I've had to start and stop Ian Kershaw's Hitler over the last couple of months because it's so depressing, though not for the obvious reasons.
Kershaw's biography is less about Adolf Hitler and more about the conditions that made him possible. Post-World War I Germany amounted to anarchy: hyperinflation was rampant, and the government was so weak that it could barely keep law and order. (During his failed putsch, which was planned in less than a day, Hitler merely walked into the Reichstag with a pistol and a couple of henchmen and announced that the National Socialists were taking over government. No one argued with him.) The depressing thing, however, is that Hitler later won office legally--he was elected chancellor of Germany, and later elected president. He also managed to keep most of his main political promises: he invaded Russia, in an effort to combat Bolshevism and give Germany "living space"; he violated every principle outlined in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; and he stripped German Jews of their citizenship and sent millions of them to their deaths.
But Kershaw isn't interested in morality. He doesn't assign responsibility, and perhaps that's really his point: no single person or condition was responsible for Hitler and the actions of the National Socialist party. While describing a speech Hitler gave, in February of 1926, to a club of four hundred of Hamburg's "upper bourgeoisie," Kershaw writes, "The more Hitler preached intolerance, force, and hatred, as the solution to Germany's problems, the more his audience liked it." Hitler's worldview was filled with paranoid delusions (as shown in the vile and frightening Mein Kampf), which he always stripped to the lowest common denominator and tailored to specific audiences. Hitler was an actor, and his gift was propaganda: Kerhsaw brilliantly illustrates how complicated Germany's politics were at the time, then frames the atmosphere against Hitler's gross, and often wrong, oversimplification. The essence of Hitler's propaganda was to blame Germany's problems on outside forces, then advocate force in order to resolve them. After his speech to the Hamburg upper class--in which Hitler made no mention of Jews, and instead railed against Marxism--Kerhsaw writes:
Back among his 'own sort', little or nothing had changed. The tone was very different from that adopted in Hamburg. In closed party meetings or, after the speaking band had been lifted in early 1927, once more in Munich beerhalls or the Circus Krone, the attacks on the Jews were as vicious and unconstrained as ever. In speech after speech, as before the putsch, he launched brutal assaults against the Jews, bizarrely depicted both as the wire-pullers of finance capital and as poisoning the people with subversive Marxist doctrine. Explicit attacks on the Jews occurred more frequently and extensively in 1925 and 1926 than in the subsequent two years. Antisemitism seemed now rather more ritualistic and mechanistic. The main stress had moved to anti-Marxism. But only the presentation of ideas had been modified to some extent; their meaning had not. His pathological hatred of the Jews was unchanged. 'The Jew is and remains the world enemy,' he once more asserted in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in February of 1927, 'and his weapon, Marxism, a plague on mankind.'
Hitler was the product and embodiment of very specific political circumstances. Kershaw's biography almost makes me believe in fate. With hindsight, we can wonder how a man like Hitler--uneducated, ignorant, and unqualified, could attain high office in Germany. But we say this by taking him out of context and by supplying the requisite moral outrage. Kershaw, by carefully outlining Germany's political culture at the time, by keeping Hitler squarely within the context of his era, and by dispelling his aura of myth and contradiction, not only makes him possible, but plausible; he isn't just the embodiment of a temporary stop in humanity's progress. Kershaw inadvertently dares us to imagine Hitler at any other time (reincarnated as Slobodan Milošević or Saddam Hussein, for example), then makes us realize there are no comparisons. Hitler, with his hate-filled rhetoric and his ability to get millions to believe in him, isn't possible under any other conditions. Germany's entire political climate, specific to that time in her history, and which had been brewing since Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, made him happen. But if you take away a single ingredient, you take away Hitler. And you're left with a very different historical picture.
