Bangkok Post : A reading of Hitler

BOOK REVIEW

Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gulliver's Travels were ranked by Hitler among literature's great works. Above these was Shakespeare, whom he considered superior to Goethe and Schiller. He could quote extensively from the Bible. He had thousands of books on military history and strategy, on mysticism and the occult, on technology and racialist science, architecture and the arts, as well as hundreds of trashy romances and adventure stories that he kept more hidden.

The high school dropout _ more renowned for burning books than reading them _ was a voracious reader who read a book a night and accumulated some 16,000 volumes, and sound bites and passages from favourite books infiltrated his speeches and writings. Much can be discerned about Hitler's shifting thoughts and ambitions by the titles he prized during different periods of his life and the marks and marginalia _ underlines, question marks, exclamation points, scrawled ungrammatical and misspelled comments, even a moustache hair _ within them.

Some of the books that Timothy W. Ryback focuses on in Hitler's Private Library include Max Osborn's architectural travel guide to Berlin, Dietrich Eckart's nationalistic interpretation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Thomas Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great, Henry Ford's anti-Semitic The International Jew and Hitler's own Mein Kampf. The Fuehrer was aware of his limitations as a writer and a completed third volume of his written thoughts was never published.

His books on the occult, mysticism and spiritualism pointed not to a cynical atheist but a lost agnostic who thought that science (and biological racism), technology and spirituality would find a common ground. Of interest to psychoanalysts, one picture book of his on horses had the stallions unblemished and the mares all crossed out.

Those who sought to influence the Reichskanzler, or divide the Nazi movement, would make gifts of books with  alternate political bents, or ingratiate themselves by offering volumes he was known to approve of. It seems a lot of politics was involved in promoting or stifling book distribution among the ranks.

One fault of Hitler's approach to reading was that he looked mainly for passages that corroborated his own ideology or furthered his own agenda. A relevant line in the film comedy A Fish Called Wanda comes to mind, when Kevin Kline's Otto character defends himself from an insult by Jamie Lee Curtis' Wanda by claiming that ``Apes don't read philosophy.'' Wanda's reply: ``Yes, they do Otto, they just don't understand it.''

Hitler admitted he didn't understand Nietzsche much, though he greatly respected his prose and borrowed many of his terms and aphorisms for his speeches. Schopenhauer was also greatly loved for his maxims, but faded in importance to Hitler once his political inclinations superseded his artistic ones.

And Fichte, whose political philosophy perhaps most closely resembles National Socialism's, seems to have been largely ignored by Hitler, despite being presented with his Collected Works by Leni Riefenstahl, who filmed and glorified the 1934 Nuremberg Congress (Triumph des Willens) and the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Olympia) for him, films which were used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes.

There is much historical context in Hitler's Private Library _ why certain inscriptions are significant, what the intended influence is, what Hitler's interest in the subject was.

This ``book about books'' _ especially of the 16,000-volume Hitler library spread across Berlin, Munich and the Obersalzberg during his lifetime and quickly vanishing around the world after his death _ could have easily degenerated into a bookish and unreadable tome, with myriad  tangents and annotations. Instead it is readable and compelling. Like a book on a bookshelf overlooking the chancellor's office, we have an intimate view of the Fuehrer of the Third Reich. It is succinct, doesn't stray too far off course and when it does shift gears it does so to good effect.

It would be difficult to write a book on such an intimate facet of this divisive figure's life without some personal emotional intrusion, or an invasion of the writer's personal politics. To Timothy W. Ryback's credit, he does neither _ his interest here seems mainly academic _ and gives us a sober and even-handed account of the library of Adolf Hitler, a man who became one of history's greatest monsters. As with all such divisive figures, there is no harm in humanising him. The greater mistake would be not to realise that he is not so different from the rest of us.

Much of his military strategy was gleaned from books, his political identity, his distrust of Jews and freemasonry, his notions of Uebermensch or personal philosophy, was derivative. He was not an anomaly, some evil demon in human guise. With help from books, he was a persuasive speaker, but also a product of his times and situation.

He didn't drink much or eat meat, was kind to dogs, courageous and selfless as a messenger on the front lines in WWI, a man with an artistic bent, a dream to achieve high art and a love for books. He was ambitious, passionate, persuasive, manipulative and self-delusional.

Book collections have a way of preserving the lives of their collectors. Hitler's helps us understand the man responsible for so much suffering and loss by tracing his development through one of his great passions. By following his literary interests, his scribbled comments and marginalia, we have a window into his development and degeneration _ and a history lesson in the process.

Hitler's Private Library is very readable and leaves you wanting more, and despite its subject instils in the reader an awe at the power of books.

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The world's greatest mass-murderer as family man

Another recent publication to shed light on the human side of the Nazi inner circle is The Himmler Brothers by Katrin Himmler, grand-niece of Heinrich Himmler, who as head of the SS and Gestapo was responsible for the deaths of over 6 million Jews, Roma, political opponents, homosexuals and others unwanted by the regime. Der Spiegel called him ``the greatest mass murderer of all time''.

Most chilling about this family history is how normal everyone is. The three brothers were patriotic but seemingly well-adjusted middle class youths. They were well-educated and hard-working, resentful of the harsh  economic conditions the Treaty of Versailles subjected Germany to following World War I, but perhaps were politically naive. Heinrich developed a personal sense of duty to the nation _ hoping for unity, respect and Lebensraum (the need for ``living space'' that justified colonisation) for German minorities abroad and a purging of domestic ethnic minorities, especially Jews _ and preferred clearly defined gender and societal roles. He was liked and respected in his community as a family man and affectionately called ``Heini'' by relatives and close friends. In the early days of the National Socialist German Workers' Party he performed thankless, tedious and underpaid tasks, and later as Reichsfuehrer-SS did what he could to protect and boost the careers of his brothers and those close to him.

As the Nazi Party rose in power, greed and paranoia, Himmler's methods likewise  became more brutal, disconnected and  inhuman.

Katrin Himmler pieces together her family history with great historical detail, but it is the personal aspect of her research that   resonates most. Possibly to compensate for inherent guilt at her family's past, she  developed an affinity for Poles and Jews _ two peoples who suffered terribly under the regime _ and eventually married an Israeli whose family was persecuted in the Warsaw ghetto. Such moves aren't uncommon for Germans with past family Nazi connections, but the author dreads the day she will have to explain to her young son that one half of her family tried to kill the other half.

As with Hitler's Private Library, the book demonstrates the necessity of remaining  vigilant, politically aware and democratically active, to ensure that such a regime is never allowed to take power again. The Third Reich wasn't run by demons or monsters but  relatively normal people who had a misguided, if not evil, collective philosophy.

As a German citizen, like many fellow  students I considered it a duty to be informed about history, to undertake pilgrimages to sites of massacre and torture such as Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald to try to  understand how such things could happen in our grandparents' lifetime. At these places the scope of Nazi terror is preserved and irrefutable. But it was a single book _ not the many volumes of WWII history _ that illustrated how monstrous the regime was. That book was Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. One personal memoir, when multiplied by the millions, drove home the degree of individual suffering, the racist agenda of National Socialism, the avoidable tragedy unfolding all over Europe and beyond.

As Shakespeare (whom Hitler so venerated) adroitly pointed out, the pen is mightier than the sword. If only all our wars could be waged purely in print.