Book Review - Hitler's Private Library by Timothy W. Ryback

 Hitler's Private Library: the Books that Shaped his Life by Timothy W. Ryback

London: Vintage Books, 2010 (first published 2009)    ISBN 9780099532170

This is a fascinating book, although perhaps the title should be reversed, as this book is more about the books that shaped Hitler's life that were in his library, rather than a full discussion of Hitler's Library. Still, if you are a student of Nazi Germany, it is well worth reading.

Ryback focusses on a few key works, and uses them to dive into Hitler the man, Hitler the thinker, and Hitler the leader. From a book on the architecture of Berlin that he purchased while on the front in France in 1915, to the presentation copies of Mein Kampf that were scattered around his flat in Munich after the war, we get through Ryback's book an insight into how and what Hitler read from his library, which by some estimates contained over 16,000 volumes.

To firstly deal with the library itself. Ryback charts its growth from a couple of bookcases in Hitler's early digs in Munich, to a vast conglomeration that was held in Munich, Berlin and at the Obersalzberg. Many of the volumes were presented to Hitler, as it was well known that he enjoyed getting books as a gift. Ryback has a couple of fascinating stories about how Hitler acquired some of his collection, including an interview with Leni Reifenstahl, during which she describes how she gave Hitler a rare set of volumes of Fichte to smooth over quarrel they had over the Jewish question. Throughout the book, and partially via some appendices from other documents, Ryback describes how we have what we have of Hitler's library (approximately ten percent), through confiscation by the allies or pilfering by individuals.

The larger part of this book is to do with what and how Hitler read (and wrote). Many of the books that Ryback mentions Hitler had marked with underlining, marks in the margins, question marks or exclamation marks. From these it is possible sometimes to surmise Hitler's thinking about certain subjects. In an early chapter, Ryback goes into Hitler's relationship with Dietrich Eckart, a formative experience for the young man, and important in the sense that is seems to be during this time that Hitler formed and firmed most of his political views.

What is clear is that once Hitler formed his views, he mostly read to confirm them. Like many autodidacts, Hitler read voraciously, not really to expand his mind, but to gather material to confirm his pre-existing thoughts and biases. Many of the books gifted to him over the years fed precisely this need, especially those given to him as gifts from his inner circle. It seems he was prone to agree with anything that prophesied that Germany needed a saviour to gain its deserved glory in the parade of nations, for example. He also devoured statistical material, and we have many examples of people being astounded at his recall of obscure facts about military equipment, or statistical information about countries. While this feat might have dazzled some, it is not necessarily a sign of a deep thinker, or indeed of wisdom.

One part of the Hitler library Ryback doesn't really discuss is his large collection of books to do with the occult and astrology. It seems from some reports that this was one of the major parts of his collection - he seems to have had astrological charts drawn up for himself on at least one occasion, and for me it would have been interesting to explore this bizarre side of Hitler's character a little more.

This book is not really about Hitler's Library, it is a book about Hitler illuminated through the texts he chose to read. It's probably not a book to read if you don't know much about Hitler or Germany, as it does assume some prior knowledge. Not bad.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

 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.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

 

Book Review - The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans

London: Penguin, 2005              ISBN 0143034693


Richard Evans' three volume history of the Third Reich is set to become a classic of history. Having read the third volume, The Third Reich at War, I've come to this first volume with some idea of Evans' style and approach to the subject. This volume doesn't disappoint.

Evans begins his book with a quick overview of the Bismarkian period of German history, and how that era both set the stage for World War One, and in some ways for the reaction to Germany's loss in that war. In fact the Nazi Party is not mentioned until the reader is almost half-way through this volume, with Evans giving a comprehensive coverage of the Weimar period that led up to the Nazi takeover.

He describes a country ravaged not only economically and physically by her experience of war, but politically as well. The country was almost evenly divided between those on the left, who saw aristocracy and Capital as the reasons Germany suffered catastrophe, and those of the Nationalistic right, who longed for the re-instatement of the the old forms, and who felt that it was the socialistic left who gave the army the "stab in the back" that led to ultimate defeat. These two sides of the debate had almost equal support in the body politic of Germany, until the Depression.

The fact that it was mostly the left of politics who held the reins in Germany in the 1920s ironically assisted the Nazi rise to power after the Depression hit, as it was the left that took the blame for what happened, even though to a great extent it was external forces that brought the German economy to its knees. The Nazis took advantage of the chaos, with their brown-shirted SA men fomenting much of the violence that scared the middle-classes, while Hitler espoused a mantra of stability and rebirth that the same middle-classes found attractive.

Evans clearly describes how the Nazis were very much a modern phenomenon, not so much a party as a movement, with a myriad organisations and groups under their banner, covering every aspect of life. Their ceaseless energy also made an impression on the German people.

This energy and organisation meant that when the chance came they were ready to take the country by the throat. Hitler had enough brains to know that he should only throw his lot in with the traditional Nationalist parties when they offered him the top job, and when they did, the Nazis went into action, using their structure to quickly infiltrate every part of German political and cultural life. The chaos that the country found itself in lent credence to the claim of emergency powers, but what Evans shows is how quickly the Nazis used "legal" means to begin their repression and re-organisation of society.

While they never got over 50% of the vote, the Nazis did garner most of the vote of the right, and the middle just wanted the chaos over and done with. The left's big mistake was not to fight fire with fire and bring on a confrontation on the street. They had their reasons for not trying this, but it was to be their downfall: by the time the Social Democrats and Communists realised that the Nazi "government" was a dictatorship by thuggery, their parties and organisations had been smashed, and many of their members jailed, or cowed into submission.

The Nazis themselves had various factions within the party - those who were more socialist, those who thrived on violence, those who wanted a revival of Germany, and those who wanted the Jews dealt with. Evans shows how Nazi propaganda, driven by Goebbels, promoted various parts of their ideas to different parts of German society, depending on what would resonate with that particular group. This part of the book is fascinating, as Evans shows that the Nazis were the first of the modern political parties, targeting their constituencies with the appropriate information, and toning down what they mightn't want to hear. Where anti-semitism went well they pushed that, where "blood and soil" was popular that was what they ran with, and so on. These sections of the book can, in this day and age, be a depressing read, as it reflects the current level of politics, in this country at least.

Evans has aimed this trilogy at a reader who is not familiar with the Third Reich and the Nazis, and on that basis this is a wonderfully comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of the topic. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Diary of a man in despair by Friderich Reck

Diary of a man in despair by Friedrich Reck, Translated from the German by Paul Rubens, Afterword by Richard J. Evans.

New York : New York Review Books, 2013                             ISBN 9781590175866


Friedrich Reck was a minor German novelist active in the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote simple stuff, somewhere between airport fiction and Morris West. Not the sort of author I would normally read, but this is not a normal book. Reck was an arch conservative, and an arch-enemy of Hitler. Those two phrases don't seem to sit right together, although he wasn't the only German conservative to hate the Nazis - but he was the only one to write something like this.

This is not a diary in the sense that Victor Klemperer wrote a diary, more a set of meditations on the state of Nazi Germany and the War that carry the date they were written. Reck apparently kept these writings very secret, and they weren't published in Germany until 1947. Reck himself died of typhus in Dachau in February 1945, having been imprisoned on a charge of "insulting the German currency".

What is fascinating about this book is how prescient Reck was about the fate of Germany. He was an aristocrat by nature, if not by title, and loathed "mass-man", which he noted was not a phrase interchangeable with "proletariat"; realising that it was the lower end of the Middle Class from which came the masses who followed the likes of Hitler, and who were debasing what Reck saw as true German culture.

He saw clearly that despite the Nazi claims to be true Germans, they were in fact in thrall to the technocracy - the likes of Krupp and Farben - and were busily destroying their much-loved German countryside to enable German industry to build the war machines required by Hitler for his madness.He sees Hitler himself as almost a cypher, describing him as a man "without the slightest self-awareness and pleasure in himself, that he basically hates himself, and this opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now-apocalyptic vanity are all based on one thing - a consuming drive to drown out the pain in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity." and later "There he sat, a raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, a teetotalling Alexander, a womanless Napoleon, an effigy of Bismark..." what Reck did see in Hitler was the death of Germany as he knew it, through being eliminated by the Nazis or by Germany being crushed in war.

He had much to say on modern developments, believing the Prussians and technology were to blame for the state of the world, with Prussian bloodlust combining with the ability of technology to raise the common man leading to a destruction of higher feeling in Germans. His writing and turn of phrase are wonderful, forceful and inventive. "...and the masses sensing that they are doomed, they will, no doubt, strike out against everything that is not mass-like, but is, simply, 'different'. In Germany, whose Hitler regime is simply a massive attempt to prolong the existence of mass-man, the target will be that small elite which has done more harm to this regime with its principled 'No' than all the Chamberlain policy of impotence and endless appeasement. I believe that our martyrdom, the fate reserved for our little phalanx, is the price for a rebirth of the spirit, and that realising this, we can hope for no more good during what remains of our ruined and brutalised lives on earth than that there may be meaning to the manner of our deaths." This was written in September 1937, when Chamberlain, and not only him, did indeed still see Hitler as someone with whom they could work.

In 1942 Reck was already predicting the German regime's downfall - "This war based on the revolt of the masses may destroy the Gothic cathedrals and silence forever Bach's 'Chaconne': but a horde of degenerate football players will not survive the fire they started."

Reck also includes some great little pieces of gossip about the leaders of the Third Reich (mostly incorrect), and throughout his writing are descriptions of small acts of defiance by normal Germans against the Party. From his essay written in February 1943 - " The news of the Anglo-American landing in Africa spread with a speed that amazed me. Despite the ban on listening to the Allied radio, the news spread within an hour, And I was even more amazed, that gray November day, to see the reaction the news produced. Everyone seemed glad about this decisive change in the course of the war, which meant the defeat of his own country, and Bavarians [Reck owned property in Bavaria and this is where the diary was written] had the added consideration to ponder that the fighting must eventually reach the Alps.....Everyone sensed that a ghostly hand had nailed the death warrant of the Nazis to the wall, and this had as salutary an effect on the bad as it did on the good."

His entry concerned with the July Plot is a scathing attack on the Prussian military caste, who Reck blamed for nearly everything that was wrong with Germany: turning their back on the Kaiser in his hour of need (not that Reck has much good to write about Wilhelm in this tome); supporting Hitler for their own purposes; and now when the going got tough again, looking to get rid of their latest master.

As 1944 rolls on, Reck writes more and more of arbitrary arrests and executions, and the death throes of the regime, the Diary ends in October of that year with Reck's own arrest, and initial release, before his final incarceration. There is a useful Afterword in this edition by Richard J. Evans, which throws some useful light on Reck and the circumstances of the writing of this Diary.

At the time these were the railings of a prophet in the wilderness, but they are now a valuable insight into the development and denouement of the Hitler regime from an interesting viewpoint.

Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hitler's philosophers by Yvonne Sherratt

Hitler's philosophers by Yvonne Sherratt

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2013                           ISBN 9780300151930

Hmmmm. This book was not at all what I was hoping it might be. I perhaps should have been warned by the following lines in the introduction "The book is written as a docudrama, bringing to life the historical era and personal dramas of the people involved. It is a work of non-fiction, carefully researched, based upon archival material, letters, photographs, paintings, verbal reports and descriptions, which have all been meticulously referenced. However, it is written in a narrative style, which aims to transport the reader to the vivid and dangerous world of 1930s Germany." Hmmmm.

While there is no doubt that 1930s Germany was vivid and dangerous, I'm not sure a book about Philosophy in Germany during that time is best served by being written as a "docudrama". No matter how meticulously referenced a work, the reader struggles to take it seriously when it contains lines such as the following - "It was a hot, humid July day in Stadelheim Prison, Munich, 1943. The drizzle that had started to fall earlier that day increased to a light rain. The caretaker cursed - warm, wet weather made his job even more irksome."  It doesn't help that the endnote that covers this passage states "The details of the caretaker are my (i.e. the author's) own reconstruction."

While this kind of writing might almost have been forgivable if the work delved in detail into the thinking and milieu of the philosophers and philosophy of Hitlerite Germany, what we are given are a series of chapters, which in true "docudrama" tradition dwell on the lives and scandals of a select few individuals, with precious little effort given over to explaining their philosophical theories.

We are also given quite a bit of what I would consider unnecessary background to Hitler and Nazi Germany - I would have thought that someone coming to a work with the title Hitler's Philosophers would already have a handle on the basics of the history of that place and time.

What we do get in the book are two sections - the first being a potted history of Hitler's intellectual formation, with a chapter on German philosophy of the 19th century, mostly to do with Kant and Schopenhauer, a chapter on minor collaborators, and a chapter each on Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. Section two, "Hitler's opponents" gives us the following chapters - Tragedy: Walter Benjamin, Exile: Theodor Adorno, The Jewess: Hannah Arendt, The Martyr: Kurt Huber, and The Nuremberg Trials and beyond.

The book is strangely polemical in tone - the "baddies" are irretrievably bad, and the "goodies" seem to be unable to do wrong. Whilst there is no doubt that Hitler himself was irretrievably evil, I'm not sure why Sherratt feels that she has to ridicule his claims that he read Schopenhauer in the trenches. It seems probable that he did, and there is no doubt that he was an effective and brave soldier. In fact his experiences in the trenches in World War I would seem to me to be absolutely critical in the formation of his philosophy, and yet Sherratt doesn't linger on them.

The chapter on Heidegger does not focus, except in a very general way, on his philosophy. It focuses instead on his affair with Arendt, his spurning of Husserl after the Nazis came to power, and his famous rectors speech given in 1933 at Freiburg University. While all of this is interesting in a way, I would have preferred a chapter that went into detail about his thought, and about how it aided Nazism, and how Nazism filtered into his work.

Likewise with the chapters on the victims, we get very little focus on their thoughts and interactions with Nazi ideology, and more on their close calls with the Gestapo, attempts to flee Germany, and in Benjamin's and Huber's cases, their tragic deaths.

The most interesting chapter was the Nuremberg Trials and beyond - the gradual (or not so gradual in some cases) rehabilitation of those academics that served under Nazi rule, and the (mostly) continuing exclusion of the exiled Jewish cohort could be a book of its own - touched on here, and worth further reading.

Overall, a disappointing book especially as it seems that Sherratt is an expert on philosophy, having written a couple of previous books. In this case she's erred too much on the side of "docudrama".

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The diaries of a cosmopolitan : Count Harry Kessler 1918-1937

The diaries of a cosmopolitan : Count Harry Kessler 1918-1937 by Harry Kessler, translated and edited by Charles Kessler, Introduction by Otto Friedrich

London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971  ISBN 0297003402

Count Harry Kessler was one of that last generation of European aristocrats who were at home anywhere in Europe, part of the floating cosmopolitan "village" of nobles in the late Victorian and Edwardian ages. Born in France, schooled in England, he considered himself German, and fought in the German army in the early part of WW I. As well as being a connoisseur of the arts, and a writer and publisher in his own right (his Cranach Press is still renowned for the fine publications it issued), he was heavily involved in the diplomatic maneuverings of Germany during the 1920s. His diaries therefore are a fascinating insight into the "life and times" of Weimar Germany and the European world of that era.

The diaries have been heavily edited [Charles is no relation of Harry, by the way] for this English version "to exclude matter unlikely to be of interest to an international public," but still show Kessler to be an indefatigable traveller, acceptor and giver of dinner invitations, and general bon-vivant. He was on good terms with people as varied as Einstein, Cocteau, Gide, Hofmannsthal, Neitzsche and his sister, Gustav Streseman, and Rathenau (of whom he wrote a definitive biography). Josephine Baker danced naked for him, and Eric Gill and Paul Valery were involved in producing items for his Press.

As with most published diaries - especially if they cover a span of years - the diarist can be seen to change their views over time, as well as make bad calls and prescient judgements. Kessler was a socialist and democrat (although not a member of the SPD), and his diplomatic work was in the main to help Germany and Europe to a democratic and republican future. On several occasions during the diaries he vents his spleen at the Kaiser - in an entry on the tenth anniversary of the armistice he wrote "Every fresh publication [about the Kaiser] renders the portrait of this weakling, coward, ambitious brute and braggart, this nincompoop and swaggerer who plunged Germany into misfortune, yet more repulsive. Not a facet of him is capable of arousing pity or sympathy. He is utterly contemptible."

Scattered throughout are entries that presage the hell that was to come. As early as 1919 he writes "For my part I believe that youth tends simultaneously in both directions and towards two extremes, radicalism and reaction, internationalism and chauvinism, and that in the coming years the battle between these will be unprecedently fierce."  A few days later he wrote " Perhaps one day traditional Prussian discipline and the new socialist one will coalesce to form a proletarian ruling caste which will assume the role of a Rome propagating new brands of civilization at the point of the sword."

He talks to many people about the causes of the war, and the War Guilt of Germany, and there are some interesting details in here of people delaying vital telegrams, which may have changed the progress of mobilization if they had have been delivered on time.

As for the Fascist movement and Hitler; he in the end became a victim, but was not necessarily a mortal enemy. When Mussolini came to power, he mused "Perhaps he will usher in a period of fresh European disorders and wars", but later on (1927) wrote "I had somewhat revised my notions about Mussolini and Fascism. There are elements in the Fascist state, like its corporative structure, which cannot be condemned out of hand.", although he does point out the myth that Il Duce made the trains run on time and the post to arrive was just that, a myth. As for Hitler, Kessler knew pretty much what the Nazis were about, and in fact was exiled to Paris after the Reichstag fire, because he was an outspoken defender of democracy, among other things.

While he may have been a socialist, Kessler could never rid himself of his finely honed views on manners and taste, writing "Compare Wirth with Lincoln, for example. 'He's a cad,' the British would say. And he has learned nothing on the way up (no 'breeding'). The result is that his innate crudeness lies naked to the eye. He is, in the deeper sense of the word, 'vulgar'." There are quite a few such asides in his diaries, about people both in politics and the arts.

There is so much more to be discovered in this wonderful book, gossip about Kings and Prime Ministers, wonderful pen-portraits of famous and infamous people, and a fly-on-the-wall view of the struggle to rehabilitate and democratize Germany. This particular edition is wonderfully illustrated, with reproductions of line drawings by or of the people he mentions in the text, such as Grosz, Klee, Cocteau, Edward Gordon Craig and Eric Gill.

This was a book I was going to dip into, I ended up reading it from cover to cover. The earlier diaires (1898-1918), have recently been published, and I will be hunting them out.

Check out your local library or second-hand book vendor for The diaries of a cosmopolitan.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell