UBC: HItler: Hubris/Hitler: Nemesis
Mar. 17th, 2012 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyKershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. 1998. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
I need to start with a tiny nit-picking piece of bitchery: nobody involved in the process of publishing this book caught the vice/vise mistake, and it happened more than once. Germany may have been caught in a vise of its own vices, if you want to be smartassed about it, but it was not caught in a vice. Thank you. Never mind. Two countries separated by a single language as per usual.
This is, as you may already have inferred, a biography for which the word "monumental" is not incorrect. 591 pages for the first volume, 841 for the second. It is, unfortunately, dated, because Kershaw was writing before the David Irving libel trial (I've blogged about books discussing the trial here and here), so there are some things (mercifully, mostly incidental details rather than anything crucial) for which Irving is the only source. Other than that--and while I'm remarking on Kershaw's flaws--his prose style is adequate at best. And it's not surprising, given the length of the project, that we don't maintain a steady state of "best." So you're not reading for the prose here.
Historians of Nazi Germany can be roughly divided into two camps: intentionalists, who believe that Hitler planned every step of the Final Solution, and functionalists, who believe that Hitler didn't plan any damn thing and the functionaries and bureaucrats of the Third Reich made the Final Solution up as they went along. (This is a reductive schema, and most historians, more accurately, fall somewhere on the continuum between the two poles.) Kershaw is a functionalist--which is an interesting perspective to write a biography of Hitler from, because it means that at every turn, he's looking for the least amount of agency from Hitler commensurate with the historical outcome. And what's really interesting about his biography is the degree to which he has to admit that Hitler was indispensible to the Final Solution, that it couldn't have happened without him and that, even though he shied away from direct involvement, none of it happened without his knowledge and approval.
(Functionalism does occasionally lead him into some rather odd corners: he is the only historian of the Third Reich whom I have read who argues that the Fritsch-Blomberg debacle wasn't planned by anyone, that it was bad luck and stupidity on all sides. Even the clusterfuck surrounding poor Fritsch. Although Kershaw does seem to believe that Blomberg knew his wife had been a prostitute and was trying to keep that a secret from Hitler, which seemed to me like a dubious piece of blame-the-victim thinking. But I digress.)
Kershaw is very very good at explaining, not merely the patterns in Hitler's thinking--the way that what he said in Mein Kampf in the 20s and what he did when he came to power in the 30s are of a piece--but the way in which his habits of thought remained consistent, and the ways in which they both brought him to power and caused his downfall. In particular, Hitler habitually thought in polarized binaries. He habitually radicalized any conflict into an all-or-nothing scenario ("Here ve see," as Monty Python say, "ze life-or-death struggle between ze pantomime horse and ze other pantomime horse for ze position in the merchant bank."), and he believed, from first to last, that compromise was unacceptable. Seeing the pattern in his early life makes his "leadership" during WWII, if not exactly explicable, at least comprehensible.
As a functionalist, Kershaw is also excellent at showing the degree to which the other power-elites of Germany were culpable in the Nazi seizure of power and in Nazi Germany's unprovoked and indefensible assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Russia . . . He stresses repeatedly that even though invasion after invasion was Hitler's idea, he couldn't have done it without the willing and frequently enthusiastic cooperation of the Wehrmacht and the rest of the German government. Hitler led Germany into World War II, but he did it with his followers treading on his heels. Kershaw shows the way that "working toward the Führer"--the method by which second- and third- and fourth- tier Nazis and government officials (and the two categories were not necessarily identical) tried to anticipate what Hitler wanted--both meant that Hitler rarely if ever had to issue an explicit order and that any initiative deemed to be what Hitler wanted would inevitably snowball, as everyone tried to jump on board.
Aside from a much better grasp of how Nazi Germany "worked" (and I use the word loosely), I came away from Kershaw's biography of Hitler with a profound sense of the paucity of Hitler's inner life, how wretchedly little there was of him beyond three or four idées fixes (and all of them crystallized and immune to modification after about 1923), wrapped up in ambition and garnished with hate. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
This is, as you may already have inferred, a biography for which the word "monumental" is not incorrect. 591 pages for the first volume, 841 for the second. It is, unfortunately, dated, because Kershaw was writing before the David Irving libel trial (I've blogged about books discussing the trial here and here), so there are some things (mercifully, mostly incidental details rather than anything crucial) for which Irving is the only source. Other than that--and while I'm remarking on Kershaw's flaws--his prose style is adequate at best. And it's not surprising, given the length of the project, that we don't maintain a steady state of "best." So you're not reading for the prose here.
Historians of Nazi Germany can be roughly divided into two camps: intentionalists, who believe that Hitler planned every step of the Final Solution, and functionalists, who believe that Hitler didn't plan any damn thing and the functionaries and bureaucrats of the Third Reich made the Final Solution up as they went along. (This is a reductive schema, and most historians, more accurately, fall somewhere on the continuum between the two poles.) Kershaw is a functionalist--which is an interesting perspective to write a biography of Hitler from, because it means that at every turn, he's looking for the least amount of agency from Hitler commensurate with the historical outcome. And what's really interesting about his biography is the degree to which he has to admit that Hitler was indispensible to the Final Solution, that it couldn't have happened without him and that, even though he shied away from direct involvement, none of it happened without his knowledge and approval.
(Functionalism does occasionally lead him into some rather odd corners: he is the only historian of the Third Reich whom I have read who argues that the Fritsch-Blomberg debacle wasn't planned by anyone, that it was bad luck and stupidity on all sides. Even the clusterfuck surrounding poor Fritsch. Although Kershaw does seem to believe that Blomberg knew his wife had been a prostitute and was trying to keep that a secret from Hitler, which seemed to me like a dubious piece of blame-the-victim thinking. But I digress.)
Kershaw is very very good at explaining, not merely the patterns in Hitler's thinking--the way that what he said in Mein Kampf in the 20s and what he did when he came to power in the 30s are of a piece--but the way in which his habits of thought remained consistent, and the ways in which they both brought him to power and caused his downfall. In particular, Hitler habitually thought in polarized binaries. He habitually radicalized any conflict into an all-or-nothing scenario ("Here ve see," as Monty Python say, "ze life-or-death struggle between ze pantomime horse and ze other pantomime horse for ze position in the merchant bank."), and he believed, from first to last, that compromise was unacceptable. Seeing the pattern in his early life makes his "leadership" during WWII, if not exactly explicable, at least comprehensible.
As a functionalist, Kershaw is also excellent at showing the degree to which the other power-elites of Germany were culpable in the Nazi seizure of power and in Nazi Germany's unprovoked and indefensible assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Russia . . . He stresses repeatedly that even though invasion after invasion was Hitler's idea, he couldn't have done it without the willing and frequently enthusiastic cooperation of the Wehrmacht and the rest of the German government. Hitler led Germany into World War II, but he did it with his followers treading on his heels. Kershaw shows the way that "working toward the Führer"--the method by which second- and third- and fourth- tier Nazis and government officials (and the two categories were not necessarily identical) tried to anticipate what Hitler wanted--both meant that Hitler rarely if ever had to issue an explicit order and that any initiative deemed to be what Hitler wanted would inevitably snowball, as everyone tried to jump on board.
Aside from a much better grasp of how Nazi Germany "worked" (and I use the word loosely), I came away from Kershaw's biography of Hitler with a profound sense of the paucity of Hitler's inner life, how wretchedly little there was of him beyond three or four idées fixes (and all of them crystallized and immune to modification after about 1923), wrapped up in ambition and garnished with hate. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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Date: 2012-03-17 06:03 pm (UTC)I'm doing a major ideas partial transcript (http://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/tag/ruud), and hope to have it finished in a day or so.
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Date: 2012-03-17 07:13 pm (UTC)It's good to see you pop up again to post here, and I hope that the things which are keeping you busy are for the most part pleasing and agreeable to you.
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Date: 2012-03-24 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-17 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-17 09:49 pm (UTC)::is embarrassed::
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Date: 2012-03-19 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 04:35 pm (UTC)