intellectual history, the triumph of tedium.rnRosenberg’s career, almost ine’itably, was more interestingrnthan his writings. Like Hitler, he was born outside Germany,rnhis father being a cobbler in Estonia, which in 1893, the year ofrnRosenberg’s birth, was part of the Tsarist empire. I le studiedrnengineering in Riga and architecture at the Uniersitv ofrnMoscow, where in 1917 he took a diploma and witnessed thernRussian Reolution. On returning to his nati’e Estonia, herntried to join the imperial German army, but he was refused onrngrounds that he was a Russian. He then moved to Vlunich,rnprobabK’ at the end of 1918, where he met Hitler, a soldier fourrncars older than himself who was preparing to build the NationalrnSocialist German Workers Part out of the ashes of Gcrnianrn’s defeat in World War I. The hour, Rosenberg felt, hadrnproduced the man, and in 1923 he became a German citizen,rnten vears before his leader.rnThough Rosenberg was a prolific author in his cady ears,rnI litler seems to have thought little of his assistant’s administratirne competence—so little that on being sentenced to prisonrnfor his part in the failed putsch of 1923, he made Rosenberg thernproisional leader of the party, confident of being able to resumernthe leadership without difficulty when he emerged.rnMeanwhile Rosenberg wrote on, and his writings from thernears 1917-23 alone, when collected in Munich at the height ofrnthe war in 1943, made two fat olumes. This was a pen thatrnncer stopped.rnHis pubhc appearances, howexer, were unsuccessful, and hernhad no reputation cither as a priate personality or as a publicrnorator. No striking remarks are attributed to hinr. In Ma’ 1933,rnhe ‘isited London to gather support for a regime that had takenrnpower in Germany onh a few months before. The isit wasrna fiasco. There were hostile demonstrations outside his hotel,rnand a swastika-decked wreath he laid in memor- of the warrndead at the Genotaph was contemptuously thrown into the ri-rner, so he cut short his isit after a few davs and returned to German.rnAfter the fall of France he helped to loot works of art forrnGerman collections, and after the in asion of the So iet Unionrnhe was put in charge of the new eastern territories of the Reich.rnHis political skills remained unremarkable. In Februar}’rn1939, as part of a crude peace offensive mounted b the Nazisrna few weeks before thev seized Prague, he delivered an addressrnto foreign diplomats in Berlin entitled “Must ideological differencesrnlead to w ar?” I le assured them that the German governmentrnhad no designs on its neighbors and respected therniews of other states. A pact with Stalin was alread’ one of thernsecret options being considered b Hitler, and the speech wasrnno doubt meant to lull Moscow as well as Paris and Londonrninto a false sense of securit. But it was an unimpressive performance,rnas published, at once crbose and implausible.rnMeanwhile, his books about Nordic purit’ and Wotan-worshiprncontinued to appear and, highh unreadable though the were,rnto sell. I’hev argued at length that the German people were descendedrnfrom a anished race of subarctic supermen worshippingrnNorse gods and fortified by a cold climate and an innaternsense of heroic xirtues, their primitie force unsullied by Slavs,rnLatins, Jews, Freemasons, and Roman Gatholics. Some of hisrnbooks, like one on the immora]it of the Talmud, add Hastinessrnto silliness, and it is doubtful if as man as a dozen people nowrnliing have ever read them. Three ears after he was hanged inrn1949, his Memoirs appeared in F,nglish, apparenth based on hisrntestimony at the Nuremberg trials, where he had representedrnNazism as a great idea tragically mishandled; and in 1970rnthere was an anthology of his works called Selected Writings.rnNeither book includes the political diary from which myrnanecdote about Soviet pogroms against the Jews was taken.rnLIsed as evidence against him at Nuremberg and published inrnthe original German in 1956, or as much of it as had survived,rnthe diary docs not appear to have been translated at all.rnThe obliion into which the name and works of AlfredrnRosenberg have fallen is not surprising. He contrived to bernboring as well as evil and histor’ rightly demands that its villainsrnbe interesting. On the other hand, he offers a striking instancernof a phenomenon of intellectual life peculiar to the 20thrncentur and to the ideas of totalitarianism that once threatenedrnto overwhelm it. I mean the pherromenon of the unread sage:rnthe ideologue who is revered or hated, or both, though his writingsrnremain unread and e’en untested. Marx, Lenin, Hitler,rnand Mao are classic instances. Who reads them now? Who everrnread them through? I’here is a story about Goering and otherrnNa/i leaders being asked if the’ had eer read Mein Kanipf.rnThe laughed in embarrassment and changed the subject. Itrnis a fair bet that the ‘ihoughts of Mao, in its best-selling days,rnoutnumbered its readers by a comfortable margin. There is nornevidence that Rosenberg’s books converted anyone of note tornNazism, just as hardh’ any Marxists in our own dav, one mayrnreasonably suspect, hae been con’erted b’ reading Marx.rnThe late Raniond illiams once confessed, in Politics andrnLetters (1979), that it was “a deficiency of mv own generationrnthat the amount of classical Marxism it actually knew wasrnvery small” (he, for example, had joined the Gonrmunist Partyrnin 1939 as a Gambridge freshman without ha’ing read Marxrnand Engels). Hitler once told Otto Wagcncr—the story is reportedrnin Wagener’s Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant (1985)—rnthat most intellectuals who appealed to historical traditionsrn”have never even read Marx,” as he had done, and did not evenrnunderstand that the October Revolution was not just an eventrnin Russian history but fulfilled the Marxian prophecy of the endrnof an epoch for all mankind, the end of the age of individualism.rnI litler was proud, in his prix-ate conversation, of his debt tornthe writings to Marx; but he was probabh right in thinkingrnhimself unusual in reading them through.rnWe still need an explanation, however, for the phenomenonrn—wholly characteristic of the present century—ofrnthe ignorant intellectual: the worshiper of grand ideas propoundedrnin works he has not read. It is the mark of the times.rnWe hae just emerged from an era in which allegedly excitingrnideas—exciting enough, apparently, to live and die for—havernbeen purveyed in prose so dingy and so drab that even thernfaithful do not read it. The worid, in the early to mid-20th century,rnwas suddenly excited by gra- men. I lannah Arendt, wonderingrnat Eichmann’s ordinariness as he stood in the dock inrnJerusalem admitting to mass murder, coined a famous phrasernabout the Banality of Eil. ‘I’heorists and ideologues, too, canrnbe deeply banal. Bad as Rosenberg’s books are, only a man ofrndeeply ordinary talents, at most, could have written them.rnBut their neglect, and the neglect of other authors of the totalitarianrnschool, have re ied a great m th.rnThe myth is that even in the ideological age that followedrnthe French Re’olution, ideas do not nratter in human affairs, orrnmatter much: that the Nazis, for example, or the Bolsheviks beforernthem, were less a band of ideologues than a bunch ofrnthugs; that it is chance happenings and not ideas that makerngreat events. For three centuries this has been known as thernFEBRUARY 1995/15rnrnrn