BOOK OF THE DAY: Robert Gerwarthreviews Hitlerby Ian Kershaw
OF ALL the great villains of the 20th century, none continues to capture the public imagination in quite the same way as Adolf Hitler. The reason for the seemingly unquenchable thirst for information on the Nazi leader lies both in Hitler's obscure personality and in his uniquely devastating legacy. Personally responsible for unleashing a war that killed between 40 and 60 million people and for instigating the Holocaust, "Hitler" has become synonymous with the darkest chapter in the history of European civilisation.
For more than two generations, historians around the globe have offered a variety of explanations for Hitler's rise to power and the criminal nature of his regime. Their interpretations have differed, often profoundly, but the questions have remained largely unchanged: why did a civilised European nation entrust its fate to a self-professed political saviour without any prior experience in government, a bizarre misfit whose endless threats to annihilate his enemies should have left little doubt about his ultimate objectives? How did Hitler exercise his virtually unlimited power once he had obtained it in 1933? And why did he encounter so little opposition from within Germany?
Few historians have answered these questions with greater authority than Sir Ian Kershaw whose award-winning Hitler biography was first published in a two-volume scholarly edition entitled Hubris(1998) and Nemesis(2000). These volumes amounted to the first truly comprehensive account of Hitler's extraordinary life, from his modest beginnings in rural Austria to his suicide in the ruins of bombed-out Berlin. Ultimately, however, Kershaw's Hitleris not primarily about the dictator's private life or his inner psychology. It is a book about the social and cultural forces that made his rise to power possible and the ways in which he shaped Germany for 12 long and devastating years. According to Kershaw, one of the key factors contributing to Hitler's growing popularity in the wake of the Great Depression was his exceptional charisma. By 1938, following the Anschluss of Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland, even former critics of the regime had become convinced that the führer was "infallible". Although the myth of Hitler's infallibility began to wane after the German defeat in Stalingrad in January 1943, Kershaw convincingly demonstrates how the lingering popular belief in the dictator's genius, combined with Nazi terror, prevented Germans from seriously challenging the Nazi regime until the end of the second World War.
Almost a decade after the publication of the biography's second volume, a condensed version of Hubrisand Nemesishas now been made available in a reader-friendly one-volume edition. The overall arguments and structure remain intact, although the text has been purged of all footnotes and the bibliography. In two cases - the sections on Hitler's emergence as an orator of the right in post-war Bavaria and on foreign policy between the Munich crisis of 1938 and the outbreak of the second World War - chapters have been substantially shortened and merged. The rationale for shortening these two chapters is obvious. It was in these sections of the original books that the main protagonist seemed to slip from the narrative spotlight in favour of long passages on general background information about everyday life and foreign policymaking in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.
The trimming and tightening of these passages has done little harm to the book's integrity and analytical quality.
Kershaw's Hitlerwill stand the test of time, both as the definitive biography of history's greatest villain and as a general starting point for anyone interested in the origins and grim reality of Nazi Germany.
• HitlerIan Kershaw Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 969pp, £30
• Robert Gerwarth teaches modern European history at UCD and is the director of UCD's Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Mythand editor of Twisted Paths: Europe 1914-1945