Reader review: Hitler by Ian Kershaw

Continuing our series of reader reviews, Paul Doolan reviews Hitler, the latest paperback edition of Ian Kershaw’s two-part biography.


by Paul Doolan,

Ian Kershaw’s aim is to answer two questions: how could ‘a bizarre misfit ever have been in a position to take power in Germany’ and how could this ‘unsophisticated autodidact […] so swiftly dominate the established political elites and go on to draw Germany into a catastrophic high-risk gamble for European domination, with a terrible, unprecedented genocidal programme at its heart?’

The present volume is an abridgement of the massive two-volume study that Kershaw published in 1998 and 2000. Over 650 pages of text as well as references and notes have been cut. Nevertheless, it still weighs in with over 1,000 pages.

The author rightly insists that Hitler’s rule needs to be continually studied for it provides us with a warning on ‘how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity’. He recognises that Hitler’s immense historical impact was achieved by a man who was ‘no more than an empty vessel outside his political life’, describing Hitler as a ‘black hole’, an ‘unperson’. Consequently, he does not focus on Hitler’s personality, but on the nature of his power and how this power worked on others. To this extent, Kershaw argues, Hitler’s charismatic leadership depended as much on others – Nazi fanatics, non-Nazi elites and ordinary Germans – as it did on any talents that Hitler himself might have had. Kershaw places Hitler at the centre of the story of the Nazi assault on civilisation, but claims that Hitler was not the sole or prime cause of this assault.

Kershaw argues that, until the First World War, Hitler’s life had been one of failure and indolence. However, 1919 saw him cast into the maelstrom of right-wing politics. He was trained by the army as an anti-Semitic, anti-communist instructor and was ordered by his superior to join the German Worker’s Party (the Nazi Party) – Kershaw thus claims that the army made Hitler. The failure of his 1923 putsch should have been the end of his career. Instead, he was allowed to become a national celebrity and was released from prison within 11 months. Thus, the judiciary was also responsible. The economic conditions of the early 1930s triggered Hitler’s quick rise, but the conservative right was responsible for putting him in power, while by 1933 the army, agricultural interests, big businesses and ordinary Germans had, according to Kershaw, destroyed democracy. Only organised labour and politicised Catholics still opposed him.

Once in power, Hitler was helped by the thousands of careerists who did their best ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, trying to anticipate his will and implement his wishes. Few criticised anti-Jewish legislation and doctors and nurses readily participated in the murder of thousands of the physically and mentally ill. When the government orchestrated a nationwide pogrom against Jews during ‘Kristalnacht’, ‘the leaders of the Christian Churches […] kept quiet’ and did not even issue a protest. By the end of the decade, Hitler had become the most popular politician of the 20th century, never surpassed.

Most Germans feared war, but were delighted with the early German victories. The war that was prosecuted against the Poles in 1939 was of extraordinary brutality. Hitler had provided a license for barbarism, but, in Kershaw’s words, there ‘was no shortage of ready hands to put it into practice’. Even worse was to come when, in 1941, Hitler unleashed upon the USSR the ‘most destructive and barbaric war in the history of mankind’, a war that led to genocide.

The author claims that many within the army leadership doubted the wisdom of this war; none, however, had the courage to make their doubts public. This is one of the important lessons that emerge from Kershaw’s work, one that anyone working in a hierarchical organisation should take to heart. Many in the army, party and civil service ‘worked towards the Fuhrer’, and feared being accused of defeatism; few openly opposed his unrealistic schemes and they thereby fed his destructive optimism.

Kershaw uses the word optimism/optimistic to describe Hitler no less than 23 times in the final quarter of the book – pages that describe the gradual destruction of Germany after Stalingrad. Pessimism was always regarded as defeatism. Hearing of Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 Hitler still had ‘a sudden shaft of optimism’, with the Russians just a few miles from his bunker. The criminal silence of those around him was symptomatic; the physical and moral ruination of Europe was not the work of one man alone, but ‘collectively’ German citizens had been prepared ‘to place their trust in the chiliastic vision of a self-professed political savior’. Many had helped to make Adolf Hitler.

There is much to be learned from Ian Kershaw’s Hitler. It makes for disturbing reading. And so it should.

Paul Doolan is Head of History at Zurich International School.
www.pauldoolan.com

Reader review: Battle for the Castle

In the latest of our reader reviews, Zbysek Brezina reviews Battle for the Castle by Andrea Orzoff.

by Zbysek Brezina,

Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia, 1914-1918 is a result of the author, Andrea Orzoff’s, deep research interest in 20th-century East and Central European history. In particular, she explores the use of mass media in propaganda, the role of nationalism, and the origin and continuance of national mythologies in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period at home and abroad.

The book’s title, Battle for the Castle, refers not only to the Prague Castle, but also to an unofficial group of significant people (and sometimes to the organisations to which they were affiliated). More specifically, Orzoff considers the role that intellectuals played in supporting various national policies and programs created in interwar Czechoslovakia mainly by Tomas G. Masaryk (1850-1937), the founder and the first President of the Republic, and Edvard Benes (1884-1948), the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In chapter one, the author argues that it was primarily professor Masaryk who, during his time in exile from December 1914 to 1918, created a positive image of Czechoslovakia as a politically and culturally progressive and pro-western nation in the eyes of the French, British and American intellectual elite. He was able to successfully seed these messages largely through propaganda concentrated in the hands of an assiduous Edvard Benes. This war propaganda strategy was thereafter brought home to the newly established Czechoslovak republic; keeping it alive was one of the most important tasks of the Castle group.

Chapter two explores the informal Castle organisation itself. In particular, the author examines the presidential chancellery, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the pro-Castle press and pro-Castle intellectuals (such as Karel Capek and Ferdinand Peroutka), as the main centres for gathering, evaluating, analysing and disseminating the Castle’s ideological, political and cultural ideas. Orzoff also emphasises the fact that although the Castle was an unofficial centre of power, it played one of the most vital roles in shaping Czechoslovak domestic politics, primarily through its struggle with Parliament and the party leaders who fully controlled the constitutional body.

In chapter three, the author addresses the complex issues of Czech (and partly Slovak) interwar nationalism and the key role that the Castle played in portraying Czechoslovakia as pro-western and almost transnational. This was in direct contrast to the Czech political Right, which put forward a chauvinistic and national model of Czechoslovak history. It is not surprising that newspapers and journals became major battlefields for this ideological exchange between the Castle intellectuals, led by Masaryk himself and his intellectual lieutenant Karel Capek, and opponents of the Castle. Furthermore, the rapidly growing popular support and ‘cult’ of Masaryk was another important part of this ‘mythical combat’.

Chapter four charts the development of Czechoslovakia’s position on the international scene, which, in the 1930s, in the face of the growing threat of Nazism, became increasingly complicated. The Czechoslovak position weakened not only in London, but also in France, Czechoslovakia’s key western supporter and guarantor of its security and independence. The 1920s and 1930s were times of hectic media duals between Czechoslovak and foreign propaganda, in which Czechoslovakia was constantly criticised for its artificiality and hypocrisy.

Orzoff concludes, in the final chapter, that the Munich Diktat meant the end of the interwar Czechoslovak myth about both itself and the nobility and trustworthiness of the West. However, as she persuasively demonstrates, Czechoslovakia was not just based on myth. Without doubt, in the interwar period, it was the most democratic and socially progressive country in its region. The Republic had its flaws, but in the end, the ‘Czech democracy failed because Europe failed’.

This well-written and researched study will be essential to anyone interested not only in Czechoslovak interwar history, but also in the impact of various national myths on our recent history. Orzoff’s study could have profited from more of her deep knowledge of her subject instead of using space to recapitulate well-known events. Another minor omission is a bibliography to supplement the book’s detailed notes. It will be very interesting to see the Czech readers’ reaction, if Orzoff’s work is ever translated and published in the Czech Republic. It may notably raise controversial questions and new ideas about Czech perceptions of the country’s recent history.

Zbysek Brezina is Assistant Professor of History at Bethany College, Kansas. He has recently completed a dissertation on the informal group of people around President Tomas G. Masaryk and Minister of Foreign Affairs Edvard Benes in interwar Czechoslovakia.

The Lost World of Communism: An Oral History of Daily Life Behind the Iron Curtain

Taylor Downing reviews Peter Molloy's new book on the lost culture of the Eastern bloc

Apparently in Germany today there is a growing nostalgia for the days of the Democratic Republic – there is a GDR-themed youth hostel and a revival of interest in kitsch East German design. There is even a word for it in German, Ostalgie or ‘nostalgia for the East’. I am glad to say there is no sense of nostalgia in The Lost World of Communism, which recalls the horrors of Communism in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

This is the book of the BBC TV series marking the 20th anniversary of the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe. It allows the ‘talking heads’ to be quoted at greater length than in the TV series, which is much to be welcomed. And it is part of that explosion of oral histories published by Ebury, often in the strand Forgotten Voices.

Peter Molloy relates the story of each individual with a minimum of context and then quotes extensively from interviews. This is the strength and the weakness of this type of history. If you like oral histories you’ll love this book. If you seek out explanation and analysis you’ll find these accounts frustrating and cursory. But the range of 50 or so characters in the book makes fascinating reading. There is an East German border guard, a leading member of the Politburo, a Czech cosmonaut, a transvestite East German athlete, a Lutheran pastor, a female prisoner who fell in love with her Stasi interrogator (they finally married in 2006) and a sexologist who claims that East German women had a much higher number of orgasms than women in the West.

For me, nothing here matches up to the revelations of life in East Germany in Anna Funder’s compelling Stasiland. But the material about Romania under Ceausescu is remarkable. Abortions were banned to keep up population growth and women workers were regularly inspected to ensure they were not terminating pregnancies. The Securitate bugged anyone, including the president. The weirdly obsessive behaviour of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu is related by those who had to sustain it. And their grisly end is recounted by the man who led the execution squad.

Much of the apparatus of these appalling states happily crumbled with the Berlin Wall but the climate of fear they generated left a moral devastation that will take longer to heal. The former Czech President Vaclav Havel reckons it will be two generations before the footprint of Communism has been fully washed away.

He Knew He Was Right

The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia
John & Mary Gribbin
(Allen Lane)

A biography of an iconic figure in British science, best known as the father of the Gaia theory, now an established method of understanding and responding to dramatic changes in the earth's environment.

Alan Villiers

Kate Lance
National Maritime Museum

A biography of the writer, journalist, photographer, film-maker and voyager, Alan Villiers, based on his own journals and private notebooks, which interweaves Villiers’ personal story with that of commercial sail and takes a close look at the complex man behind numerous classic seafaring books and articles.

Europe Since The Seventies

Jeremy Black (Reaktion Books)

An analysis of the social and economic development of Europe in the last four decades, which addresses environmental, demographic and cultural issues, as well as political, societal and economic matters, whilst also considering immediate subjects such as transport, crime and migration.

The Lost World of Communism

Peter Molloy (BBC Books)

An oral history of daily life behind the Iron Curtain based on first-hand testimonies of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era, from international figures such as Vaclav Haval and Lech Walesa, to figures of Eastern Europe’s intelligence and security services, to its ‘ordinary’ citizens.

Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting

Michael Lynch, Simon A. Cole, Ruth NcNally, Kathleen Jordan (The University of Chicago Press)

An ethnographic account of DNA fingerprinting and its evolution, which considers court cases in the United States and United Kingdom beginning in the mid-1980s, when the practice was invented, until the present day.

The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry

Lawrence E. Mitchell (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

An insight into the origins of the giant modern corporation and the rise of the stock market in the first years of the twentieth century: by the early 1920s, the stock market had left behind its business origins and was the centre of the American economy.

British News Media and the Spanish Civil War

David Deacon

Edinburgh University Press

A study of the reporting of the Spanish Civil War, which examines the personalities, routines, pressures and structures that shaped news coverage of the war in Britain as it unfolded.

The Titanic Experience: The Legend of the Unsinkable Ship

Beau Riffenburgh
Carlton

The Titanic Experience contains photographs, facsimile items of the Titanic memorabilia and first hand accounts from the survivors, providing an insight into life aboard the ship.

Summary: Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: 1914-1922

Aaron B. Retish
Cambridge University Press

The evolution of peasant society and peasants’ conceptions of themselves as citizens in the Soviet nation, from the First World War to the end of the Civil War, in a period of total war, mass revolutionary politics and civil breakdown.

We Will Not Fight… The Untold Story of World War One’s Conscientious Objectors

Will Ellsworth-Jones
Aurum

The tale of the British men who refused to fight in the First World War, at the heart of which lies the story of Bert Brocklesby, who was sentenced to death for refusing to join the army.

The Western Front, Richard Holmes (BBC Books)

A new edition of Holmes’ classic text, which covers the creation of the Western Front and the experiences of the British Army in France, and clarifies some of the complexities of the Western Front.

Survivors’ Songs from Maldon to the Somme, Jon Stallworthy (Cambridge University Press)

A study of poetic encounters with war including essays on Brooke, Sassoon and Owen, which places the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare.

The Fall of Mussolini, Philip Morgan (Oxford University Press)

An account of Mussolini’s fall from power, which reveals the causes and consequences of the event and how the Italians’ experiences of the country at war distanced them from the fascist regime.