Reverse Engineering Hitler

So let’s say, just hypothetically, that you—the reader, the consumer of this text, the subject-position nominally occupied by “you” (though already, caveats^1)—have been tasked with reverse engineering Adolph Hitler. Not in the sense of a literal, bioengineered recreation (God help us), but rather in the sense of, let’s say, a systems-level forensic analysis of the causal and informational strata that, in a complex feedback loop of 19th-century Romantic nationalism, post-Weimar economic humiliation, and oddly resentful watercolor aspirations, produced That Guy. The One Who Requires No Introduction. The guy who, if mentioned in any online forum, immediately invalidates all other arguments and sends threads spiraling into a kind of Godwinian Event Horizon.

^1 Is there really a stable “you” here? Or, for that matter, a stable “me” doing this supposed analysis? Are we not already implicated in the kind of historico-political machinery that makes the very act of dissecting someone like Hitler possible, even necessary? And at what point does “reverse engineering” shade into the much more suspicious practice of implicit rehabilitation?

The question at hand is less about Hitler-the-person and more about Hitler-as-formula. As a computational entity, reducible to input/output sequences. Because, let’s face it, in the modern era, the idea that history is driven by individuals rather than systems is embarrassingly pre-Piketty. People who still subscribe to the Great Man Theory of history tend to be the kind of people who also think the stock market is a function of individual greed rather than the inevitable late-stage manifestations of capital in crisis. The task before us, then, is to determine: What were the necessary preconditions? The specific variables? If we were to run the simulation again, what tweaks to the dataset would make Hitler statistically improbable? Or, more unsettlingly, inevitable?

Let’s talk inputs. One: The Treaty of Versailles, a document of such economic punitiveness that it more or less guaranteed German hyperinflation and a population primed for radicalization. Two: A German aesthetic culture in which deeply Wagnerian myths of fallen grandeur met a late-stage technological modernity that left old modes of heroism—Kaisers, knights, Prussian military precision—feeling not just outdated but actively castrated. Three: The structural peculiarities of post-WWI German party politics, in which a fragmented system allowed the NSDAP to gain a foothold despite representing a relative minority, leading to the kind of legally sanctioned chicanery that turns minor strongmen into full-blown fascists.^2

^2 This is where we could, if we wanted, start talking about contemporary parallels, but that would be cheap, wouldn’t it? It would be the kind of on-the-nose “lesson from history” that self-satisfied podcasters peddle, as though recognizing a pattern were the same thing as breaking it.

Now, the outputs. Or rather, the emergent properties of the Hitler System, when run at full capacity. A cult of personality that functioned via mass-media amplification, a carefully cultivated image oscillating between man-of-the-people and quasi-messianic figure. The aestheticization of politics to the point where form mattered vastly more than content—a principle that, if we’re being honest, doesn’t exactly feel obsolete today. And of course, the violence, which must be understood not as aberration but as function, the logical extension of a system built to identify, isolate, and obliterate whatever it defined as its Other.

The real question—and the one that probably makes this whole exercise either necessary or deeply suspect—is: Can you reverse engineer Hitler without, in some sense, validating the engineering? Because, much as we’d like to think of him as a unique case, a one-time historical fluke, the fact remains that Hitler was less the culmination of some singularly twisted psychology and more the emergent property of a system that can, has, and will continue to reproduce itself under the right conditions. Which is to say: The moment you believe that you’ve understood the recipe well enough to never let it be cooked again, you’ve already failed to notice the oven preheating.

Which, I guess, means we should have spent less time on the past and more time asking: Who’s running the kitchen right now?

GPT