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The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. Please verify that you are not a robot. Would you also like to submit a review for this item? You already recently rated this item. People interpret 'getting rid of the Jews' in different ways, and cumulatively that then pushes along the dynamic of the persecution without Hitler having to say 'do this, do that, do the other'. By combining those two ideas, Kershaw was able to achieve the goal he had set himself after the conference — to square the historiographical circle.
I had this tension in the biography, which I tried to resolve through these devices, between the structural approach, which traditionally had ruled out biography, and the biographical approach, which had tended to rule out structures and concentrate on the central figure. The first volume of the biography — Hitler — Hubris — appeared to wide acclaim in , by which time Kershaw was professor of modern history at Sheffield University, a post from which he retired in He says combining running the department with writing the biography was exhausting, and that during four years in the late 90s he never had a weekend or evening off.
Coping with the "avalanche of publicity" on the first volume while writing the second, Nemesis , which appeared in , proved especially difficult. He had perhaps reckoned without the enduring popular fascination with the figure of Hitler, who dominates the history sections of bookshops and is covered in so many documentaries on the History Channel that it is sometimes referred to as the "Hitler channel".
But there is about Hitler personally and about the Nazis in general a sort of cultism that attracts fascination. The same people are not fascinated by Stalin or Mao, but somehow Hitler does it. I wonder whether it's because this happened in a country that's not so far away, that we know a little bit, that lurched from a democracy to this regime in one fell swoop, and that demonstrates what unlimited power can do. We are meeting in the wake of the appalling slaughter in Norway, and I ask Kershaw whether he sees similarities between the Europe of the s and the continent today, with economic collapse, alienation from the political class and scape-goating of minorities.
He warns against generalising from this one tragedy, and says that, while there is no scope for complacency as the far right increasingly makes itself heard, what strikes him is its weakness rather than its strength. Ian Kershaw appears at the Edinburgh international book festival on 25 August Stephen Moss. Ian Kershaw … his two-volume biography of Hitler is likely to remain the standard life for a generation.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian. Topics History books A life in Reuse this content. The subsequent chapters, covering the period of , are dominated by preparations for war and expansion abroad. According to Kershaw, power served a double ideological aim for Hitler: the destruction of the Jews; and control over the continent of Europe, and later the world. II, p. While various indications suggest that Hitler played a quite active role in the pogrom from its initiation on the evening of November 9, to its official termination the following day, he was evidently at pains, for the sake of external appearances, to distance himself personally from the atrocities.
Coupled with this was the fear he would not live long enough to witness the realization of his imperialist dreams. Only after these ideological basic convictions had taken on solid institutional contours did the Weltanschauung become an operative force.
For all practical purposes, collective political decision-making had now been eliminated, and Hitler hovered high above the power struggles. Indirectly, those confrontations acted to bolster his position as a leader who was unchallengeable. He stresses that Hitler pursued his expansionist policies even though there was no strong popular desire for adventurism abroad and the predominant mood was a rejection of a policy aimed at war. Though his popularity reached new heights with the windfall successes in foreign policy, his mass support continued primarily because that success had been achieved without the use of military force.
In any event, he no longer saw mass assent as a source of legitimization for his regime; rather, it was merely a useful instrument for its continuance. That much is clear. The fracturing of any semblance of collective government over the previous six years left him in the position where he determined alone. Kershaw concedes that these personality features might be attributable to his personal experience of war and trauma in World War I - a topic, according to him, of possible interest to the psychologist.
But Kershaw does not want to psychologize. This section contains little that is new or surprising, but is exemplary for its precision of detail and broad synthetic grasp of the material. The ways different power-groups and important individuals in positions of influence interpreted the ideological imperative represented by Hitler saw to it that the dream of the new society to be created through war, struggle, conquest, and racial purification was kept in full view vol.
Sustaining the dynamics of the National Socialist Movement required the continuation of expansion, the conquest of new territories, the setting of new goals, the relentless pursuit of the millennium vol. He notes repeatedly that, throughout , for example, Hitler paid only minor attention to anti-Jewish policy. His precise role, as so often, is hidden in the shadows. But he had little need to move into the foreground.
Such pronouncements clearly signaled to responsible officials that they should now work out a program for the systematic murder of the European Jews. This creates the impression for the reader that, after Hitler had laid out his ideas, the program of mass murder spurted ahead, almost automatic in its mechanism. Yet it is impossible to doubt his culpability for the mass genocide. Why, in the spring of , when the mass murder was already in high gear, was he still going on about his plans to resettle the Jews out of Europe after the end of the war?
So his behavior seems to have been marked by a strangely ambivalent mix of secrecy on the one hand and public declaration on the other. What possible motives geared to shoring up his power base may he have associated with such allusions?
Yet there is also evidence that, over and beyond this, Hitler repeatedly pressed ahead with the anti-Jewish policy by means of concrete decisions. An obsession with detail was, in fact, also characteristic of him in other spheres of policy. Kershaw notes the various indications proving that, during the period of , Hitler repeatedly involved himself directly in the policy of the mass murder, making decisions that spelled death for tens and hundreds of thousands of people. Nonetheless, he generally adheres to the conception of a process of mass murder that Hitler set in motion but which then continued to unfold almost automatically.
Then it would have become clearer that maintenance and expansion of the mass murder was only possible because Hitler repeatedly called for this policy to be implemented. Even if some form of personality disorder or psychological abnormality could be determined, Kershaw emphasizes that Hitler was not in any clinical sense mentally ill. The resultant tendency to await such orders, therefore, should come to an end.
Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. This suggestion, coming from a ministerial source and never disavowed by anyone in the party hierarchy, set off a Darwinian struggle between agencies and persons within agencies hoping to increase their influence in the state hierarchy.
At a time when the racial and expansionist goals of the Nazi ideology were coming more sharply into focus, it also led to a progressive increase in the violence and unconditionality of politics.
Hitler then forbade further public outrages but at the same time partially appeased them by instituting the process that led to the Nuremberg Laws, a significant and ominous curtailment of Jewish rights.
Important in this respect were his first successes in foreign policy. Even so, he had no lack of confidence, and he possessed gifts that are of major importance in diplomacy, particularly a sense of its limits, a skill in the uses of ingratiation and bluff, shrewdness in assessing the weak spots of his opponents, and, when it was needed, great daring.
While the Gleichschaltung process was being carried out, therefore, Hitler encouraged foreign states to believe that his government would effect no radical break with the foreign policy of the past. His public pronouncements were pacific and disarming and even when he shocked Europe by withdrawing from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference in October , he was able to avoid antagonizing the other powers by professing willingness to enter any schemes of arms limitation that they might propose.
But in the next two years he had a series of successes that belied those assurances. These successes were greeted with the wildest enthusiasm in his own country, and this became shriller when in March , disregarding the cautionary preachments of his own officers, he sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, effectively destroying the Locarno Treaty of , in which Germany promised to respect established European borders.
Unfortunately, Hitler had begun to believe it himself. The point where nemesis takes over had been reached by A well-known historian of the Habsburg Empire, particularly in its final days, Hamann has undertaken here to write a cultural and social history of Vienna in the last years before the First World War as it was seen by a young man from the provinces, combining this with a biography of her subject up to the time when he left for Munich at the age of twenty-four.
It was also a city of mass politics, of prophets and hot-gospelers and popular demagogues, of bitter ethnic rivalries particularly between the Pan-Germans and the Czech minority , and of rampant anti-Semitism. In this city, Hamann is convinced, Hitler acquired important elements of his Weltanschauung. His philosophy was made up of a number of strongly held general ideas based on fragments of arguments that were sometimes taken out of context.
And his lifelong belief that the downfall of the weak was as inevitable as the victory of the strong was rooted in the Darwinian atmosphere of Vienna at the turn of the century and in the rhetoric of people like his hero Lueger.
There is no doubt that he thought deeply about the Jewish question and spent a lot of time discussing it with others. He had Jewish friends with whom he discussed religious questions and the future of the Zionist movement and upon whom he could rely for loans and other help in his worst times.
He always preferred to sell his watercolors to Jewish dealers, because he thought that they were more honest and gave him better prices. No reliable source has reported Hitler making any anti-Semitic remarks in his Vienna period; on the contrary, he was known to have expressed admiration for the courage with which the Jews had withstood a long history of persecution.
Nevertheless, Vienna was a profoundly anti-Semitic city and the Jews were the favorite targets of the politicians whom Hitler admired and studied most. Hamann concludes that it was only during the revolutionary disturbances in Munich in that the young politician Hitler found it profitable to adopt anti-Semitism himself.
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