WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, ADIE?

Justin Aldmann is to blame for this one.

Some weeks ago he recommended an Internet radio station that plays nothing but the music of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and before long the thing had spread through the Council. Justin claims that when these songs were actually popular he wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to them. They were verboten, style wise for a young person. He had standards, although his main concern wasn’t being cool. However, he did have eclectic tastes.

The curious thing is that he seems to know nearly every one of the tunes.

Apparently nobody told the 1960s that Justin wasn’t listening. The songs came through car radios and kitchen radios, stores and restaurants and other people’s stereos until they lodged themselves somewhere in his head without permission. Now that he’s older, he’s made the still more disturbing discovery that he actually likes most of them. He says the melodies sound better than he remembers and the words make considerably more sense.

Age does terrible things to a person.

So we’ve all been listening.

And eventually I heard “Alfie.”

I knew the song, of course. Or thought I did. But this time I actually listened to what Hal David was asking this poor fellow.

What’s life about? Is it every man for himself? Is kindness foolish? Does strength win simply because it is strength? Or is there something else going on here—something involving love, giving, commitment and another human being?

And somewhere in the middle of all this I committed what I thought was a very small joke.

I changed Alfie to Adie.

Then I imagined Eva Braun singing it. Unfortunately, the joke held up. So I played it again. This time I took notes.

🎶What’s it all about, Adie?

Is it just for the moment we live?

What’s it all about when you sort it out, Adie?

Are we meant to take more than we give?

Or are we meant to be kind?

I stopped there.

That’s quite a question to put to Adolf Hitler.

Forget the Reich for a minute. Forget armies, borders, history, destiny and all the capital-letter abstractions men occasionally become very excited about.

Eva is asking something much smaller and considerably larger:

Adie, what is a human life for?

And because we already know where this particular relationship ends, the question has an urgency Hal David could never possibly have intended.

There isn’t much life left.

🎶And if, if only fools are kind, Alfie

Then I guess it is wise to be cruel

And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie

What will you lend on an old golden rule?

Now I stopped it again.

Because this was where my silly substitution began behaving suspiciously like an argument.

I am not going to tell you that Hitler was sitting in the bunker with a dog-eared copy of Nietzsche on his nightstand. His relationship to Nietzsche is more complicated than the popular shorthand, and Nietzsche deserves considerably better treatment than being reduced to a slogan.

But listen to what Eva has just asked our imaginary Adie.

Is life about taking?

Is giving foolish?

Is kindness for fools?

Those questions sound remarkably pointed when addressed to a man whose political universe placed such enormous emphasis upon struggle, strength and will.

Eva Braun has somehow become a relationship counselor to the Will to Power.

I did not see that coming either.

And that’s the passage that made me sit up.

Because Eva isn’t offering Adie a competing political philosophy. She isn’t telling him somebody else’s system would work better.

She’s challenging the premise.

What if strength isn’t what life is about?

That’s a rather formidable question to arrive disguised as a Burt Bacharach song.

And Eva’s proposed alternative is almost embarrassingly ordinary.

Love.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Planet Parenthood.

A WORD ABOUT FAMILY VALUES

The Third Reich was hardly bashful about marriage and family. It encouraged marriage, offered qualifying newlyweds interest-free marriage loans, forgave a portion of those loans as children arrived, provided other advantages to families and treated marriage, motherhood and children as positive social goods.

There were exclusions, and we might as well be precise about them.

The original marriage-loan program excluded Jews, people deprived of civil rights, people regarded as politically unreliable, people classified as having certain hereditary physical or mental illnesses, and those whom the authorities classified as “asocial.” Later racial legislation made the distinction between Jews and people of “German or related blood” explicit and extended racial exclusions to Roma and Black people as well.

But there is another detail worth knowing because the shorthand version of Nazi racial policy can obscure it.

Among Germans accepted as members of the national community, family policy did not ordinarily sort people into Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean-looking or other supposed European racial subtypes and dispense marriage benefits accordingly. “German or related blood” was itself a broader category than one might expect. Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick specifically explained that national minorities such as Danes and Poles could be regarded as of related blood. Nazi racial anthropologists likewise regarded Slavic populations as containing many of the same supposed European racial types—including the Nordic type—that they identified among Germans.

So, if we’re talking specifically about family policy, let’s get the history right.

The government wasn’t handing one marriage loan to the blond fellow, another to the Alpine fellow and telling the Mediterranean-looking Bavarian to try his luck elsewhere.

For the ordinary German couple who met the eligibility requirements, the message was considerably simpler:

Get married. Have children. Build a family.

Which makes one particular bachelor rather conspicuous.

Adie.

The man presiding over all this marrying and reproducing remained unmarried himself. And Eva waited. And waited.

Planet Parenthood has encountered this situation before.

🎶 As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Allie

I know there’s something much more

Something even non-believers can believe in

There it is. Eva has answered her own question.

Not victory.

Not power.

Not getting what you can while you can.

Love.

And here’s where my joke stopped being quite as funny to me. Because Eva Braun went to Berlin. She knew what was happening. She knew the war was lost. She had opportunities not to share Hitler’s fate. She went anyway. She stayed. And then, after all those years, Adie married her.

Think about how unnecessary that wedding was if marriage is merely practical.

There was no household to establish.

No children to plan.

No property ladder to climb.

No retirement account.

No golden anniversary.

They didn’t even have much of a honeymoon. They had hours. They could have died as lovers.

They chose to die as husband and wife.

And I don’t think we should sneer at that.

When almost every practical reason for marriage had disappeared, the distinction between being lovers and being married still mattered.

That is worth noticing.

Especially on Planet Parenthood.

🎶 I believe in love, Adie

Without true love we just exist, Adie

Until you find the love you’ve missed you’re nothing, Adie

When you walk, let your heart lead the way

And you’ll find love any day, Adie
Adie

And that’s where I let the record play out. My little experiment had begun with changing one name because it made me laugh.

But now look where Eva has taken us.

The song begins with the question of what life is for. It passes through self-interest, taking, kindness, strength and love. And when we place those questions—quite unfairly to Hal David, I admit—inside the Führerbunker, history supplies an ending nobody writing a romantic song in the 1960s could have invented.

Adie marries Eva.

At the end of a political project built around enormous abstractions—race, nation, history, destiny, empire—we arrive at something almost absurdly small.

A man.

A woman.

A promise.

The Third Reich had spent years telling its people to marry, have children and build families. Its leader waited until virtually the last possible moment to practice the first part himself.

Better late than never seems inadequate under the circumstances. But technically accurate. And I find myself unwilling to make the marriage the joke.

The circumstances are the joke. Marriage isn’t.

Perhaps that is what surprised me most about putting Eva’s voice into this old song. If marriage means anything, surely part of its meaning is precisely that it asserts something beyond immediate utility. It says that love ought to take a form, make a promise, establish a bond and, ordinarily, open itself toward a future.

Eva and Adie would have no such future. But they made the promise anyway.

So I am returning the record to Justin.

He can have his Bacharach and David station back.

Although I suspect I’ll keep listening.

Because after all this, I have an answer to Hal David’s question—or at least the answer Planet Parenthood was bound to come up with.

Life is for living. Love is for giving.

And when you’ve finally found the person you’re determined to face the end of the world with—

for heaven’s sake, marry them.

THE ESTABLISHMENT VIEW
Kevin—Derek’s socially impaired and spectacularly unreliable friend—somehow arrives at the establishment view of the Adie-and-Eva nuptials.

Planet Parenthood does not. We remain pro-wedding.