Hitler

Hitler

Adolf Hitler. “Never in history has such ruination—physical and moral—been associated with the name of one man,” writes author Ian Kershaw about the “main author of a war leaving 50 million dead,” and the “chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known.” The horrific scope of Hitler’s legacy makes any attempt to tell his story an immense challenge. But it’s a challenge that Kershaw meets spectacularly in Hitler.

The story is all here of course: Hitler’s strange, terrifying arc from failed artist and social dropout misfit to beer-hall agitator, head of state and “Führer.” Many explanations have been offered to explain Hitler: he has been seen as a power-mad opportunist, a fanatical ideologue, a political con-man, a demon or simply a lunatic. For Kershaw though, the real mystery of the story of Hitler is the emptiness at its center. Outside politics, Hitler’s life was largely a void. Invoking Max Weber’s concept of “charismatic authority,” that of a people projecting onto a leader heroic attributes and a mission of salvation, Kershaw sees Hitler as playing a role. His “entire being came to be subsumed with the role he played to perfection: the role of ‘Führer.’” And so Kershaw’s task is not to focus on the personality of Hitler, but on the “character of his power—the power of the Führer.” A history of Hitler must, argues Kershaw, be “a history of his power—how he came to get it, what its character was, how he exercised it, why he was allowed to expand it to break all institutional barriers, why resistance to that power was so feeble.” It’s a history that involves not only Hitler, but the German people as well.

Kershaw notes that “Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany.” Though he never actually mustered a majority in a free election, he was nonetheless legally appointed Reich Chancellor just as his predecessors had been, and became in the 1930s “the most popular head of state in the world.” To explain this, Kershaw looks to a German people traumatized by a lost war and an economic crisis. “At any other time, Hitler would have been a nobody.” Kershaw explores the unfolding and ultimate collapse of Hitler’s power with mesmerizing thoroughness. By the time we get to the agonizing details of the last days in the Führer Bunker, of Hitler’s last vain hopes for military success and plots to take revenge against those he felt had betrayed him, the claustrophobic effect is overwhelming.

For this volume, Kershaw has condensed his two-part biography, published in 1998 and 2000. The result, with many fascinating and haunting photographs, is the compelling account of the birth and death of the “Führer,” even as the man behind the mask remains an eternal enigma.

Hardcover: 1056 pages

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. ( November 01, 2008 )

Item #: 12-2174

ISBN: 9780393067576

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 1.68 inches

Product Weight: 55.0 ounces