemed to be an inexorable political and military force, smashing constitutional guardrails, shredding international treaties, breaking trade alliances, upending the international order, and ultimately plunging the entire world into war.
But then came military reversals that stopped Hitler in his tracks: El Alamein, in November 1942, then Stalingrad, in January 1943. Donovan wanted to know how Hitler would react—militarily, politically, personally—if the tides of war began to change. “Do you suppose you could come up with something along these lines?” Donovan asked Langer.
This was the first time the U.S. government would commission a psychological profile of a foreign leader to determine his possible future courses of action. Donovan was not interested in an academic study. Rather, he wanted a “realistic appraisal” that might provide actionable intelligence about what the führer might do next.
“The world has come to know Adolph Hitler for his insatiable greed for power, his ruthlessness, cruelty and utter lack of feeling, his contempt for established institutions and his lack of moral restraints,” Langer wrote in framing the scope of his work. “In the course of relatively few years he has contrived to usurp such tremendous power that a few veiled threats, accusations or insinuations were enough to make the world tremble.” It was only when the world wearied of Hitler’s threats and bluster, “and concluded that it was all a bluff,” Langer wrote, that the Nazi leader had “initiated the most brutal and devastating war in history.”
Cutting to the chase:
Not until the final three pages of his long report did Langer provide the “realistic appraisal” of Hitler’s potential courses of action that Donovan had been seeking. Based on his interviews and his review of 11,000 pages of source materials, Langer discerned scenarios for Hitler’s possible reactions were he to face ultimate defeat. Langer thought it unlikely that Hitler would try to escape to another country, as dictators were known to do—because “nothing would break the myth” of Hitler as a great leader more assuredly than running away.
Langer presciently posited suicide as the most likely scenario. He knew that Hitler had always been a man whose “infantile thinking” drove him to extremes and blinded him to compromise. Hitler sacrificed an entire army at Stalingrad, and his entire Afrika Korps in Tunisia. Langer cited Hitler’s fatalistic fanaticism verbatim: “We shall not capitulate … no, never. We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us … a world in flames.”
If anything, Langer suggested, the worse things got for Hitler, the more intransigent he would become. “He will fight as long as he can with any weapon or technique that can be conjured up to meet the emergency,” Langer concluded. “The course he will follow will almost certainly be the one that seems to him to be the surest road to immortality and that at the same time wreaks the greatest vengeance on a world he despises.” It is fortunate that Hitler never had access to a nuclear button.
‘East Coast Butter’ Vs. ‘West Coast Butter’:
We’ve all had realizations that make us feel like we’ve been living a lie ― like the discovery that it’s “Berenstain Bears” and not “Berenstein Bears.”
A tweet about butter spawned another one of those “whoa” moments.
In January 2022, Panic Inc. co-founder Cabel Sasser tweeted an ad for “a smarter butter dish” that promises to hold both “West & East Coast butter” and shows two differently shaped sticks to represent each. His accompanying text sums up the reaction many of us had: “i’m sorry, what.”
Indeed, butter on the East Coast tends to be sold in long and narrow sticks, while on the West Coast, the sticks are shorter and wider (and sometimes called “stubbies”).
The gist (or shall we say the long and skinny) is that early 20th century butter was sold in 1-pound blocks, in most cases. In 1907, a New Orleans-based chef asked his butter supplier, Swift & C., to give him the product in quarter-pound sticks instead.
The concept clearly caught on. Over time, these skinny East Coast sticks of butter came to be known as Elgin sticks after Elgin Butter Co. in Elgin, Illinois, which was once known as the butter capital of the world. The Elgin Butter Co. manufactured the widely used butter press (the Elgin Butter Cutter) that standardized the shape and size.
Although the eastern side of the U.S. dominated the dairy industry for a long time, its western counterpart decided to ramp up production in the 1960s. But it didn’t use those Elgin-style machines.
So, as John Bruhn ― former director of the Dairy Research and Information Center at the University of California, Davis ― told “Marketplace,” “the size of the cube you see in the West is a result of newer equipment purchased at the time to package the butter.” Basically, their new machines made the stubbier sticks known as “West Coast butter.”
To this day, the difference persists, leading to some culture shock among transplants.
You didn’t wake up today expecting to learn about ‘butter culture shock’. That’s why I’m here for you.
Patricia Highsmith Was A Miserable Human Being. It’s what made her work so compelling:
Highsmith, who was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, had a hit with her 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train, boosted by Alfred Hitchcock’s film. A perfect second novel, lesbian road trip The Price of Salt (later republished as Carol), sold a million copies under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) was a critical success. But around the mid-1960s, Highsmith’s American luck ran out: her agent wrote that her books were “too subtle”, her characters too unlikable, to make it into paperback. By 1984 she was without an American publisher.
“She never found a home because she was so unpleasant,” Penzler says. “I don’t think anybody said, ‘Oh look, we’re losing money but I love her so much, let’s keep her.’” Not yet knowing this, he signed a six-book deal with Highsmith, creating a new imprint in the process. “Pat didn’t want to be identified as a mystery writer, so I started Penzler Books.” He knew Highsmith’s first editor, Joan Kahn. “When I told her I’d bought Pat, she said: ‘God, what’s wrong with you?’ Later we agreed she was a monster.”
The image of the misanthrope has helped keep Highsmith’s legacy alive, with Ripley recently remade by Netflix, but has the knife-collecting sadist become a caricature? Did she deserve greater recognition in America? She hated publicity, which made life tricky for her champions. Penzler remembers that on one book tour, “my wife and I took her to our most beloved Italian restaurant. A young publicist, whose job it was to take Pat to all the interviews, came with two long-stemmed roses. My wife said, ‘Oh, what a sweet thing!’ Pat threw hers on the floor without making eye contact. You can’t imagine a person like this.”
By 1967, Highsmith had begun a lifelong relationship with the Swiss publisher Diogenes, who took control of her literary estate when she died – as well as 56 volumes of unpublished diaries, letters and stories, neatly filed at the back of her linen cupboard. Those diaries laid bare Highsmith’s antisemitism and racism. In her introduction to a published edition of them, in 2021, Von Planta writes that Highsmith’s views have been represented faithfully, even where offensive, but that “in a handful of more extreme instances [we did] feel it our editorial duty to deny Pat a stage for them, in the same way we did while she was still alive”. Did Penzler ever feel she crossed a line? “She hated so much, including women. If there was antisemitism in her stories, I probably missed it because it was mild compared to the other things.”
Even those who were repelled by Highsmith’s prejudices shared an appreciation of her work – its strangeness, precision, gift for character and its unfashionable darkness. The horror of the Tom Ripley novels lies not so much in their violence (though there is plenty of that), as in his increasing enjoyment of it. Does he mean to murder an art collector with a bottle of Margaux in Ripley Under Ground? “Tom simply could not answer that. And did it matter, much?”, she writes. That bleakness sold better in Europe: even a weak late novel, Found in the Street, sold 40,000 copies in Germany compared with 4,000 in America.
I think it is safe to say that, had Highsmith not been such an awful person, we never would have had Tom Ripley. Was the trade-off worth it? I’m going with yes. But I could be wrong. After all, without Ripley, we don’t have this song:
I’ve read a good bit of Highsmith, and the Ripley novels are – there’s no other word for it – disgusting. She was a vile, miserable drunk, and her work demonstrates it amply.