Hubris: A Hitler Biography by Ian Kershaw

Luck greased the way of Adolph Hitler on many an occasion, from before he was born in fact, when an obscure Austrian customs official named Alois Schicklgruber changed his name to Alois Hitler. It’s the first revelation in Hubris, the first volume of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. “Adolf can be believed,” Kershaw writes, “when he said that nothing his father had done had pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely rustic name of Schicklguber. Certainly, `Heil Schicklgruber’ would have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero.”

Luck, in plentiful measure, greased the path of this misfit and mediocre artist to absolute power in the first modern totalitarian state—luck and the self-interested calculation, rationalization, prevarication and cowardice of a great many enablers along the way. It’s a fascinating story told by a master historian and fine writer; his command of the material, primary and secondary sources, and his range over the factors—social, cultural and political—that helped to make Hitler possible is remarkable. It’s the riddle of how Hitler happened that drew Kershaw, originally a medievalist, to Hitler. Among Hitler and Third Reich historians (for all of whom, this is the question: how did it happen?) Kershaw is a “structuralist,” focusing on the structure of German society that allowed the man to become who he became, rather than the man himself. In a preface entitled, “Reflecting on Hitler,” Kershaw meditates on the myriad difficulties facing a biographer confronted with the figure of Hitler. “What has continued in the writing of the book to interest me more than the strange character of the man who held Germany’s fate in his hands between 1933 and 1945 is the question of how Hitler was possible…….If the answer to that question cannot be presumed in the first instance to lie in those attributes, such as they were, of Hitler’s personality, then it follows that the answer must be sought chiefly in German society—in the social and political motivations which went into the making of Hitler.”

He dispenses with quickly (and, one senses, has little patience with) some of the stuff that has floated around over the decades to “explain” Hitler—an occluded Jewish ancestry; deformed genitals; sexual eccentricity or perversity; a Jewish doctor who may have been responsible for his mother’s death. These are all either unknowable speculation or rumor possibly originating with political enemies or those who, after the fact, wanted to pile on.

His father was brutal, so much can be discerned, and mother was a doormat. And no doubt there was something extremely strange about Hitler from adolescence on—most notably, from the historical record, the absence of any real human relationships. Everywhere, he stood apart; those who got close to him testified to a sense of never really knowing him, a sense of someone always acting, playing a part.  It’s a common enough experience around run-of-the-mill narcissists and phonies. Hitler seemed to have this quality of “something missing” to a very great degree. The “un-person” is Kershaw’s term for this enduring blank space, and it works as a way to understand what must have been a deeply ingrained, and comprehensive disorder of personality. When Hitler would find his place as an agitator and beer-hall speaker, the un-person would find a convenient way to hide his deformity, by projecting outward and upward an image to which millions of Germans became enthralled.

In this it has to be said that Hitler possessed, distinctly, a kind of genius, that happened also to be wed to a ferocious single-mindedness. Very often it took the form of a negative kind of genius, an instinct for the long game, a knack for waiting out his enemies, a willingness to dissemble and play nice when it suited his purposes, and an eye for his adversary’s weaknesses. His one positive, or “creative” talent was speaking—more precisely, propaganda, what today we would call “messaging.” He grasped intuitively, instinctively, what the German people wanted at that time, in those circumstances, after so much misfortune: a Fuhrer—and then he became that thing. It was a conscious projection, a kind of trick of acting, of making his own un-personhood disappear—so that the real man, the absurd, weird looking, unsmiling guy with the bad mustache didn’t really matter. He projected it upward and outward away from himself, as if he were painting on the sky; people looked up and when he shouted and shook his fist at those rallies, what they saw was the charismatic leader, the Fuhrer, they needed. 

The man had an unpromising start, to say the least. He wanted to be an artist, spent some time in Vienna where he applied to the Vienna Art Institute. Denied, he was crestfallen. He spent a lot of time scrounging around Vienna selling paintings and drawings in bars or wherever else he could, and imbibed the politics of the era, including the potent anti-semitism. He lived in a men’s home, was regarded as a weird bird with strong opinions. It is easy enough to imagine him, at this stage, aging as a crank and an oddball.

The war that broke out in Europe in 1914 was a destiny changer. He enlisted and served as a sentry, showing some bravery and earning a medal for it. Toward the end, in October 1918, when every “norm” had been shattered and poison gas came into use at the front, Hitler was partially blinded in a mustard gas attack by the French at Yrpes. He was hospitalized, and for the failed artist for whom the war was an escape from the emptiness of his un-personhood, it was over. “And little though he knew it,” Kershaw writes, “the Army High Command was already maneuvering to extricate itself from blame for a war it accepted was lost and a peace which would soon have to be negotiated.”

One month later, with Germany bankrupt and depleted by war, the German socialist workers party staged an uprising. Amid extreme chaos and an extraordinary amount of political violence on all sides, the socialists came to power and established, briefly, a highly unstable Soviet-style republic. “It lasted little more than a fortnight,” Kershaw writes. “But it ended in violence, bloodshed, and deep recrimination…..”

The importance of the 1918 revolution and Germany’s capitulation (after four years of propaganda lies from the high command that it was winning the war) cannot be overstated. A conspiracy theory that Germany’s war effort was sabotaged by Bolshevik Jews—the “stab in the back”— gained wide currency. For Hitler, it became an enduring obsession, down to his dying day. Revenge on “the November criminals” can reasonably be regarded as the motivating element in everything Hitler would do for the rest of his life.

(Christopher Hitchens, in his review of Kershaw’s work, emphasizes, as well, the likely lasting importance of Hitler’s experience of being gassed. That makes sense. It is easy to imagine the experience as one that never quite goes away entirely—the odor, the severe pain it causes in joints and limbs and behind the eyes.)

During the war, Hitler had become known among the ranks as a fanatic, and he attracted the attention of military higher-ups after the socialist republic was overthrown, replaced by an uneasy coalition of mainstream parties and the military. Hitler hadn’t wanted to return to civilian life, and he was spared that fate when one Captain Karl Mayr became the first of Hitler’s many, many enablers, hiring him as a speaker or “educator” in anti-Bolshevik courses for the troops. In Mein Kampf he would record this revelation—“I could speak”—as seminal. From there it was on to the beerhalls where he earned a widening following and would in time assume leadership of the National Socialist German Workers Party.

“Gathering storm” is a cliché hard to avoid as the rest unfolds. The darkness does gather, at first out on the horizon, seemingly ignorable, but inexorably marches in closer: social and civic unrest as the shambling Weimar republic totters; growing strength of the Nazi party along with the enervation of the mainstream parties; rise of the Brownshirts; the failed Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler’s trial in which he was treated as a kind of renegade celebrity, speechifying in a way that actually managed to increase his popularity; the stint in jail where he wrote Mein Kampf; consolidation of Hitler’s power within the Nazi party following his release from prison; the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler had to shatter the growing power of the Brownshirts; the fall of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s ascension to power; the systematic destruction of all other parties and of independent civic life (with the notable exception of the churches) that did not conform itself to Nazi goals; Hitler’s early successes—especially the re-entry of German troops into the disputed Ruhr valley—and the growing Fuhrer-cult that grew up around the man. 

“Perfect storm” is another one. Things fall in place for Hitler all along the way. There’s that luck of his. But there are also a lot of people in positions to thwart Hitler and put him in his place, but who found it convenient for one reason or another to accommodate him. Hitler had gathered up through the years a nationwide following of brutal, violent, racist thugs, and lots of people were frightened of it. Quite a lot of others, including military types and the cultured elite, saw Hitler as a vulgar crank, gauche and ridiculous. But his power was such that he couldn’t be ignored. Chief among the reasons for why he was tolerated by so many who knew better, was the fear of socialism, more particularly of Soviet-style bolshevism, shared by virtually everyone in the country, and disgust with Weimar-style democracy, regarded by many as “un-German,” a foreign import. Emblematic is the cartoonish, top-hatted Franz von Papen, the industrialist who was instrumental in allowing Hitler to assume the Chancellorship, believing he and allies in the military and business could contain him, could use him for their own purposes (destroying socialism, defending private enterprise, ending the mess that was Weimar democracy). They underestimated him mightily, but they wouldn’t know that for a while. “We’ve hired him out,” Papen said.  

*****

So what of the man himself, the un-person who might have, in another time and place, grown old muttering and cursing to himself on the street? Where he appears at all human, he is quite ridiculous. As dictator, he slept in late, lounging in bed watching movies. King Kong was a favorite, as was Snow White. In his early days, he was known to carry around a dog whip. During his beerhall days, he befriended one Putzi Hanfstaengel, a cultured part-American who would for a while be Hitler’s press attache. “Hitler was a regular guest at Hanfstaengl’s home, where he regularly gorged himself on cream-cakes, paying court to Hanfstaengl’s attractive wife, Helena, in his quaint Viennese style. `Believe me,” Helena told her husband, `he’s an absolute neuter, not a man.' "

I don’t know about you, but I love that (maybe it’s the “believe me”) and enjoy imagining Helena as a languid Weimar vixen for whom not a lot is new under the sun and who might have spotted from a million miles away an overcompensating loser. The Hanfstaengls introduced him to the high life in Munich. “In his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip, he cut a bizarre figure in the salons of Munich’s upper-crust.”

*****

The really scary part of Kershaw’s story describes the growing radicalization of the entire German society under Hitler’s dictatorship, what Kershaw calls “working toward the Fuhrer”—how all sectors of civil society were expected to “do their part” toward realizing what were assumed to be the Fuhrer’s goals, racial purification especially. It’s here where the German people themselves become most culpable. It's also here where you can begin to believe in something like supernatural evil, something demonic,  some unholy force that took on a momentum no longer containable--radicalization begot radicalization, as norms, one after the others, were shattered.  

Alas, it is the great virtue of good historians to remind us that all of history is, finally, human history. Like Lanzmann’s Shoah, Kershaw’s detailed account of the period shows us there was nothing supernatural about it. It was the culmination of specific policies, procedures, protocols, actions by individuals—stupid, blind, arrogant, greedy, self-interested or cowardly—arising out of a specific culture at a time and in a place where it all was possible. More than possible, it all seems--such is the command of Kershaw's narrative--logically predictable. “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets,” goes the clever contemporary aphorism of systems analysis. And so it was, once upon a time in Germany, 1933-1945.