THE HITLER SALUTE: ON THE MEANING OF A GESTURE
By Tilman Allert
Metropolitan, 106 pages, $20

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.  read more »