let’s start with the first of the hitler books you have chosen, the führer. the author, konrad heiden, was a journalist?
yes. for frankfurter zeitung. he is the only journalist at the time who dealt with hitler’s case from a very early date and recognized that his and others’ oratory was very powerful, and persecuted him relentlessly. so much so that when hitler came to power heiden he had to go into exile. I think he worked as a professor of journalism in the United States.
You are reading: Adolf hitler biography books
so when you say he took up his case you mean he did it in a negative way, wasn’t he a supporter?
I was certainly not a supporter. instead of an academic paper on it, he did what any good journalist would do and started looking into hitler’s finances and his relationships with women and all that kind of stuff. he deepened. he focused on the dirty details.
and what was the dirty detail?
well, things like the fact that hitler lived with his niece and she committed suicide in the 1920s under mysterious circumstances. presumably her intentions or her controlling nature became too onerous. it took guts to write about that, since these Nazis were armed and violent people. the money came from all kinds of covert addresses with secret donations from businessmen. it’s a better book than all the heavy hitler tomes, because heiden was really there, it’s from the time. I think that can be more interesting than people writing about things afterwards.
did heiden know hitler?
I don’t think he really talked to hitler, no. But he followed in his footsteps until 1934 when Hitler decided to assassinate some 80 people, leading the brownshirts, and disguise it as a restoration of good public morals. they were all depicted as a nest of homosexuals in need of cleaning. he also killed anyone who came across him, such as general schleicher, a previous chancellor, who was shot and, indeed, mrs. schleicher, who opened the door for assassins. and the owner of a Munich pub who had molested him. Anyone who crossed Hitler in any way was killed.
tell me about the next of your books on hitler, hitler’s vienna, by brigitte hamann.
brigitte hamann was a contemporary austrian academic who went to great lengths to study her life. it’s quite complicated because hitler provided her own account of her in mein kampf, which includes an account of her childhood and her time in vienna and munich before and after world war one, so she seems to know. she used an incredible amount of legwork to separate reality from mythology. she constructed her whole life, her odyssey, as a form of political mythology.
“he was someone who never worked a day in his life and lazed around, was on a downward trajectory and lived in two houses before the first world war.”
what does the book say hitler lied about?
well, for example, he says he conceived his hatred of jews when he came to vienna from his hometown. the reality was that he was selling his painted postcards to Jewish commercial art dealers, who were selling them for him. in the book he says that the people he detests in particular are the eastern jews of poland, the orthodox jews, many of whom lived in vienna. but there he is having quite normal relations with Jewish picture dealers.
surely you’re not trying to suggest that hitler didn’t actually hate the jews?
no, no! I’m not saying that. I say it’s a little more complicated. He stereotypes them as wandering the streets with their beards reeking of garlic, but in reality most Jews in Vienna were highly assimilated and he was dealing with them.
what else does hamann discover about hitler in the book?
just his weird lifestyle, really. he was someone who never did a day’s work in his life and was lazing around, going on a downward trajectory and living in two houses before the first world war. he did not go to germany until shortly before the war. Ironically, he was an Austrian and didn’t become a German citizen until 1932… did you know that?
I knew he was Austrian.
but he didn’t get citizenship until 1932, which means that, given his political upheavals in the 1920s, he could have been legitimately deported if someone had intended to deport him. he was trying to avoid serving in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces. he got the papers from him and fled to germany.
but why was he in two houses? he was from a respectable family, right?
well, it’s more complicated than that. it was a fairly extended family with many name changes and quirks. he just didn’t have any money, he didn’t work, and there was no social safety net, so he went under.
how did he crawl back?
going to germany. he claimed that austria-hungary was some kind of multicultural hodgepodge that he wouldn’t have wanted to fight for anyway. while of course germany was a different proposition because it was an ultra-german nationalist so it served as a corridor in world war one on the western front.
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And he lied about that too?
Well, he was decorated for his bravery. one author said that the actual men in the trenches at the front would have vaguely scorned him, running back and forth between the command posts where he received written orders to bring to the front line to be executed by officers. however, I think that is a bit of a spurious distinction. I mean, there would be bullets flying and projectiles, whether you were a runner or not. I think on one occasion one of the command bunkers he was running for was flattened by a shell, killing everyone in it.
Are we going to be able to be understanding with him then? maybe he had post-traumatic shock that manifested itself in… dictatorial madness?
well, a lot of people went into post-traumatic shock and left normal lives in the post-war period. He was gassed and blinded, which he re-dramatizes, waking up blinded and gassed and facing unconditional surrender from Germany. it’s very strange – you can see what it was about in the sense that the german armies were in eastern europe on one front and in france and belgium on the other and hadn’t actually been defeated militarily. they would have been smashed to pieces if it had gone on any longer, but if you were a German soldier you would have found it all quite mysterious. Of course, Hitler later blamed internal subversion.
the title of the book makes it sound like a guide to hitler’s vienna. is there an element of that?
it certainly makes it vivid. his obsession with wagner’s operas, for example. he went to see parsifal 70 times or something.
Tell me about j p stern, the author of the third of your books on hitler, hitler: the führer and the people.
he was a literary scholar who paid much more attention to questions of language, looking at the rhetorical concepts someone like hitler used. So it all comes down to these militaristic concepts of fighting and battle. actually, it’s about how someone like that successfully turns his own rather strange life story into the story of a country. all political extremists do this. you turn your individual grudge or grievance into a larger narrative. that would be true of radical Islamists in this country right now, as well as the Nazis. Someone like Hitler managed to make his own life story iconic.
is incredibly interesting from a psychoanalytic perspective. everyone tries to make the outside world match their inside world and if your inside world is very disturbed… hitler was actually creating an outside world to match the inside.
yes, exactly. he was turning into an animated version of the unknown soldier at the war memorial. he was the everyday person coming back to articulate the supposed views of the people who died by the millions in the first world war.
is also enacting a massive omnipotent fantasy.
yes, on the largest scale. j p stern is very well placed to talk about his own, since he knows the language, probably from reading karl kraus, the great interwar satirist who also wrote some very astute things about all this. Hitler’s speeches have very particular patterns in them. is essentially the story of redemption: here we are in this abyss and I’ll get you out of it.
Looking at them as someone who doesn’t speak German, he doesn’t seem like much of a speaker. he looks like a complete psychopath, yelling and waving his arms.
no, no! I do not think so at all! I’ve listened to a lot of his speeches, including things like opening a freeway or something, and you’d be surprised at the level of economic analysis, and then of course there are those moments where he completely swoons. wild tangent, whenever he touches on the subject of the Jews. like all anti-Semites.
“hitler’s myth is about how his grandmothers knitted socks for him, about all the interaction with the german people”
Assuming you and I were having lunch and one of us looked down at the salt shaker and said, ‘it is a well-known fact that the Jews monopolized the medieval salt trade in the south of France,’ that is what it would be. like and that would lead to some other aspect of perfidy from him.
what do you think the Jews meant to him?
It is an incredibly complicated subject. in a way there is a kind of contempt and hatred with a furtive admiration for his biological obstinacy. who survive everything. it’s a love-hate relationship, albeit with a lot less love, obviously. what I mean is that he would have thought that they maintain their racial integrity, which he admires.
So, there’s a sense of belonging that he doesn’t have.
yes. And it’s a very complicated relationship. If you go to Israel, Polish Jews always talk about the snobbery of German Jews, who are the most cultured and sophisticated. the most German, basically. ironically, they were assimilated and not religious so their point of identification was with German culture.
so you think he was a great charismatic speaker?
of course. must have been. it is also the way in which it offers a transgressive temptation. in other words, it is inviting you to think dark thoughts. he’s articulating dark thoughts that people had in their heads anyway and giving them voice.
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as a racist joke? is it ok if it’s a joke?
a bit like that, yes. he is tempting people to think things through and agree with the things he is articulating. he was all set up and deliberately delivered the speeches at twilight or in the dark, all of which he says he got from being inside catholic churches that use twilight and candlelight to manipulate. he deliberately set out to do that because people become emotionally sensitive in that kind of environment. considering the darkness, the blazing torches, the drum rolls and the trumpet blasts, he would have been almost tribal in the power of him. he was quite deliberate. also because he didn’t get up for most of the day. he didn’t surface until late in the day. he invested time. he was a night operator. they all were. stalin was another.
the fact that hitler never had a job, you would have thought, would make it terribly difficult for him to run a country, an army, a war.
Well, it was very frustrating for the bureaucrats who worked from nine to five. it would have messed up orderly government and then the other annoying thing if you were a general was having a little guy constantly harping on his worm-eye experience of world war one with people who had been to the most intellectually rigorous staff colleges in the world world. . they had spent five years doing this intellectual training for this little idiot to tell them, ‘what do you know? I was there.’
tell me about the next of your books on hitler, the myth of hitler by ian kershaw.
I know you’ve written a huge biography in two volumes. if that’s what catches you… but it doesn’t catch me. his earlier book, the hitler myth, is much more effective because it looks at how he interacted with the german people and how his image was manipulated after he came to power to turn negatives into advantages. for example, the fact that he was sexually dysfunctional and had no relationships with women became the führer’s idea negating his natural manly instincts to work all the time for germany. this is an old trick. if you remember the napoleon portraits of ingres on his desk at three in the morning with the candles out. it’s a fairly consistent way of creating images.
Why do we think he was sexually unsuccessful?
god knows. I’ve never thought of that. people just think it was. no, hitler’s myth is about how his grandmothers knitted socks for him, about all the interaction with the german people. Just like any famous person, when he walks into a room, you somehow think his eyes have connected with you. if you touch your hand you don’t wash it; you tell your classmates that you actually touched it.
well, bill clinton is good at it, but some famous people make you feel rejected, not loved.
true, but the book is about how he becomes the fulfillment of people’s wishes.
then, maybe he had no character. made your projection of an entire country but also received the projections of an entire country at the same time?
yes, I’m sure he did.
does that mean it was a blank slate?
That’s the thing. having read a lot about hitler and all his own musings, his offhand ramblings, his führer monologues (because somebody was writing down everything he said late at night, on topics like what soup spartans drank, really), he introduces himself like something of an enigma there was nothing there. everyone was trying desperately to keep their eyes open and he went on to say how wonderful it was that it only took a few hundred Brits to keep millions of Indians at bay – that’s what we must do.
So, was there something key missing?
yes. maybe it’s like any kind of problem: you’re missing the simplest thing. but the more you look at it, it’s like there’s nothing there. It is difficult to explain. there’s a lot of feeling, but it all seems pretty fake and empty.
That’s scary. it’s all the more frightening that there isn’t much more to it than he is evil incarnate.
Of course, the strict theological definition of evil is the absence of good, so it actually suggests a void, oddly enough. then it is correct.
If you can take any projection from little grannies to sexual arousal in young women, it means you can absorb anything.
yes. I once read a very interesting book, a German book that consisted of all the letters that ordinary people wrote to Hitler. they are extraordinary. some of them are simply opportunists, a baker who wants to call a cake a Hitlerian cake. Hitler said no. and marriage proposals. endless marriage proposals.
tell us about the last of your books on hitler, the biography of joachim fest, hitler.
died a couple of years ago. he was the editor of frankfurter allgemeine zeitung. he was a great german journalist who also wrote wonderful history books. it’s beautifully written and very clever about it. he obviously finds him to be a frightening individual. he spends a lot of time talking about whether or not he is a “great” historical figure, who had a huge impact on his time. I’m ambivalent about it, as all he left behind was ruins and dead people. but it is a brilliant biography of him as a politician and a warlord. it is a life of man rather than an attempt to make the times and somehow put man in them. the Germans do fewer biographies, in fact. here and in the united states there is a lot about fascism because it indirectly reinforces the left as the force of anti-fascism. the Nazis provide the left with their anti-fascist credentials.
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