Martin Amis - From the Acknowledgements and Afterword (301-02) lyrics

He has so far gone unnamed in this book; but now I am obliged to type out the words “Adolf Hitler.” And he seems slightly more manageable, somehow, when escorted by quotation marks. Of mainstream historians, not one claims to understand him, and many make a point of saying they don't understand him; and some, like Alan Bullock, go further and admit to an ever-deepening perplexity (“I can't explain Hitler. I don't believe anyone can . . . The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain”). We know a great deal about the how—about how he did what he did; but we seem to know almost nothing about the why. Newly detrained at Auschwitz in February 1944, and newly stripped, showered, sheared, tattooed, and reclothed in random rags (and nursing a four-day thirst) Primo Levi and his fellow Italian prisoners were packed into a vacant shed and told to wait. This famous pa**age continues: . . . I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand's reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “HIer ist kein warum”(there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove. There was no why in Auschwitz. Was there a why in the mind of the Reichskanzler-President-Generalissimo? And if there was, why can't we find it?