Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

Ian Kershaw

Well, as Ian pointed out a while back, this biography is a bit of a monster. And the more I read it the more disappointed I became. The first few chapters, the ones dealing with Hitler's childhood and early adulthood, are full of interesting detail and it's always useful and somehow surprising to be reminded of what an ordinary young man he was. He was lazy, of course, and disorganised and rather socially inadequate and he floated around Linz and Vienna eking out a rather pathetic existence. The basic "young Hitler" story which any student of the period will know is fleshed out quite nicely by Ian Kershaw. Hitler was a loser. So far so good.

But the 1924 to 1933 period, dealing with the emergence of Hitler as a national figure is just standard Nazi-rise-to-power stuff. The closer Hitler comes to power the less interested Kershaw is in him as a person. There is little about where or how he lived during this time. The Geli Raubal story, about which whole books have been written, gets four pages.

Ian Kershaw's thesis seems to be that Hitler the leader was still a loser, a lightweight thinker, idle, hardly an able political animal at all - at best merely opportunistic. He concedes that Hitler spoke brilliantly but that's it. As a theory it's interesting and even attractive, but it leaves too much unexplained. For example Kershaw's theory dictates that the story of January 1933 is of the German conservatives handing power to Hitler on a plate (how else would the idiot Hitler have become chancellor?). Again and again Kershaw condemns the moderate right for their failure to keep him out and yet by devoting fifty pages to the various pre-Nazi government crises of 1932-33 he, perhaps unintentionally, paints a picture of a German establishment which was desperately and repeatedly seeking to exclude Hitler. How they were supposed to do this indefinitely while the Nazis were winning a 42% popular vote (a percentage Tony Blair can only dream of) is neither explained nor even addressed by the author.

Similarly the chapters dealing with 1933-36 describe a Germany which quickly became a leaderless bureaucratic mess. This fits in with Kershaw's ineffective Hitler. But Nazi-Germany-was-a-shambles is the consensus among historians and has been for decades. Kershaw has come up with nothing new there.

The book is 591 pages (and this is only volume one) plus hundreds of pages of notes and bibliography. Carefully researched and academic it may be (3,251 notes I counted) but the definitive Hitler biog it is not. I guess I'll pick up the second volume (I'm a completist at heart) but it won't be with massive enthusiasm.