What if the Nazis had greeted each other with high fives instead of that stiff-armed, sharp-handed salute? What if Germans had been allowed to say hello to one another by name instead of invoking their Führer?

Tilman Allert’s The Hitler Salute, a joyously sharp account of a massively evil slice of human history, doesn’t treat the Nazis’ obligatory two-word, one-arm greeting as a product of evil, but as its enabler. He argues, movingly, that the salute wounded Germans’ sociability, connectedness and personal sovereignty, warping the holy human order.

A nation that’s forced to adopt inhuman gestures, in other words, is fated to oblige inhuman horrors: First hellos disappear, then morality.

MR. ALLERT IS a professor of sociology and social psychology, not a historian, and it shows. He gives almost nothing in the way of a pre- or post-Nazi account of the Hitler salute—which is odd for a book that happens to be titled The Hitler Salute. (It would also have been nice to learn how nearly the same gesture, the Bellamy flag salute, earlier came to accompany the pledge of allegiance in American schools.)

But if you’re willing to piece together the historical details that get sprinkled around, a terrifying chronology emerges. It starts on July 13, 1933, when the Hitler salute officially became “a general civic duty” (that’s half a year after its namesake became chancellor, and one day before he banned all other German political parties). An Interior Ministry memo instructs that the right arm, or left “in the case of physical infirmity,” must be raised voluntarily and joyfully, palm down and open at eye-level, and the accompanying hail must be articulated clearly. Even written correspondence had to end with the salute.

On July 24, 1933, students and teachers were ordered to salute one another at the beginning and end of the school day, between classes, or whenever an adult entered the classroom. Plus: “Individual pupils who encounter fellow pupils inside the school building or on school grounds are also required to use the Hitler greeting.”

In a local police memo sent on July 23, 1934, the government complains about “traveling vaudeville performers training their monkeys to give the German greeting on command.” The police are ordered to “see to it that said animals are destroyed.” By the end of that year, special courts were established to punish the Germans who refused to salute. Offenders, such as the Protestant preacher Paul Schneider, could be sent to concentration camps.

By 1935, the “greeting” entry in a German pictorial dictionary has the Hitler salute as the first illustrated example (a handshake is ninth); toy figures were fashioned with pivoting right arms; Sleeping Beauty was reworked so that the prince gives Hitler’s salute to his damsel when she wakes up.

And by 1937, Jews were forbidden to use the Hitler salute; street signs reminded True Germans how to greet one another; department store clerks said, “Heil Hitler, how may I help you?”

ALL THIS TOOK its toll. Mr. Allert reverently imagines social greetings as dramatic dances over wide personal gulfs, expressions of individual character that also make for communal bonds in a shared moment. So a disruption of traditional German gestures presented a massive threat to interconnectedness—especially because of the strange and estranging stiffened arm, which pushed people away just when they should’ve been brought together.

The slogan “Heil Hitler,” which essentially translates to “health to Hitler,” or “may Hitler keep you well,” was just as odd. The Führer wasn’t there to enjoy his subjects’ good wishes, or to bestow wellness on them—so each salute hoisted him further above reality. The Hitler salute wasn’t an actual human greeting; it was a one-on-one party rally.

Consider, also, that Hitler was invoked in place of the greeted person’s name—or in place of goodness (“Guten Tag”) or God (“Grüß Gott”). A link with one’s neighbor, or a shared link with the divinity, was replaced by a tense-armed, tense-tongued oath to Nazism. “There are no free spaces in which the individual belongs only to himself,” the chairwoman of the National Socialist Women’s League boasted. “The age of personal happiness is over. From now on we will know only communal happiness.”

Even in translation, the prose of The Hitler Salute can be just as stirring as that fantastic fascistic slogan. This 100-page English edition, which comes three years after the book was first published in Germany, is handled acrobatically by Jefferson Chase, who has previously translated Nazi nonfiction and also Thomas Mann. Within the span of two sentences, we’re liable to hear about “ghostly spectacle,” “magical fascination” and the “triumph of social radicalism over the fragile space of human dignity.”

And the moral of the story? Tilman Allert urges us, in parting, to be “wary of obligatory rituals, especially when they are imposed from above.”

Max Abelson is a reporter at The Observer. He can be reached at mabelson@observer.com.

Perhaps the lack of coverage of the attack on the Nobel Prize–winning Holocaust survivor is understandable: It’s one of the most deeply depressing, dispiriting, demoralizing and sickening stories that one can imagine. On every level.

I didn’t read anything about it until a week or so after it happened, when a friend e-mailed me the San Francisco Examiner online account of it. A later report claimed that the police delayed releasing details while they searched for the suspect. The only clue to the cretin’s identity in media reports at the time is from a pseudonymous Holocaust-denier posting on the Web site Ziopedia, which calls itself “anti-Zionist” but turns out to be a cyber-nexus for Holocaust denial.

In case you missed it, Mr. Wiesel, 78, who won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for his memoirs and novels of the Holocaust, suddenly found himself in a microcosmic American nightmare. Returning to his room after a talk at a San Francisco hotel, he was dragged out of the elevator by a demented denier who attacked Mr. Wiesel and started yelling at him that he had to “tell the truth”—the truth, for this sick moron, being that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

According to the poster on Ziopedia (who used the same name as a New Jersey man arrested on Feb. 17 for the crime), the thug planned to forcibly convey Mr. Wiesel—whom he called “the Pope of the Holocaust religion”—into his hotel room (he claimed to have been stalking him for weeks), where he planned to torture him into “confessing” that the Holocaust and Mr. Wiesel’s account of his experiences in it were lies.

Fortunately, the cops intervened before Mr. Wiesel—who survived Hitler—could be tormented by one of Hitler’s modern Mini-Me’s.

My initial reaction was to place the blame on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president’s dimwit Holocaust-deniers’ “conference”—last month’s convocation of vicious Jew-hating clowns—served, for certain infantile goons, to validate and empower their drooling nuttery.

While it’s true that if Mr. Ahmadinejad hadn’t “enabled” this pinhead punk, Internet filth might have well done it, nonetheless, I think there’s something deeper than the Iranian connection behind this repellent incident.

For one thing, there’s the way that Holocaust denial has become a familiar weapon in the arsenal of a certain element of the “anti-Zionist” spectrum. They use Holocaust denial like Mr. Ahmadinejad does—as part of a strategy to delegitimize the state of Israel preliminary to wiping it “off the map.” The Holocaust deniers have in common with other anti-Zionists the belief that the Jewish state’s only legitimacy comes from the guilt of the West for mass murder. The Holocaust deniers say the same thing, ignoring the fact that Jews lived there for thousands of years and that the Balfour Declaration antedated the Holocaust by two decades—only they just say that the Holocaust didn’t happen; it was a fabrication used to guilt-trip the West.

But, as I said, I’ve come to think there’s something deeper here: I’ve come to think the assault on a Holocaust survivor is an extreme symptom of something very dark, something that extends beyond the sick paranoia of Holocaust-deniers: a subterranean, subtextual anger at Holocaust survivors. A resentment of their presence—because they’re still alive to remind us of our shame, the shame of Western civilization. A civilization that, in perverse form, gave birth to the Holocaust, and at the very least stood aside and allowed it to happen.

Resentment at Holocaust survivors? After all they’ve suffered? Yes, alas: They are uncomfortable reminders in their witness to the depth that human nature can fall to in what was regarded as one of the most highly civilized and cultured nation states in history. They tell us something that we don’t want to know about who we are as a species, and it’s not something that we want to be reminded of.

What’s more, Holocaust survivors are witness to the criminal indifference of the world. And they are Jewish. If only they’d go away.

They’re dying, but they’re still here. Their sight provokes some to physical violence, enrages those who want to believe in the goodness of man and a loving God. If only they’d go away.

Romney: Ignorant or Brain-Dead?

Let me append one further incident that I find in some way related to the attack on a Holocaust survivor by a Holocaust denier, because it involved another kind of denial of the truth—knowing indifference, which is perhaps even worse.

This was the lack of attention that was paid to the fact that Mitt Romney announced his Presidential candidacy at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan. As far as I know, only the National Council of Jewish Democrats protested the fact that Mr. Romney chose to honor in this way Hitler’s personal idol, the man from whom he absorbed the form and essence of his racist anti-Semitic ideology.

Yes, Ford made many serviceable cars, and his family later tried to make reparations for his worldwide hate campaign. But, as I point out in my book Explaining Hitler, no single person had more influence on the success of Hitler and the Nazi Party than Henry Ford with the influence of his vile publication The International Jew (a modernization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), his subsidies, and his international validation of murderous anti-Semitism as a modernist creed.

No wonder there was a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in Hitler’s Munich Nazi party headquarters during his rise to power. It’s unlikely that you’ll find a life-sized portrait—or any hint—of Adolf Hitler in the Henry Ford Museum. But he’s there. Ford’s had less influence on history with his mass-production of cars than he did with his mass production of hate. It’s, as has been said in another context, an inconvenient truth.

It’s funny—while I haven’t read all the reports of the Romney event, I didn’t see any that recalled Henry Ford’s Hitler connection. Some may have, but for most it was too inconvenient, I guess. There were a few reports of the National Council of Jewish Democrats’ protest, but that was all; there wasn’t a single word of protest from any of the other candidates of either party, as far as I can tell.

Could Mr. Romney be so ignorant that he didn’t know Henry Ford’s history? I wouldn’t rule it out. But it’s worse if he did know it and chose the Ford Museum anyway. Some might argue it’s different in degree, but not in kind, from Ronald Reagan choosing the home base of the racist murderers of civil-rights workers in Mississippi as the venue for the first major speech of his Presidential campaign, or laying a wreath at Bitburg, where SS soldiers are buried.

His father, George Romney, was famous for saying he’d been “brainwashed.” The son sounds brain-dead. His Henry Ford appearance was as much of an assault on history, on truth, as the Holocaust denier’s attack on the inconvenient Holocaust survivor.

Norman Mailer’s first novel in over 10 years has a couple of big surprises right off the bat. One is physical, the other spiritual. As to the first, the welterweight from Brooklyn turns 84 at the end of the month; you lift the cover wondering how many rounds he can still go with a pencil. Forget about it. This work has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit. There are a few signs of strain, but they hardly count against the power of the language and the ideas. Here’s Norman Mailer in Act V, and he has all the wit and magic of old Prospero.

That touches on the second surprise: The novel’s concerns are metaphysical. Going in, you know the book is a biography of Hitler. I imagined I was in for a Leni Riefenstahl–ian barnburner that would take me through the Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht, the bunker. Waiting for the book to come, I peeked at a bio of Eva Braun. I was all wrong: There’s little history here at all, and more about czarist Russia in the late 1800’s than about Hitler as a fascist leader.

Any thought you have that the book will take up Jews and the Jewish question—again, no.

Mr. Mailer finishes with Hitler in 1905, at age 16 or so, in Linz, Austria, at about the time when he’s figured out how to masturbate. The author has thus eschewed Vienna and Berlin’s journalists and courtiers, types he knows well, for gothic settings. His pages are filled with incest, beekeeping, horses, squalling infants and feces, lots of it! The dogs aren’t Tolstoyan hounds, they’re snarling curs. Darkness hovers over every page. Sixty miles away, Theodor Herzl has just called for all Jews to leave Europe and form a state in Argentina or Palestine—Mr. Mailer doesn’t care. He’s using his simple materials to get at fundamental issues: the struggle between good and evil in our lives.

“The world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality …. He is, after all, the most mysterious human being of the century. Nonetheless, I would say that I can comprehend his psyche.”

The first-person narrator is a “high devil” who’s looking back on the days when he was molding Hitler so as to bring off the Holocaust. Lately demoted by Satan, he’s now betraying “the Maestro” by telling how devilish agency works (somewhat in the way that Hubbard betrayed the C.I.A. in Harlot’s Ghost). Mr. Mailer’s demonology aims to restore the devil to his proper place in a secular age. “The modern tendency is to believe that such speculation is a medieval nonsense happily extirpated centuries ago by the Enlightenment …. One Mystery [God] might be allowed, but two, never!”

Mr. Mailer’s metaphysics give the book its soul. God and the Maestro have been at war over us for a long time. God seeks to bring people to strength, generosity, loyalty, fairness. The Maestro’s goal is “reducing human possibilities” and wrecking civilization. Their methods are changing all the time. God was first to use dreams as “visions” to inspire us. But the devil has gotten into dreamwork, too: “jagged, broken-backed narratives” that reinforce our vices.

Neither God nor Satan can possess us fully, and both are strapped for time; they can’t attend all of us around the clock. That gives us a lot of leeway. (Mr. Mailer’s book tour ought to include some pulpits.) “[W]e do not appropriate people by way of a lightning flash …. Rather, it is an ongoing tug-of-war.” Meantime, we have learned to disguise the markings God gives to the depraved—an odor of sulfur and feces—with indoor plumbing and soaps.

Best-selling books tend to help the devil. Their authors call on the devil, and use magic and sentimentality “to steep their readers in baths of misperception. The profit comes to us.”

(It’s true: When you finish a great book, you want to call the author on the phone. I did, and asked Mailer if he was including his own work among books that serve the devil. No, he said, he was talking about the modern best-seller. (Mailer: “Those of use who set out to become novelists when I was young were absolutely agog with the fact that novelists were major historical figures. Steinbeck, Hemingway …. Young writers can’t feel that way anymore.” Publishers once used profits from best-sellers to nurture talents that might take a place in history; now they are “major marketing combines.”)

The great misperceptions that will bedevil Europe in this tale are patriotism and racialism. But these bad ideas are not as interesting to Mr. Mailer—or to the devil—as the future Fuhrer’s genetics. Hitler must be the product of incest. The devils encourage Hitler’s father, Alois, to have sex first with his own stepsister, then with their progeny, Klara, in twists and turns that have the mood of a “maimed French farce,” to cite Ron Rosenbaum (whose book, Explaining Hitler, is in Mr. Mailer’s long bibliography at the end).

Sweet Klara loves baby Adolf. Wiping his behind is a “dalliance.” “She wiped him so carefully that his eyes gleamed. He discovered heaven.”

So much mother-love can hobble a child’s will. The devils make sure that Adolf doesn’t get too much, by “drenching the boy’s spirit with wretchedness.” His abusive father, the retired customs agent, blows smoke in Adolf’s face, then laughs as the baby cries.

(The relationship of father and son animates the book; I wondered if Mr. Mailer was drawing on his own experience. Mailer: “No. My father was essentially a gentle man, though he was complex …. He was a compulsive gambler. He was remote, but not a brute, no, no, no. If you look at my books, there’s almost always a father-son relationship I explore.”)

The boy develops in evil ways that the devil prepares for him. He sharpens his oratory by talking to trees. He studies racialist science—and gassing—with a wizardly beekeeper who belongs firmly to the devil. He practices war games at school and masturbates to nationalist fantasies. The devil shields him from his own wretchedness by pumping up his idea of his own worth. “A mediocre mind, once devoted entirely to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential.”

Arc is the only problem here. The book ends at age 16 because the devil’s work is done: Hitler’s character is formed. The rest is history, and we know that history. Besides, Hitler’s adult actions beggar the imagination, even Norman Mailer’s imagination. Better to stick with the childhood, about which few know anything. The literary problem is that some of Hitler’s boyhood in The Castle in the Forest has the quality of a case study.

But plot has never been the reason to read Mailer. Better to read him for his ideas and insights. Here, for instance, is his take on marriage:

“[M]ost husbands and wives use so much of their time together in excrementitious exchanges. Indeed, that is often why they married in the first place …. They needed to be able to exercise one or another petty cruelty at any moment to a dependable person who would be close at hand …. The fierce upbraidings one would have liked to present to the world (but did not dare) could now be delivered through critical judgments on one’s mate. All that spiritual excrement! … Ergo, marriage is a workable institution—especially for dreadful people.”

I READ THIS BLACKLY HILARIOUS, BEAUTIFULLY written book in a few sittings. But does it live up to its own moral standards? Does it inform us about history, or steep us in baths of misperception? Can its metaphysics help us?

(Weiss: “I say this is a moral work.” Mailer: “A serious writer is always offering a moral. Even the writer who can be a perfect scamp, and people laugh, laugh, laugh—there is a moral under that.

“Theology and law are highly circumscribed. In politics, morality is also circumscribed, and often skewed.

“But as a novelist, you can be a private moralist and explore at some lengths. Saying I’m a moral novelist? That implies a piety and self-righteousness I don’t want to be attached to. I like to say that if a novel is successful, it can change the nature of people’s thinking.”)

As to history, the answer is a qualified yes. Mr. Mailer seems a little bored by history—been there, done that. He’s not interested in the Jewish question. His Hitler is a figure born of 19th-century ideas of racial difference and mass hysteria that are pan-European, and not limited to anti-Semitism. After the Holocaust, his devil says (in a plague-on-both-their-houses spirit), the demons moved on to the Arab world and to Israel.

(I asked about his Jewishness. Mailer: “There are two kinds of ways for novelists who have some talent to go. One is to use their experience as their private goldmine, and they search more and more deeply into that goldmine. That is one way to be a serious novelist. Another way was to use your personal experience as a springboard to go quite a distance into the outside world. That was my preference. My Jewishness was a great asset in my work, because it gave me a certain sensitivity to the world. It is not easy to be a Jew without thinking about the world a great deal of the time, given the classic situation of Jews in history …. But I have never wanted to write about the near things. My personal experiences are crystals to beam my imagination into far-off places.”)

The philosophical question is easier: Mr. Mailer’s metaphysics might actually change the way you think. With one blue eye on his own grandchildren, to whom the book is dedicated, another on one of the greatest evils of history, Mr. Mailer is offering us every bit of wisdom he has in his cosmology, and his manner is so open and generous that I find that I am willing to accept instruction. God and the devil are with us at every moment. Denial and repression may make us feel pious, but we’re still going to do bad stuff. The growing of ourselves involves screwing up a lot and trying to make wiser choices.

Mr. Mailer would seem to condemn himself into the bargain. The open question in this book is not what will become of Hitler (we know that story), but what will become of our narrator, and by the end he is showing real misgivings. “I have never known Love …. I can delineate most of the reasons for its presence or disappearance, I can inspire jealousy, doubt, even periods of revulsion toward the beloved …. I cannot distinguish true Love from its artistic substitutes.”

And telling true love from its counterfeit is everything in life.

These ideas give the book a kabbalistic feel: Demonology is an ancient kabbalistic pursuit, one that goes back to the Middle Ages. The Faust myth was imagined by kabbalists in the 1400’s—centuries before Goethe and Mann. (Mailer: “Trace out for me, if you will, that demonology—I’m interested.”)

Here my knowledge comes from Rabbi Asher Crispe, a scholar with the Gal Einai Institute, who lectured on demonology at Chabad-Lubavitch of the Main Line in Philadelphia last summer. Rabbi Crispe says kabbalists believe that after the snake entered the garden, the quality of doubt separated Adam and Eve for 130 years. In that time, Adam had 300 nocturnal emissions. (Mailer: “Three hundred emissions in 130 years—kind of a stingy dick!”)

Those emissions formed demons in the lower atmosphere that the kabbalists say can appear to us as animals, men or angels. They trap us at night, when we are asleep and our souls “disengage from our bodies” and seek divinity in our dreams to reorder our lives. Rabbi Crispe says wise mystics also seek their “brainchildren” in the heavens; the great test is sorting out the fake inspirations from the real deal. Mr. Mailer’s narrator engages us in the same trials.

(Mailer, chuckling: “I didn’t realize you had to be a kabbalist to believe that. You know, I was interested in the kabbalah, but I found it very difficult. Most of the writing repelled me. It was closed. I found it tiresome, not open. I felt there was a certain tyranny in the closure that surrounds it, and I didn’t like that …. The idea of a marketplace of sleep, I’ve used often. The idea that in sleep we occupy a more serious realm, that dreams are an essential apparatus. You don’t have to be a kabbalist to believe that. Christians believe that, Mohammedans.”)

Norman Mailer has always been a universalist; rejecting the idea of any tradition being chosen, he has taken freely from any tradition that interests him and shared his gifts fully in return. Here he shares the Holocaust with all humanity. It isn’t only a Jewish experience of history, it’s a spectacular victory of the devil over a weakening God, achieved with the help of a very bad boy. Now Satan has decamped to America. For mystical, metaphysical, misanthropic Mailer, there’s plenty of mud, feces and sulfur here, too.

(Weiss: “Are the two references in the book to America hints about George W. Bush?” Mailer: “Yes.”)

Philip Weiss writes the Observer.com blog MondoWeiss.

The first party was all film industry. I asked the host's daughter about being Jewish and having a Christmas party and she laughed and said, "Yeah. Basically we do whatever's fun. Like we had an Easter egg roll." I liked her attitude. California. No baggage.

The next party was more interesting because there was a Holocaust survivor there. He grew up in a wealthy German family, then spent years in Theresienstadt. After the war, stateless, he said No to Palestine and came here. In the last few years he has been able to recover some of the family's actual property. The survivor's wife took me in the kitchen and showed me some china they had finally gotten back. "This too survived Hitler," she said, touching the beautiful Deco-styled plates.

It felt like a west coast dream. Attitudes are different out there, people are more open to new ideas. At New York parties, I get in fights about Jewishness. Not in L.A.

I sat with the wife for a while at dinner and talked about my issues. She explained that she was firmly secular. Religion is a negative force in society. Jewish identity was important to her, but worship was no real part of her children's lives, and she'd never tried to separate them from kids of other creeds. She was a little regretful about intermarriage but it wasn't like she could have stopped it. Hey, it's America. The Holocaust was not something they talked that much about. When I asked her about Israel, she said, "Israel is important." When I asked her to elaborate, she repeated that statement.

I went in to get Christmas cake and passed a pretty towheaded girl singing, "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel." It felt surreal to me.

One of the claims of Jewish parochialists is that Where Hitler failed, intermarriage is succeeding: eliminating the Jewish people. It may be an incorrect statement (the latest Forward reports that Jewish #s in the U.S. are up to between 6-7 million). But right or wrong on the #s, it's ugly. It's guilting Americans who are making free and wide cultural choices, saying they're betraying their people. And the answer of the Michael Steinhardts and Elliott Abrams is, Segregating youth. Segregating privileged youth, at that. Think of the little blonde girls who won't get to sing the dreidel song.

Decca, or Jessica, Mitford came from a family of unapologetic extremists. Her sister Unity didn’t just admire Hitler (as did their mother) but fell in love with him, and shot herself in the head when her preferred country of Germany and her native England went to war. (Hitler then sent the gravely injured girl to Switzerland in his private train so her parents could get her home.) Diana, the beauty of her day, married Sir Oswald Mosley, the head of the British fascists, and was a cheerful presence in Holloway prison when Churchill jailed the Mosleys as potential dangers during the war. Deborah, or Debo, married not just any duke but one of the most important ones, the Duke of Devonshire; novelist Nancy, living and writing in Paris, became more French than the French. A family of vivid colors, except for Pam, the least colorful, who was acknowledged as such and stripped of her name by her sisters, who would refer to her only as Woman—lovingly, of course.

Which leaves Decca, whose career may be the most unlikely of them all: renegade marriage to Churchill’s nephew Esmond Romilly, running a bar with him in Miami, early motherhood and widowhood, putting down roots in Oakland, ardent communist, queen of the muckrakers via her best-seller The American Way of Death (1963), fierce civil-rights activist, part-owner of a Scottish island (which she tried to give to the Communist Party—they weren’t interested). She was also a passionate friend to famous people like Katharine Graham and Maya Angelou, and countless other regular folks, and a compulsive correspondent for whom letters were the staff of life.

Although Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford is over 700 pages long, the letters it contains, very well edited by Peter Sussman (his biographical essays and notes are invaluable in keeping track of this eventful life), represent a modest fraction of Decca’s epistolary output. That’s all that’s modest about these exuberant and take-no-prisoners missives to the world. “Darling Muv, Thank you so much for the lovely bread board, we were so thrilled with it …. As you can imagine we are frightfully busy, trying to get the Communist leaders out of jail & hoping to stay out ourselves.”

Whether she’s chiding Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worked (pre-Bill) in the law office of her second husband, Bob Treuhaft, or counseling her daughter Constancia Romilly (known in the family as Dinky), or reporting on her muckraking investigations—into the Famous Writers School, which she demolished; Maine Chance, the famous fat farm (which, unlike most people, she hated); and, most famously, the funeral industry—she was always herself: that is, a funny maker of fun at other people’s expense and, at the same time, loving and loyal to her family and friends. To Hillary Clinton: “Do write back. I’d love more news of Chelsea Victoria—what a marvelous name! How did you come by it? Was she conceived in Victoria Station, or Chelsea?”

But she wasn’t always serene. For years, living in America, with violently different politics and lifestyles from those of her family—the Treuhafts lived in a modest house; her sister Debo lived in one of England’s greatest stately homes—the gap between Decca and her background was vast, but whatever her politics, she never cut herself off from her aristocratic roots, even eventually resolving her fraught relationship with her somewhat chilly, pro-German mother, whom she (and her sister Nancy) found it hard to forgive for denying them the education they longed for: Not one of the Mitford girls was sent to school.

Decca’s double life meant that her letters reveal two separate and equally fascinating worlds, of the English aristocracy and American radical politics, and she never loses a certain note of deracinated fascination with American goings-on. As late as 1980, her letter to Sally Belfrage about sister Diana Mosley’s book The Duchess of Windsor (“It made me turn quite pink to think that one of us could write such total trash & so badly—it’s Woman’s Day all the way”) reveals that she still thinks of herself as one of “us,” that is, a Mitford, with all that implied.

The personality that emerges in these letters is that of a woman for whom everything is a tease, and at the same time deadly serious. She’s provocative, self-mocking, eloquent sometimes, silly, generous and brave. She had to endure more tragedy than most people—she lost her first husband, her favorite sister and two children—yet she seems to have faced all this with unwavering stiff upper lip, whether she’s in physical danger (as during the civil-rights period) or personal sorrow. Despite her disapproval of the American way of death, when she went down with all flags flying (lung cancer at 78), she had organized a corking funeral for herself, with horses and plumes.

Diane Johnson is the author of 14 books; her most recent novel is L’Affaire (Plume).

But first, a word about this flu. It was the strangest I’ve ever gotten, and I’m not alone in thinking it was weird. Indeed, I feel compelled to alert the world, or at least this city, about the extraordinarily subtle and insidious sequelae of this contagion going around.

When I call it the “emo flu,” it’s not a metaphor. I don’t know if it’s medically an influenza virus, but whatever the nature of this melancholy microbe, it’s worth a warning.

It begins with familiar-seeming mild flu-like symptoms (mild in my case, more severe in others), but then tails off into a long, etiolated fugue state in which something more than flu-like lethargy, lassitude and inanition paralyzes you. It’s not just a neutral world weariness, it’s Weltschmerz—world-historical sadness: Some mournful, emotional, deeply despairing, unremittingly sad and despondent sense of life seizes you and won’t let go for at least a week afterward.

I know two women, one in New York, one in D.C.—she was the one who first dubbed it “the emo flu”—who have had the exact same symptoms, and one of them has a friend in Spain who had the same sad, spiritual sequelae. So on the basis of this powerful anecdotal evidence, I suspect it’s an international phenomenon, the emo flu. It’s not the kind of thing people report to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, but I believe it’s an epidemiological phenomenon they should be aware of.

In fact, you could almost generate an unconventional thriller plot by imagining that the emo flu was bio-engineered by some sinister (or at least lachrymose) scientist: a Weapon of Mass Despondency. Not that there’s not enough in the world to be sad about already, right?

On the upside, it led me to abandon anything more strenuous than lying on a couch rereading Philip Kerr’s past work, his Berlin Noir trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal and his best novel, the one you should start with, A German Requiem). The latter, set mainly in postwar Vienna, has an affinity with Graham Greene’s The Third Man but—dare I say it?—equals or surpasses Greene (and the Carol Reed film featuring Orson Welles), because it doesn’t shy away from the Nazi-saturated substratum of the Viennese milieu. And then I discovered—and devoured—Mr. Kerr’s new noir, The One From the Other. It crystallized my dissatisfaction with recent le Carré novels (clumsily didactic) and made me rethink my addiction to Alan Furst’s oeuvre (brilliant but a bit too thickly varnished with romantic glamour).

Cumulatively, it made me determined to do something to give Mr. Kerr’s achievement more recognition than it has. Recently, I was at a dinner attended by some foreign correspondents, diplomatic and international political-theory types, all of whom knew their Greene and le Carré, and found myself surprised that none of them had heard of Kerr. He’s not unknown: Salman Rushdie has called him “a brilliantly innovative thriller writer.”

Perhaps the problem is that he’s too innovative to fit in a neat category. What’s unique about Kerr’s novels of intrigue (he’s done a variety of other sorts of fiction) is that they bridge, fuse, the two strands of what I’d call the “operative novel”: the private-eye version and the public-spy version.

“Operative” is such a resonantly ambiguous word, isn’t it? Indeed, subtle distinctions about the connotations of “operative” are at the heart of the Plame case: When Bob Novak called Joe Wilson’s wife a C.I.A. “operative,” did that necessarily mean he was knowingly identifying a covert agent or merely using—as he’s maintained—a generic term for an employee of an intelligence agency, who might be an analyst for the spy agency but not a spy?

Operative. Why is the word so resonant? I think perhaps because it suggests the ambiguity of all our positions in life: We’re not sure who we’re really operatives for, who’s pulling the invisible strings—fate, God, the secret plans of the all-knowing conspiracy—and manipulating us without our knowledge. The great figures in the morally complex thriller genre are operatives who never really know who they’re operating on behalf of, or what the real operation is; who never know whose Big Plan they’re carrying out, regardless of what they think they’re doing.

“Operative” traces itself back to the early novels of Dashiell Hammett and his recurrent hero, the Continental Op, an operative for the Continental Detective Agency. And espionage novels—though they employ a broader international canvas, an engagement with actual history, nation-states in conflict with each other rather than criminals in conflict with the cops—nonetheless focus on the figure of the operative in the field, often uncertain on whose behalf he’s operating. A different kind of operative, in some ways, subject to more alienated, ambiguous, conflicting loyalties.

The achievement of Philip Kerr’s novels is that he takes his Chandler/Hammett-style detective, that lone figure in the (largely ahistorical) mean streets of the urban jungle, into the midst of a far more highly charged historical backdrop, a different, more profoundly mean—indeed, evil—sort of mean-street neighborhood, the crossroads of history and tragedy. Mr. Kerr has set his detective on an Inferno-like trajectory that takes us deep into the heart of darkness. He’s a private eye in Hitler’s Germany.

Mr. Kerr’s detective is one Bernhard Gunther, a former cop on the Berlin police force with a Chandleresque penchant for wisecracks and a cynicism about the Nazis that is not so much political as personal, characterological. We first meet him in the lengthening shadows of the year 1936, three years after Hitler takes power. Many of his clientele are Jewish families hoping against hope to trace the fate of “disappeared” relatives.

It’s a hideously compromised position, but it raises the difficult philosophical question of whether it’s possible to do anything honorable in a regime moving relentlessly toward ultimate evil. Gunther makes a living off anti-Semitic persecution, but he’s not happy about it. Not out of philo-Semitic sentiment, but because of his contempt for Nazi cruelty and bullying. It’s not their ideology but their collective personality that he detests. Although he’s too smart not to see the connection.

And so he’s a private eye who crosses the boundary from the traditionally ahistorical realm of small-time crime to the inner workings of historical criminality.

And what deepens—and immeasurably darkens—the two postwar novels, A German Requiem and The One From the Other, is the fact that Bernie Gunther feels responsible for the death of thousands of civilians during the war, many of them Jews. Conscripted into the SS during the invasion of Russia, he’s in charge of carrying out the infamous Commissar Order, the 1941 Hitler command which allowed his invading army to slaughter civilians under the pretext that they were Communist Party officials. After realizing that, in practice, this was a cover for the beginning of the mass murder of the Jews, Gunther applies for a transfer to frontline fighting rather than continue the murder of the innocents. Nonetheless, he has to live with the blood on his hands, on his conscience.

We are now deep into the question of just what is and what isn’t inexcusable: How does one judge the degrees of evil in an evil regime?

In Mr. Kerr’s postwar novels, no one is entirely innocent, everyone is complicit—including the Americans who facilitated the protection and escape of Nazi war criminals for short-term Cold War gains against the Soviets. What does doing favors for mass murderers make one? It’s a time when the opposition of anti-Nazi/pro-Nazi is intersecting the vector of anti-communist/pro-communist, and we are complicit with the sick specter of the pro-Nazi anti-Communist. An influenza of evil.

Illicit, watered-down penicillin is the deadly cure at the heart of The Third Man. Penicillin runs like a river throughout A German Requiem, I think because Mr. Kerr has picked up on Greene’s metaphor: The cure is as deadly as the plague. Penicillin can cure venereal disease—that’s what everyone seems to want it for in Mr. Kerr’s Vienna—but there is no moral penicillin that can restore the diseased realm of collaborators to health.

I hope you’ll all read A German Requiem; I think you’ll appreciate the sophisticated historical intelligence that Mr. Kerr brings to the morally complex thriller genre. It is not without contemporary implications—this novel of an occupation disrupted by the schemes of holdover mass murderers and the incompetence of the occupation authorities.

And once you’ve read A German Requiem, you’ll probably be unable to stop yourselves from going backwards to March Violets or forward to the new one, The One From the Other.

It’s also set in the Occupied Zones, which, by the way—no accident here—fascinated Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow. The new novel is almost an essay on the meaning of being a knowing operative when unknown forces are manipulating one.

The setting—postwar Germany and Austria—raises the stakes of the private-eye novel, where the operative is conventionally deceived by a shrewd blond seductress. Here, the familiar figure of the private eye takes us into new territory entirely, picking his way through a realm of mass murderers and mere murderers.

We are far from the eternal question of the private-eye novel: Can you trust the dame? In its place comes the question of this new hybrid operative novel: Can you trust the damned? By taking us from the localized moral distinctions of the private eye to the profoundly more difficult distinctions that history and memory afflict us with, Mr. Kerr gives us an operative who must make distinctions between degrees of evil in a landscape of graves.

The very title of the book, The One From the Other, suggests an awareness that Mr. Kerr’s great theme is the difficulty of making distinctions, separating the one thing from the other—moral distinctions.

Nobody gets off the hook in Mr. Kerr’s work. You get the emo flu from him, too. But it’s more like what Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death,” a sense of the infectious affliction of human nature and human history. A sickness of the soul that no immune system can protect you from.

When the late Keith Moon wasn't jokingly parading around in Hitler regalia, he could probably be found trashing one of the many hotels The Who stayed at. This weekend, The Times "Travel" section takes a look at the hard-living Moon--who "once nailed his room furniture to the ceiling"--along with members of Led Zeppelin, The Faces and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

So what are younger rock bands up to these days? Well, they're not exactly riding motorcycles through the Chateau Marmont.

And touring with the Rolling Stones (of all bands) must have led to some wild nights. Or not.

And for Southland, a rock band from L.A., partying comes with life on the road. But so does trying to get a bargain.

Things they do look awful cold.

- Michael Calderone

I say “sneakily” profound because the Slansky/Sorkin opus partakes of the sneaky new satirical art form that Paul Slansky has invented over the years in his “quizzes” about the hard-to-believe, obscure, bizarre and blundering statements of Nixon, Reagan, Bush and other ripe targets among public figures. Coming upon one of Mr. Slansky’s “Quizzes” in The New Yorker and other venues is one of the rare pure comic-satiric pleasures to be found in contemporary periodicals.

Mr. Slansky, who has been called “a documentary satirist,” has made an art out of scouring public, mostly political, utterances for emblematic instances of verbal misdeeds, misspeaks and mystifications, the more bizarre the better, all of which deserve more than their 15 seconds of ridicule. Because such emblematic idiocies, documented with the attentiveness of Mr. Slansky’s deceptively simple quiz form, become compressed verbal embodiments of our misbegotten times.

But Mr. Slansky does more than document; he possesses, like the great satirists, a Swiftian disgust at human folly. He is still capable, one senses, of being outraged at pure stupidity. Long after many inured themselves to Nixon and Poppy Bush’s pronouncements, say, Mr. Slansky, one felt, was constantly slapping his forehead and saying, “Can you fucking believe this guy!”

I remember running into him at a party a while ago and discussing our mutual fascination with Nixon. Where mine had mutated into a “He’s a great representative of the dark side of the American character” mode, Mr. Slansky had preserved the pure flame of righteous wrath at every new White House tape revelation. And I admired him for it.

Another thing about Mr. Slansky: He respects your intelligence. He doesn’t feel he has to spell everything out, connect the dots for you, jab you in the elbow and say, “See the relatedness of it all.” (That’s my job.) He just lets his quotations lie resplendently (in both senses of the word “lie”) on the page and allows the attentive reader to savor their many-layered meretriciousness. (See his books The Clothes Have No Emperor and The George W. Bush Quiz Book.)

Comes now Mr. Slansky (and Ms. Sorkin) to the public apology—a natural progression, in a way. Where once he would make multiple-choice quizzes out of various instances of verbal infamy (the answer to many of his multiple-choice quiz questions was “All of the above”), now he’s focusing on the language we use to apologize for the language we use or the behavior we “regret,” as well as the mendacious way we ask (and grant) forgiveness. And what a big fat lie it all is.

In My Bad, he and Sorkin move beyond satire to the realm of moral philosophy. (Although you could argue great satire is a form of moral philosophy.) Moral philosophy that asks such questions as:

Are there any deeds that are unforgivable? Does a verbal apology—an expression of “heartfelt regret to those I may have hurt,” a formulaic verbal act of contrition to “anyone I might have offended”—wipe the slate clean? Is there any way of judging the “sincerity” of such ritual and convenient and job-saving formulae? How much does it matter if the apology is unforced or forced (only given because caught)? When it comes down to it: Are words enough?

Should shame last beyond the press conference? Do we believe in shame at all, or rather syndromes, diseases, addictions of the sort that rehab rather than real consequences will redress? Does promiscuously granted forgiveness encourage bad behavior if the only consequence suffered is uttering a verbal formula? But what’s the alternative: a return to the public stocks, tarring and feathering?

So every example of the hundreds of public apologies in My Bad poses a question in moral philosophy. Some people evidently need for its subtexts to be spelled out for them, so let me start spelling.

First, just so you get a sense of the book: It takes the form of boldfaced (not just typographically) apologetic statements followed by a description of the offense apologized for.

To take one of the less famous examples of the sort that Mr. Slansky is famous for ferreting out:

“‘The comment was not meant to be a regional slur. To the extent that it was misinterpreted to be one, I apologize.’“

“Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Taylor apologizing for referring to potential jurors in the eastern Kentucky mountains as ‘illiterate cave dwellers.’”

It’s an extreme example, but it embodies the shamelessness of public-apology discourse: It doesn’t matter if it’s virtually impossible to believe the veracity or sincerity as long as you use the right words. And the right words these days are the ones that find a way of throwing the blame back at the beholder. Those who “misinterpret.” Those who are over-sensitive. “If I hurt the feelings of anyone … I apologize.” In other words, if you’re a crybaby about stuff, I feel sorry for you, but here’s your apology, wimp.

“‘I wish to again express my apologies to those who have been impacted by my inappropriate conduct.’”

“New Hampshire judge Franklin Jones apologizing in his resignation letter for groping five women at a conference focusing on sexual assault.”

Note the artful rhetorical device: using the passive voice and objectifying the “conduct.” He’s not apologizing to those he himself hurt, but to those who were “impacted” by his conduct (an objectified entity distanced from his self).

Of course, some confessions cannot be saved by artfulness. Any public apology that begins with “Let me say once again, for everyone to hear, I despise Hitler and everything he stood for … ” is really going up against tough odds.

That was, by the way, “Ralph Engelstad, owner of the Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, apologizing for conducting two parties celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday …. ”

One revealing reminder in My Bad is the way it documents the persistence of casual racism and bigotry in the supposedly civilized suites of corporate America:

“‘The editors of Focus magazine apologize to our readers and, in particular, to people of color for an illustration that perpetuates racial stereotypes.’“

“AT&T apologizing via e-mail to recipients of the corporation’s in-house magazine, which featured a cartoon showing the world with callers on various continents talking on their phones, all human except for the African caller, depicted as an ape.”

But some of the racial apologies raise interesting questions:

“‘It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil-rights movement. We regret the omission.’”

Yes, it’s unfortunately worded (“It has come to the … attention,” as if the editor only just noticed it). Yet isn’t some apology, however inadequate, some gesture of contrition, at least in some small way better than nothing? I remember a few years ago, when an argument broke out whether the U.S. President and Congress should apologize for slavery and racism, thinking: “If it’s not a substitute for a substantive commitment to justice, how could anyone oppose such a resolution?” So might we cut the good intentions of the Herald-Leader’s editor some slack?

Compare that, for instance, with the one person who has most conspicuously resisted the ritual of public apology recently: Zacarias Moussaoui, who not only refused to apologize, but publicly gloated over 9/11 and the pain he brought to the survivors and his hopes to inflict more death and pain. It’s more “honest,” yes, but that doesn’t place it on a higher moral plane. The public apology can be the hypocritical tribute vice pays to virtue. Or is it the way vice cons virtue yet again? My Bad raises unexpectedly complicated issues.

Mr. Slansky and Ms. Sorkin posit the notion that we’ve gone around the bend, that the ritual of apology has gone from a rite of purification and self-abnegation, to a rite of self-glorification, a suburb of positive thinking.

In their introduction, they indict “the culture’s willingness to grant … speedy pardons.” What is the source of that readiness and willingness? Isn’t it a good thing to forgive, if not forget? But then you read this example of pleading malice down to unintentionality:

“‘Although I didn’t intend to offend anyone, obviously I did. I can only hope my apology has been accepted.’”

“Lawyer Scott Mitchell apologizing for playing a tape—for the amusement of fellow attendees of a Florida bar convention—on which a sexual assault victim described her attack.”

Notice how he’s compounding the offense in his “apology” by subtly putting the burden of doing the right thing on us. If we were to refuse to accept his apology—refuse to accept it as the absolution he seeks—we are the malefactors, it’s our bad, for our lack of belief in the powers of forgiveness.

If our forgiveness must be automatic, doesn’t it guarantee insincere pleas of remorse? It’s all so complex.

Mr. Slansky and Ms. Sorkin speculate about whether something more than an apology, something more than a rote expression of shame, is required for any kind of absolution. They even suggest the reintroduction of “the humiliation that used to provide the penance part of the whole moral exchange” (my italics). Not a scarlet letter exactly—instead, they imagine a TV show in which the apologists are attacked by a panel “confronting the week’s apologists like misbehaving children, and telling them, like their parents should have, ‘Don’t just say it because you got caught. Convince us that you mean it.’”

But what could they do to convince us? Community service? This is going to be tough. The most “penance” for non-criminal embarrassment and spectacular screw-ups inflicted these days on the worst offenders is a season on The Surreal Life. Celebrity and more celebrity (of sorts) is the reward for that brief ceremony of apology. Ask James Frey.

It all may be too late, but you have to admire Mr. Slansky and Ms. Sorkin for still being angry about it.

But sometimes we meet a practical sociologist who is engaged in more alarming work: Walker Percy (Lost in the Cosmos), George W.S. Trow (Within the Context of No Context), Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae). They take a big bite of homo sapiens, with shreds of philosophy or art attached. Their tone of voice is bracing, but also a little angry, a little bullying, even a little nuts. They have reason to be hyper, because they are trying to explain what the hell is wrong with everything. My Life Among the Deathworks by Philip Rieff may be such another book.

Mr. Rieff has an academic résumé as long as your arm. Once upon a time, he was married to Susan Sontag (the book is dedicated to her). The author photo shows him wearing a derby and a pinstripe suit with a gray vest: not your usual C-SPAN Booknotes garb. His message is that Western man—what we used to call the Orient is not his concern—lives in three contending worlds, or cultures: pagan, Jewish/Christian and modern.

The first world is populated with ancient gods and godlets, though it’s ruled not by them, but by fate. “Fate teaches no moralities; nor does it teach immoralities. It is merely remorseless.” The second world is ruled by the God of Judaism and Christianity. Like any devout Jew, Mr. Rieff is leery of Christianity—maybe this Saul of Tarsus guy and his idol really started all our problems—though he gives high praise to certain Christian artifacts, and believers: “The Gulag Archipelago is the greatest book of remembrance, the greatest martyrology, ever written.” Mr. Rieff’s third world—producer alike of great art and a great many martyrs—is modernity.

The deathworks of Mr. Rieff’s title are masterpieces of third-world genius aimed at the second world: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (on the front cover); the philosophy of Nietzsche; the poetry of Wallace Stevens; the poetry (once called science) of Sigmund Freud. Mr. Rieff ranges widely, picking fights with everyone: Harold Bloom’s Book of J is dismissed as “fiction,” and John Paul II is chided for calling totalitarianism a “substitute religion” when it really opposes “all sacred orders” (you have to like a man who lectures the Pope on his job).

Mr. Rieff’s most audacious claim is that Hitler was “a great third world artist,” because he attempted a “clean sweep”—not only against second-world ideas and morals, but against a whole chosen people. Mr. Rieff returns to the Nazis again and again: “Remark the cut of the German uniform in the Nazi time. No more erotic uniform has ever been created.” Nazis made common cause with various Christians, even as modern artists borrow pagan props, like Picasso’s masks, but in neither case do they really mean it. The third world is liberated from both faith and fate. In it, men must make themselves. All too often, this involves unmaking Jews.

Mr. Rieff’s counterideal is that we should know where we are. We can only know this if we place ourselves in a sacred order superintended by the Almighty. This gives us both a local habitation and a name. God’s separateness guarantees our identity.

This is certainly unexpected, considering the source. Flip through the academic press ads in the New York Review of Books; you won’t find many that say this. There are several reasons, though, why My Life Among the Deathworks might not make a splash.

Mr. Rieff admits that he has little to say of Islam, because it has “scarcely more than started up in America.” Oops. Islamists have been making a mark far out of proportion to their numbers, from the Iranian who drove a Jeep Cherokee through a crowd at the University of North Carolina this month to 9/11. Are they legitimate defenders of a second-world culture, as they believe? Or are they, as Paul Berman argues, a demented modernist riff, owing as much to fascism as to Islam? This, one of the big questions for the rest of our lives, is outside Mr. Rieff’s purview.

Curious readers will have to contend with Mr. Rieff’s prose. Most of it is like chewing ball bearings; every once in a while, there is a cherry. Marching through this book, I considered the possibility that the jawbreakers were deliberate, an ironic invitation to Mr. Rieff’s fellow academics: I am as dense as Heidegger—read me. I could only finish the book by murmuring it aloud; I haven’t done that since See Spot Run.

Mr. Rieff won’t play well on Hannity and Colmes because he has no program, no action items, no plan to save America. We live in all three of his worlds simultaneously, and we can’t disentangle ourselves from any of them. The war against Hitler, Freud and their friends “cannot be won,” Mr. Rieff explains. “But it can be lost.” His best hope is to hold off defeat by showing people what they are up against, in the ads they see, in the TV they watch and in their own minds. Even “the current debate over curriculum in the university [is] pointless; you can only offer [kids] whatever they want, a smattering of everything/nothing.”

There is ample precedent in second-world religion for such quietism. For centuries, Jews had to make the best of ghetto and shtetl. Hermits sat on pillars, nuns took the veil, Quakers would not fight or swear. But the sacred orders that Mr. Rieff honors were also orders of this world. We are supposed to do a variety of concrete things—help the poor, spurn graven images. Judaism and Christianity have also thrown up a variety of political leaders, from Abraham to George W. Bush. Some of them were monsters or nuts. But if any of them weren’t, maybe we are obliged to go and do likewise.

This book is the work of a man done in by adverbs: Mr. Grayling will “answer definitively” whether or not civilian bombing was immoral; by late 1944, the Allies had “already won”; the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki took place when the war was “effectively over.” Pretending to the concrete while allowing a sliver of contingency, those words let Mr. Grayling gloss over any unpleasant facts that complicate his case. Knowing that the war is going to end is very different from knowing when or how it’s going to end. That the Allies had “already won” by late 1944 did not prevent horrendous fighting in places as far-flung as the Hurtgen forest (33,000 American casualties) or Okinawa (123,000 American and Japanese casualties).

But, Mr. Grayling insists, it’s the Allies who “kept the Axis powers going until the last drop of fuel” by insisting, at the Casablanca Conference in early 1943, on unconditional surrender. Mr. Grayling seriously believes that Hitler and Hirohito would otherwise have considered a negotiated surrender. The facts tell another story: Even with his defeat certain, Hitler expanded the draft to include boys of 16 and men of 50; Japan planned to conscript women from the ages of 17 to 40 to fight the expected land invasion.

There’s an entirely reasonable argument to be made against the Allied bombing of civilians: The ends do not justify the means. The chapter Mr. Grayling devotes to the German survivors of the 1943 Allied bombing raid on Hamburg is his way of saying that the unimaginable horror they endured is what supporters of Allied area bombing must face, and he’s absolutely right.

But if Mr. Grayling is going to argue that ends do not justify means, he should also be obliged to acknowledge the sacrifices entailed in achieving what he sees as morally acceptable ends. In Among the Dead Cities, you’ll find no mention of the 200 Jews remaining in Dresden who had been notified that they were shortly to be deported for a “labor task.” (Seventy died in the bombing; others, like the diarist Victor Klemperer, were able to remove their yellow stars and escape.) You’ll find no mention of the estimates of Allied soldiers expected to be killed in the planned land invasion of Japan. Nor will you find the chilling promise of Japanese Field Marshal Terauchi. (He gave orders that, in the event of an Allied land invasion, all prisoners of war were to be immediately killed.)

For Mr. Grayling, we can safely conclude, those lives would have been acceptable losses if civilians had been spared. He’s appalled by Gen. Leslie Groves, who, after the bombing of Hiroshima, said he was thinking more of the soldiers on the Bataan Death March than dead Japanese civilians. (Exactly where General Groves’ sympathy should lie.) One of the ugly facts Mr. Grayling is incapable of facing is that when you’re waging war, you have to be more concerned with the lives of your soldiers than with the lives of enemy civilians. Mr. Grayling quotes approvingly the citizens of Coventry, the English town flattened by the Germans, who protested they did not want Germans to suffer as they did. But it’s not in his moral makeup to deal with the Jewish woman, sheltering with Klemperer during the raid on Dresden, who said, “If only they would smash everything up!” To Mr. Grayling, such a person can only have crossed the acceptable moral line.

He quotes an R.A.F. officer speaking at a press conference after the bombing of Dresden as saying that the strategy was one of “deliberate terror-bombing of German population centers as a ruthless expedient of hastening Hitler’s doom.” That’s the money quote that makes Mr. Grayling’s case for the sadism of area bombing. The trouble is that the officer never said it. The quote is from a report filed by the Associated Press’ Henry Cowan, who attended a press conference given by R.A.F. Air Commodore Grierson. What Grierson actually said when asked what the Dresden raid hoped to disrupt was, “Primarily communications. To prevent them moving military supplies. To stop movement in all directions if possible—movement is everything.” He added that the raid aimed to destroy “what was left of German morale.”

There’s little doubt that Mr. Grayling knows the truth about what Grierson said. In Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945—a book Mr. Grayling singles out for high praise—Frederick Taylor flatly declares: “No one at the press conference … used the word ‘terror’ or anything remotely like it.”

I’m skeptical of Mr. Grayling’s claim that area bombing was not only a moral crime but also ineffective. He argues that area bombing did not affect German war production—a highly debatable point to anyone who has read the airtight case in Mr. Taylor’s book for Dresden as a significant center of war production, as well as an important point for shipping supplies to the eastern front. Mr. Grayling’s arguments in favor of precision bombing take no account of the notorious imprecision of precision bombing. (In Wartime, Paul Fussell writes, “It became obvious to everyone except the home folks reading Life and The Saturday Evening Post that although you could destroy lots of things with bombs, they weren’t necessarily the things you had in mind.”) And even supposing Mr. Grayling is right to suggest that the bombing had no effect on German morale, he should also consider what effect it had on British morale—and explain why he’d find the cheering on the other side of the Channel morally distasteful.

He’d be right to feel that way. But his conclusion—that area bombing is against “general moral standards of the kind recognised and agreed in Western civilisation”—is nonetheless absurd and morally dishonest. War itself is against any recognized and agreed-upon moral standard of civilization, and to pretend that it can be waged in a refined manner is simply moral cushiness.

These days—with the U.S. government flouting international law in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and God knows where else—it would be easy to take my objection as an argument for war without limits. But recognizing the brutal reality of war is not at all the same as reveling in it. The overarching idiocy of Mr. Grayling’s book is the belief that war offers exactitude, moral and physical neatness, the ability to determine precisely “the point at which moral trespass occurred.”

Though Mr. Grayling claims that he’s taking up the challenge of a new moral inquiry impossible until now, Among the Dead Cities feels like the work of a sensibility that predates modern warfare. The author is like someone out of The Four Feathers, someone who believes that war can be conducted with the fairness and honor you’d expect to find on the playing fields of Eton: Dash it all, some things just aren’t cricket!

Only a sadistic cretin would feel pride at the inhuman destruction waged in the name of inhumanity during World War II. Both sides suffered. It does not follow that all victims are created equally.

Charles Taylor has written for Salon, The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He’s a frequent contributor to The Observer.