Fatal attraction

When Prince Harry stirred up a fuss by wearing Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party he found a gallant defender in Paul Johnson who wrote that ‘in treating Nazi insignia as a party joke’ the young prince ‘reflects the instincts of his generation’. ‘The Nazis,’ he added, ‘do have an undoubted fascination for many young people’, because of their style, not their ideology. ‘Hitler still exerts some of the dread appeal he exercised in his lifetime … A lot of his appeal, I suspect, is visual. Hitler was a kind of artist’ who ‘put his  artistic and inventive instincts to work’.

This is surely undeniable, and Johnson is by no means the first to remark it. Thomas Mann was there before him. In 1938, by then exiled from Germany, he wrote an essay  entitled ‘Brother Hitler’. ‘The fellow is a catastrophe; that is no reason to find him uninteresting as character and destiny,’ he loftily declared.