Hitler, without myths

HITLER

Ascent 1889-1939

Volker Ullrich; Translated by Jefferson Chase

Alfred A Knopf

998 pages; $40

When Adolf Hitler turned 30, in 1919, his life was more than half over, yet he had made not the slightest mark on the world. He had no close friends and was probably still a virgin. He had dreamed of being a painter or an architect, but was rejected twice from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. During his years in the Austrian capital before World War I, he survived by peddling his paintings and postcards. When war broke out in 1914, he entered the German Army as a private, and when the war ended four years later, he was still a private. He was never promoted because he “lacked leadership qualities.”

Yet within a few years, large crowds would be hailing him as their Führer. In the sheer unlikely speed of his rise – and his catastrophic fall – Hitler was a phenomenon with few precedents. Extraordinary, too, was the amount of destruction and suffering for which he was responsible: The millions of soldiers and civilians killed in World War II, the six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust. 

Ever since Hitler came to power, writers have been trying to fathom him, and he is already the subject of major biographies. The goal of these books is “explaining Hitler.” Hitler cries out for explanation, and perhaps always will, because even when we know all the facts, his story remains incredible, unacceptable. How could so insignificant a man have become so potent a force for evil? How could the world have allowed it to happen? And always, the unspoken fear: Could it happen again?

The latest attempt to tackle these questions is Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, the first of two planned volumes of a new biography by the German historian Volker Ullrich. Every generation of historians produces its own version of Hitler, and Mr Ullrich is no exception. He has taken on board the latest primary scholarship; but more important, he writes, is his desire “to refocus attention on Hitler” the man. This means treating him as neither a myth nor as a nonentity who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to capitalise on Germany’s rage and disorder. Rather, Mr Ullrich sees Hitler as a consummate political tactician, and, more important, as a gifted actor, able to show his audiences the leader it wanted to see.

Like most biographers of Hitler, Mr Ullrich passes quickly over his subject’s early years, which are little documented, in part because one of his last orders before his suicide in 1945 was for all his private papers to be burned. The story of Hitler’s public life doesn’t really begin until 1919, when he emerged in Munich as a far-right agitator, one of many who capitalised on the chaos created by the world war and a short-lived leftist revolution in Bavaria.

By 1923, his National Socialist German Workers’ Party had grown bold enough to try to overthrow the provincial government, in what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. The coup failed, and after a short stint in jail, Hitler decided it would be easier to destroy the deeply unpopular Weimar Republic by legal means. He manoeuvred ruthlessly toward this goal, aided by widespread despair over hyperinflation and then the Great Depression, until his triumphant elevation to the chancellorship. Notably, the Nazis never won a majority of the vote in any free election. 

Once in office, with dizzying speed, Hitler banned and imprisoned political opponents, had his party rivals murdered, overrode the constitution and made himself the centre of a cult of personality. After years of ideological warfare, the German people went wild with enthusiasm for a man who claimed to be above politics. The fact that he hated Jews only added to his popularity in a anti-Semitic society. 

Of course, these events were much larger than the life of one man, and Hitler sometimes disappears from Mr Ullrich’s. But if Hitler: Ascent is as much a work of history as a biography. For Hitler was a man who evacuated his inner self in order to become a vessel for history and what he believed to be the people’s will. But everything we learn from Mr Ullrich about Hitler’s personal life is commonplace. He was himself conscious, on some level, that he was a thoroughly undistinguished person. When in the company of intellectuals or aristocrats, what Mr Ullrich calls his “inferiority complex” was inflamed.

Hitler’s mediocrity is all the more noticeable in this book because Mr Ullrich strives not to mythologise his subject, knowing how many myths are already in circulation. There is a tendency, in stories about Hitler, to try to locate the magic key that explains him. Thus, people sometimes say he hated Jews because a Jewish doctor failed to save his mother from cancer, or that he was sexually neurotic because he was missing part of his genitals. Ullrich summarily dismisses both of these legends, noting that Hitler actually had a good relationship with his mother’s doctor, and that records of his medical examinations reveal no physical abnormality.

The strange thing about Hitler is not that he imagined himself as the leading figure in a historic drama — many people have such grandiose fantasies — but that life ended up vindicating him. It might have taken a world war, the Great Depression and other calamities to prepare the way, but in the end Germany decided to see Hitler just as he saw himself; the country matched his psychosis with its own. What is truly frightening, and monitory, in Ullrich’s book is not that a Hitler could exist, but that so many people seemed to be secretly waiting for him.

©2016, The New York Times News Service