Hitler 1889-1936 : Hubris by Ian Kershaw
London: Penguin Books, 1999 (First published 1998) ISBN 0140288988
Anyone who has serious interest in the history of World War Two and Nazi Germany is aware of this biography, and anyone who has a serious interest in the history of World War Two and Nazi Germany should read it. I have finally got around to it, and this review is my half-way point, having finished the first volume.
The problem with all biographies of Hitler - a big problem for those that chose to write one - is that Hitler in his personal life was a cipher. His life was the movement, the struggle, the grasping of power. He seems to have undergone very little personal development beyond his early years: his personal life was in essence non-existent. Which leaves biographers with a big issue - how do you write a life of such a person? Kershaw in this book has gone down the line of a political biography, which grapples with the issue being a biography of Hitler vs. a history of the Nazi movement. At times Hubris does read like a history of Germany and the Nazis rather than the biography of a particular person, but as Hitler said, Providence had given him to Germany, and Germany to him, so perhaps it is all one and the same.
This first volume takes the reader to 1936, the year that Kershaw believes Hitler's trajectory moves from Hubris to Nemesis and the beginning of the descent to the disasters of 1945. Kershaw deals with Hitler's early life by judiciously sifting the available evidence for some sense of the actual. This is not easy, as both the idolators and bitter enemies of the man published and instigated many falsities and rumours about him. What we do know for sure is that Hitler's father was a nasty piece of work, and his mother seems to have worshipped him, as he did her. His early life created a personality that easily succumbed to the extreme narcissism that he exhibited later on, and his early failures he blamed on others. Kershaw, like most other biographers, struggles to pin down just how Hitler came to develop his extreme anti-semitism, but posits - unlike some others - that it didn't develop fully during his time in Vienna, but brewed and developed more after World War One when he tried to fit Germany's defeat and collapse into a world-view that made sense to him.
Kershaw develops the view during this volume that Hitler was mostly an opportunist, who took his chances when events swung his way. Time and time again, when a crisis in the Party - or later on the State - occurred, it found Hitler stricken with indecision, waiting to see how events might unfold, before he then moved, usually decisively and taking the most extreme option. Far from being in control of events as they unfolded, Hitler was often carried along by the extremism of his followers.
The one thing Hitler did have was the power to engage people when he spoke. Kershaw writes well of Hitler's early years in the party, where it was his demagoguery that dragged the Nazis from a fringe of fanatics into a group that was drawing attention firstly in Bavaria, and then across Germany. The machinations of these early years are well-covered, as is the putsch attempt in 1923, which in many ways was the making of Hitler and his movement.
He was also helped by the incompetence of others, not only in Germany but across Europe and the USA. It's important to note, as Kershaw does, that large portions of German society never felt comfortable with the Wiemar Republic or democracy, and the conservative Volkisch sections of society worked assiduously to undermine successive democratic governments, with a view to replacing them with a renewed monarchy, a military-led government or some other technocratic anti-democratic way of ruling. Hitler played to these forces very well, as unlike them, he could garner a mass following of ordinary people through his extraordinary ability to mobilize ordinary Germans with his speeches. While the other conservative forces thought Hitler was a simple-minded demagogue whom they could control, he (and his clever minions Goebbels, Goring and Himmler) quickly outsmarted them once he gained power.
His path to the top was aided by the activities of other countries - the strange mix of brutality (reparations) and appeasement that created the atmosphere for him to whip the people into a frenzy, and which gave him foreign policy wins when he needed them. And he did need wins - reoccupying the Rhineland took the country's mind off their increasing debt and food supply problems, and the issues the Third Reich had with the Protestant Church in Germany.
What Kershaw makes clear is that Hitler was driven by one overarching idea: to make Germany great again in an almost purely military sense. Once he controlled the levers of power he virtually crashed the economy to enable a quick re-armament and re-enlistment to occur. He was obsessed with Germany taking once again its "rightful place" amongst European nations, and increasing its reach into Eastern Europe. This desire was almost purely his own amongst the Nazi hierarchy. Anti-semitism was shared by not only other Nazi leaders, but by a majority of the German population, although not to the same murderous extent. Hitler, up until 1936 played a strategic game against the Jewish population, ratcheting up the pressure when he thought it would benefit, and dialling it down when pressure on him from outside forces became too much. The Jews were fated to suffer most from Hitler's uncontrollable desire to seek scapegoats and revenge for his failures that were to come.
For Hitler was essentially a spoiled child and a thug - when things didn't go his way he had a tantrum, and he took revenge on those whom he thought had wronged him. He would have continued to be a boring conspiracy theorist trapped in homeless shelters and hovels if he had not grasped the opportunities that came his way, and if history had moved in a different direction. Kershaw shows in this volume of his biography that at almost every "sliding doors moment" that occurred in Hitler's life, the doors to more power were the ones that opened for him. That he took advantage of situations as they presented themselves to him we are left in no doubt: Kershaw also shows us that Hitler, the great fabulist, retrospectively re-engineered his own history to convince himself that it was his perserverence, his intelligence and his hard work that led these situations to come about. His increasing narcissism, fuelled by the increasing personality cult surrounding his every move, made him feel like he was some sort of messiah, who's every thought and plan was inspired from above and who could never fail.
Kershaw has with skill woven a complex net of persons, events and history together to create a compelling biography - I look forward to my adventure with volume 2 - Nemesis.
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