Hitler by Ian Kershaw: The One-Volume Biography of the Dictator and the Society That Followed Him
Why did a modern, advanced society fail to question Hitler’s methods? How did such a dark figure come to rule Germany and win the support of the masses? Ian Kershaw’s biography sets out to answer these questions, following Hitler from the end of the First World War to the collapse of the Third Reich.
Author: Ian Kershaw (born 1943), British historian
Title: Hitler (one-volume edition of his two-volume biography, Hubris and Nemesis)
Format: English paperback (Penguin, 2010), 1,072 pages
Scope: Biography and history of Nazi Germany
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0141035889 (ASIN 0141035889)
From Defeat to Dictatorship
The book explains the main motivations behind the Nazi regime and the people who surrounded the Führer in power. A German society devastated after the First World War believed in Hitler’s power to raise Germany up again and to fight the Russian Bolsheviks.
The Road to Catastrophe
The advance of National Socialist policies up to 1945, and the doctrine used to justify them, was only the beginning of a terrible war that did not end until Hitler took his own life in 1945 as defeat closed in. The great expectations of the Third Reich, and the ideals that most of German society never challenged, finally collapsed.
Propaganda, Betrayal and Conspiracy
The book covers the most significant episodes of the Second World War and the great propaganda campaigns of the period. It also details the betrayals and conspiracies carried out by those closest to Hitler in the last years of the regime.
Working Towards the Führer
Kershaw’s most influential idea comes from a speech by a Nazi official in 1934, who told his audience that it was the duty of everyone in Germany to "work towards the Führer": to anticipate what Hitler would want and act on it without waiting for orders. Kershaw uses the phrase to explain how the regime functioned. Hitler often gave only vague directions, but officials, party members and ordinary citizens competed to fulfil what they took to be his wishes, and this dynamic drove the regime towards ever more radical policies, culminating in war and genocide.
Charismatic Authority
Kershaw also draws on the sociologist Max Weber’s concept of charismatic authority. Hitler’s power, he argues, rested less on institutions than on the belief of millions of Germans that he was a man of destiny who would restore the nation’s greatness. The biography therefore pays as much attention to German society, its humiliation after 1918, its economic crises and its fears, as to Hitler himself, a rather empty personality outside politics, a failed artist and drifter until the First World War and the chaos that followed gave him his chance.
Hubris and Nemesis
The original biography was published in two volumes, Hubris (1998), covering 1889 to 1936, and Nemesis (2000), covering 1936 to 1945, and together they are widely regarded as the standard life of Hitler. This one-volume edition, abridged by Kershaw himself, keeps the argument and narrative while trimming detail. Kershaw, long a professor at the University of Sheffield, was knighted in 2002 for his services to history.
Companions
Readers who want to go further could read Kershaw’s The End (2011), about Germany’s last year of war, or Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich.
Tip
The maps and chronology at the back are worth keeping close.
Take it slowly: it rewards patient reading.
Why Read It
Kershaw is one of the leading historians of Nazi Germany, and this one-volume edition condenses his two-volume work into a single, readable book. It is long, but it is the best place to start for anyone who wants to understand not just Hitler the man, but the society that let him rise.
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