A good portion of the 16,000 books Hitler owned–a collection currently housed in Russia and the Library of Congress–reads like a Who’s Who of early 20th century racial theorists, bunk eugenicists, and crackpot political theorists. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Paul Lagarde, and America’s own Henry Ford were, therefore, lining his stacks.

To be fair, Hitler dabbled in literature, architecture, and what was then considered respectable history. But our reviewer, Michael McDonald, goes along with Ryback’s main point: that nearly all of the things Hitler read simply confirmed his opinions. Nary a word seemed to challenge them.

But here’s something I noticed, both in Ryback’s and other reviews, like the New York Times’ (in January, 2009). Critics keep pointing out the facile irony, that Hitler “may be better known to posterity for burning rather than cherishing books.” It’s a small point they make, admittedly. But it is seems an entirely false irony in any event. If one takes Ryback’s point seriously–that Hitler kept a horrendously dogmatic, selective, and self-serving collection of book, no matter how many–then it stands to reason that once he had the chance, he’d be just as selective with what went in his countries’ libraries too. He wasn’t against books, just certain kinds.

And on the last point: the books Hitler banned. I came across what seems like a reliable survey of the book-banning campaign under the Nazi regime at the University of Arizona’s library Web site. Apparently the library organized an exhibit in 2001 based on the the scholar Leonidas Hill’s book “The Nazi Attack on Un-German Literature, 1933-1945.” There’s a link to several scanned lists (and translated too!) that Nazi-approved groups made, too.

And worth noting, a list published by in 1935 by Die Bucherei, the official Nazi journal for lending libraries:

No “literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism,”
No “Pacifist literature,”
No “Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writing supporting the Weimar Republic.”
No “historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud (Emil Ludwig).”
No “Books that advocate ‘art’ which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist.”
And No “Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field”

What’s more, the Roth’s today celebrate Christmas. Definitely not a Jew.

The unnamed friend in the poem seems to live a happy existence. With each new love of his, he fully inhabits that person’s mind, learning to think, act and feel exactly as she would. But the flip-side (not necessarily a down-side, based on my reading) is that he loses any ability to develop his own personality, his own sense of self. When he moves on to another lover, he simply becomes someone else.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that he’s somehow “fake” or disingenious; not at all. He’s just mastered the skill we all more or less sharpen when we love someone, romanticly, or as friends, family, or otherwise. He’s gone beyond empathy, beyond sympathy even, and reached an utterly un-self-conscious kind of understanding. A real transcending of the self, and all the crap that comes with it — pride, temerity, caution, selfishness. He no longer views the person he’s with objectively either, and thinks entirely as she would. To his lover, this could make him unreliable of course, being of no use when she asks for honest advice. But he is happy, always discovering something new.

One challenge this kind of person poses is that he leaves no trace on his peers. When his former girlfriend’s brag to their new boyfriends about this old flame, Gluck writes, the new boyfriends “tolerate this, they even smile. / … they know this man doesn’t exist.” He embodies no qualities that his peers can look up to (or be jealous of), that they really admire about him. That is besides, of course, the happiness he’s learned to acquire through constant transformation.

Would you want to be him? Or, if you’re less enthused, do you even like him?

Just a thought.

But the plot isn’t why it’s so good. What Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “Che,” all “Ocean’s Eleven through Thirteen”) has done is create a snapshot of our gilded age–its fragility, uncertainty and systemic collusion. We are all bit players, Soderbergh seems to say, in an economy whose underlying motive isn’t real wealth, but the mere appearance of it. Bankers have deluded themselves into thinking that they can buy “the girlfriend experience,” while the seedy petit bourgeois–escorts, trainers–believe money will set them free.

The strength of Soderbergh’s film is that these comparisons aren’t made explicit, though they eventually become clear, thus saving it from dumbed-down fare. The subtle force behind its power is Soderbergh’s technique. He uses a hand-held digital camera, with even the audio muffled out at times by the background clatter of clinging glassware and scraped plates at New York new wealth’s favorite haunts (Craftsteak, Public). Reality TV only hopes to reach this kind of realism.

The film also gets a boost from the spot-on acting of the mostly non-professional cast. Few of the films main conceits–how insecure the wealthy are about the foundations of their wealth, say, or how supremely rational a prostitute must be to keep sex and love in two separate spheres–come through in the dialogue alone. It’s the actors’ inflection, their way of talking around subjects, the negation of what’s been said by an anxious little laugh, that makes their message clear.

Perhaps Soderbergh was exhausted after making his 4-hour “Che” epic, released earlier this year, but the films only flaw may be its hurried rush. Cut, cut, cut to the next scene–you can almost feel director fidgeting at the editing room desk. In any event, not since Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”–or perhaps ever–has a filmmaker captured the grand delusions of a society drunk on expensive champagne, over-priced to begin with, and air.