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Title: Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris
ISBN: 0393320359
Author:
Ian Kershaw
Publicate Date: 2000-04
Publish: 2000-04
List Price: $21.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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1: Superb
Kershaw undertakes three major tasks in the first volume of this outstanding biography. The first is fundamental biographer's responsibility of providing a thorough and well documented account of Hitler's life. The second, and in some ways more demanding task, is to explain how the indolent, poorly educated resident of a Vienna flophouse came to dominate the most powerful nation in Europe. The third is to explain the nature of the Fuehrer's role in the Nazi state. Kershaw accomplishes all these tasks superbly.
As a basic narrative, this is first rate work. Kershaw works carefully through Hitler's life, using sources juidiciously and describing uncertainty about events where there is little information. Where Kershaw really excels, however, is his ability to integrate Hitler's life story with what might be called a biography of Germany. Kershaw's description and explanation of the course of German history over this period is excellent and his ability to integrate it seamlessly with the narrative of Hitler's life is outstanding.
Kershaw brings considerable analytic power and understanding to the story of Hitler's accession to power. An expert on interwar Germany, Kershaw's descriptions of Hitler's brutal but quite conventional ideology, the structural weaknesses of the Weimar state, and the hatred of conservative forces for Weimar institutions are insightful and reveal his command of the large secondary literature. Kershaw shows Hitler's capacity for mass mobilization by relying on what appears to be a unique talent for drawing on the worst fears and tendencies of the German electorate. Kershaw shows also that Hitler was remarkably fortunate. While he had outstanding political instincts for capitalizing on new circumstances, he rarely made those circumstances. Hitler's rise to power is shown to result from a combination of the unique stresses of post-WWI Germany, the anti-liberal heritage of the Wilhelmine state, the widespread acceptance of radically anti-Semitic racism, his own limited but real political talents, and great good fortune. Kershaw's synthesis is cogent and presented clearly but does not sacrifice the complexity of events.
Kershaw addresses also the nature of Hitler's role in the Nazi state - an issue of some controversy among historians. How great a role did Hitler play in the running of the Nazi state and setting policies? How great a role did popular opinion play? An essentially lazy man, Hitler was a very hands off dictator. Kershaw shows, however, that Hitler set the ideological goals for the state, was the crucial arbiter of policy, and maintained a connection with the mass of the German people that was independent of state and party. Kershaw's model is essentially that of subordinates competing to accomplish what they thought were Hitler's goals. The result was an administratively chaotic and very corrupt melange of different institutions engaged in a horrifying competition to achieve the goals of racial purity and European domination set by Hitler.
Written very well and documented superbly, this is the Hitler biography for our time and for the foreseeable future.
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2: Solid but with problems
This is a solid but unspectacular study of Hitler--hardly the definitive account trumnpeted by its publisher and by some reviewers here. Many reviewers have commented on how many sources--including primary ones-that the author turns to. I had the opposite reaction. To be sure, there is a huge bibliography and many notes (more on these later)but I saw, as someone trained in history, a lot of padding here. Perhaps more surprising is how frequently Kershaw turns to a handful of works to guide him--and these are almost always secondary ones. For instance, on the question of the role of big business in Hitler's rise to power, Kershaw relies almost exclusively on Turner's Big Business. Maddeningly in the text, (Chapter 10, p. 392 in the paperback version) he writes that on 19 November, "the Reich President (Hindenburg) was handed a petition carrying 20 signatures from businessmen demanding the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor." Yet Kershaw fails to mention who these businessmen were and in the footnote he provides no further information about them, only that the document is printed elsewhere. This is not terribly helpful for the reader. Also, Kershaw relies a great deal on Goebbels notebook accounts of Hitler, sometimes almost exclusively, but Goebbels the supreme sycophant is hardly the most reliable observer.
Returning to the problem of footnotes in Kershaw's study, there is much, much information in the notes that should have been incorporated into the text. For instance, the whole account of the Reichstag fire (weak in the text) is fleshed out in more detail in the footnotes. Numerous other examples of this abound: Kershaw simply has a poor notion of what should be read in the text and what should be in the footnotes. Footnotes should be to document the text not to supplant it.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in this biography--and it is a major one--is that Hitler himself gets lost many times in Kershaw's pages. I have little notion of Hitler the man from these numerous pages--certainly less so than that provided by Toland for instance, who is also a far superior writer. When he does talk about Hitler's personal life, he seems to almost recount it along the lines of Nerin E. Gun's Eva Braun, Hitler's Mistress while only footnoting that source, I think, once. To my mind, Gun provides an essential amount of information into Hitler's psyche that is largely missing in this work. I further believe that Kershaw overemphasizes Hitler's blandness and he underestimates his talents (his superb sense of timing, his ability to read his enemies). Although Hitler undoubtedly was the beneficiary of the economic chaos of his times and the aftermath of WWI, he surely brought more to the table than what Kershaw gives him credit for. All in all, I found this work largely predictable and given its newness, with very few new insights.
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3: Putting Hitler into History
Hitler is the most difficult person to write a biography of. An obscure person came out of nowhere, and, against impossible odds, totally (and horribly) transformed human history. It is tempting to "explain" Hitler's career as outside the bounds of history, not subject to the usual rules of cause and effect, and instead speak of his "demonic" character, his "evil genius", and so on.
Kershaw will have none of this. Evil Hitler certainly was, he notes, but this is no *explanation* of his career. The historian must, instead, dissect Hitler with his regular tools: looking up original contemporary documents to see what casual chain explains what happened. This, Kershaw does superbly. Almost every page gives a new understanding of how Hitler *really* started the Nazi movement, how it *really* became popular, how he *really* got into power, etc.
I shall give only one example, for lack of space. Everybody "knows" the Nazi party was Hitler's creation, and that his "hypnotic" control over the masses made him the undoubted "Fuhrer" of the party from the start. Wrong, says Kershaw: Hitler *did* have a natural talent for speechmaking and keeping his audience enthralled, but why should this be enough to make him the unchallanged leader? In reality, Hitler was not only *not* the founder of the Nazi party, but--until his jail time in the mid-1920s--he was chiefly the Nazis' main propagandist, *not* their undisputed leader. Indeed, he saw himself, precisely because of his rhetorical talent, as merely the "drummer" for a coming national leader--NOT the leader himself. Only during his stay in prison did he, for complicated reasons (which Kershaw explains), become unchallangeable in the party, begin to think of himself as the "great leader", and started the "Fuhrer" cult.
Not only does this make much more sense than the "standard" evil-genius account of Hitler's rise from obscurity, it also allows us to understand Hitler's real strengths *and* weaknesses--an understanding that gives a deeper insight into his career than any "evil genius" portrait. Kershaw succeeeded in that most difficult of tasks: making Hitler, of all people, a figure *in* history, not outside it.
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4: Anticipating "what Hitler wanted"
This is a long and very detailed book. I knew it was not going to be easy reading when I started it. To my surprise, the first part of the book was quite compelling and not at all difficult to read. At about the halfway point of the book's nearly 600 pages of text, I got bogged down in the details of party politics and it was rough slogging. It took me several weeks to get through that part, but by the time it got to the chapter, "Working Toward the Fuhrer," my attention was once again riveted to the book. I knew very little about the personal life of Hitler and still cannot say that I know much more. Apparently nobody knew the real Hitler. But Kershaw's book certainly made me see him more as an individual rather than as a symbol of evil. I got a great deal out of this book and I have a much better understanding of how Hitler came to power. What I found most interesting about the book was the idea that everyone supposedly "knew what the Fuhrer wanted" and acted accordingly. So much of the evil of Nazi Germany was voluntary and done without being ordered to do so. People were encouraged to take actions that they "knew" Hitler would approve. It was a mindset not unlike "knowing what God would want me to do." Hitler had indeed, through propagandistic promotion, become a deity. Kershaw's biography, in conjunction with Frederic Spotts' HITLER AND THE POWER OF AESTHETICS, gives a very good idea of what life in Germany was like during Hitler's rise and why the German people found him so appealing. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the causes of World War II. Even though the book is extremely long, none of it is superfluous. I would not cut any of it. I plan to read volume II, even though it too is quite a tome. This book is worth spending time on. Five stars.
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5: The Ultimate Hitler Bio
This is the best portrait of Hitler we're likely ever to get -- thoroughly researched. A lot of new insights here, surprising to discover that Hitler was not 100% the thug we assumed he was. He just had others do most of the dirty work. Very convenient.
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