Albert Speer's planned capitol building for Germania
Hitlist
By
Anthony Grafton
The New Republic, December 24, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life
By Timothy W. Ryback
Bodley Head, 278 pages
The Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress has a rare book
storage area where 1,200 books from the collection of Adolf Hitler stand tightly
packed on steel shelves. These are almost all that remains of the more than
sixteen thousand books that Hitler assembled.
Hitler admitted that he was "no writer." But he insisted that he was a reader.
As a young man he claimed, with an autodidact's exaggeration, that he had read
widely in German literature and philosophy. But his copies of the German
classics show few signs of use, and his writings show little evidence of
acquaintance with them. The annotated draft typescript of Mein Kampf that Ryback
examines, with its misspellings and its vague, awkward prose, shows just how
little literary culture Hitler had, a point that impressed itself even on the
loyalists who tried to edit the book, as well as on those who tried to read it
once it was published.
Hitler read a great deal during the years when he rose to power. In Munich, he
regularly shopped in used-book stores, so often that he spent much of his income
there. While serving his time in prison
after the Beer Hall Putsch, he withdrew from politics so that he could read and
write. A passionate collector of all sorts of texts
on warfare, from strategic theories, military histories, and memoirs to
handbooks of ships and tanks, Hitler read them with close attention.
As head of state, Hitler continued to collect. Friends and admirers sent him
their publications with flattering inscriptions. So did cities, companies, and
publishers. Late at night on the Obersalzberg, Hitler read for hours a time,
sometimes until dawn. He worked in his study, reading with intense
concentration. At breakfast, as Traudl Junge, his last surviving secretary,
recalled to Ryback, he "would reprise his previous night's reading in extensive,
often tedious detail."
The mere fact that he marked many of his books is striking. Hitler was "a man
who famously seemed never to listen to anyone, for whom conversation was a
relentless tirade, a ceaseless monologue." Yet as a reader he would stop "to
engage with the text, to underline words and sentences, to mark entire
paragraphs, to place an exclamation point beside one passage, a question mark
beside another, and quite frequently an emphatic series of parallel lines in the
margin alongside a particular passage."
Hitler's lifelong favorites ranged from the Western adventure novels of Karl May
to the plays of Shakespeare. May's novels, from The Ride Across the Desert on,
"overwhelmed" Hitler as a boy, claiming his attention so powerfully that his
grades suffered "a noticeable decline." During the war, Hitler told his generals
to study May's books, and even had a special edition issued for soldiers at the
front. He considered Winnetou, the Indian chief of May's tales, a master of
"tactical finesse and circumspection," and a model for his own love of cunning
tactics and surprises. Reading at night, he told Albert Speer, "when faced by
seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for these stories," because
"they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for
elderly people."
On November 22, 1915, while serving as a message runner on the Western Front,
Hitler bought a guide to the architecture of Berlin by the critic Max Osborn, a
Jewish intellectual who covered the Western Front for the prestigious Vossische
Zeitung while Hitler was stationed there. Ryback observes that "in November
1915, for a frontline corporal to pay four marks for a book on cultural
treasures of Berlin, when cigarettes, schnapps, and women were readily available
for more immediate and palpable distraction, can be seen as an act of aesthetic
transcendence."
Osborn condemns the wild eclecticism of much Berlin architecture, the "orgies of
an unspeakable debasement in taste, " and singles out for praise certain clear
exceptions. Evidently Hitler took a special interest in the long chapter, its
margins smudged, bent, and spotted with paraffin, in which Osborn denounced the
second-rate artistic tastes of the Prussian hero Frederick the Great.
In later life, Hitler planned to transform Berlin into a monumental,
stylistically coherent capital to be called Germania, and he and Speer realized
parts of the plan in the Olympic Stadium and Chancery. Osborn's work was banned
and he emigrated to America, but reading Osborn sharpened Hitler's sense of how
to read Berlin.
A short book on Alfred Graf von Schlieffen (famous for his plan for victory over
France), written by the count's personal physician, was given to Hitler in 1940.
From the Fraktur type used on its cover to its anecdotes of Schlieffen's
kindness to defeated French generals, the book was clearly designed to showcase
the Prussian virtues: courage, austerity, tradition, and the willingness to
retreat for strategic purposes.
Hitler read the book aggressively. As he went through the fourth chapter, on
Schlieffen's campaign in France, he pondered and marked the passages in which
Schlieffen warned against waging a two-front war against France and England to
the west and Russia to the east. In the end, Germany would have to conquer all
of its enemies. But Schlieffen argued that along the way, "we must be ready to
sacrifice even so rich a province as East Prussia, in order to concentrate all
our forces where we seek a decision."
In a famous passage in Mein Kampf, Hitler rejected the scholar's deferential approach to texts: "Naturally, I
understand by 'reading' something other than that which the average member of
the so-called 'intelligentsia' understands," he wrote. "I know people who 'read'
an endless amount, who go from book to book, from letter to letter, yet I would
not want to call them 'well-read.' They possess an abundance of 'knowledge,'
only their brain does not understand how to process and organize the material it
has taken on board." Such readers "lack the art of being able to divide the
valuable from the valueless in a book." In the end, Hitler explained, "reading
is not something we carry out for its own sake, but an instrument used for a
purpose."
Rather than simply storing materials "according to the structure of the book or
the chronology of one's memory," one should fit each important passage, Hitler
wrote, "like a piece in a mosaic into its orderly place in the general
worldview: it is precisely in this way that it will help the reader to form a
picture in his head." The reader who fails to follow this rule "thinks he really
knows all that is serious, thinks he understands something from life, and is in
possession of knowledge. Yet with each new addition he becomes increasingly
alienated from the world, until he ends up either in a sanatorium, or in
parliament as a 'politician.'"
Hitler read to validate what he already thought. He went carefully through an
edition of the scholarly anti-Semite Paul Lagarde's German Essays, printed as
late as 1934 by J.F. Lehmann, as well as several of the famous works on racial
types by Hans F.K. Günther, known as "Rassengünther," a professor at Jena and
one of the founders of German racial science and legislation. These texts told
Hitler nothing that he did not already know. Hitler did not need Rassengünther
to show him what Jews looked like, or Lagarde to tell him that Germany could
never assimilate its Jews.
Ryback describes the surviving esoteric and spiritualist volumes that formed a
substantial part of Hitler's collection. They celebrated those individuals of
"imaginative power," who could concentrate their spirits and conceive
"explosive, dynamite-like" ideas that had the impact of an avalanche: ideas so
powerful that they were beyond such soft, old-fashioned categories as good and
evil, true and false, and could transform the world.
Ryback shows that Hitler called special attention to these passages in his
books. At the core of
Hitler's understanding of himself and his mission, the historian finds "less a
distillation of the philosophies of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche than a dime-store
theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric
hardcovers."
It is wrong to dismiss the esoteric strains in German thought in the early
decades of the twentieth century simply because they now seem laughable. In a
time when all values came into question, many Germans found more than cheap
potato soup for the soul in these pursuits.
Hitler was far from the only twentieth century Big Man who claimed to be a Big
Thinker and a Big Reader. Every good research library has the 44-volume Opera
Omnia of Benito Mussolini, whose beautiful, eloquent Italian Hitler admired, but
felt unable to emulate.
This book offers clear proof, if any were needed, that Hitler's worldview did
not represent the culmination of centuries of German thought.
Red Handed
By
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Literary Review, December 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks
By Sean McMeekin
Yale University Press, 288 pages
This book is a study of how a radical and illicit government
plundered the money and treasures of Russia's tsarist regime to buy arms and
fund the nightmarish experiment of the Soviet Union.
From the beginning, the Bolsheviks embraced violence and terror: "A revolution
without firing squads is meaningless," said Lenin. But he had also, since the
early years of the twentieth century, used "expropriation" — the
Marxist-Bolshevist euphemism for bank robbery — to raise party funds: the
planning and execution of a run of violent but daring heists was how the young
Stalin had first won Lenin's approval.
Once Lenin and his comrades seized power in October 1917 they continued their
policy of expropriation on a larger scale. They had to pay an army and fund a
war. They used every means of financial skullduggery to do so, and many of the
key dealers, traders and middlemen were the very men who had helped organize
Stalin's bank robberies and laundered the swag a decade earlier. More was
requisitioned in eighteen months than the amount sent by the Nazis to
Switzerland during the entire Second World War.
The tale begins comically with the inept attempts of the new Bolshevik masters
to force Russia's worldly and cosmopolitan bankers to hand over their banks
along with the contents of their safes.
Next, the Bolsheviks managed to seize the tsarist gold bullion — Europe's
largest strategic gold reserve, worth $680 million. Part of the looting involved
the murder of the entire Romanov imperial family. The next stage was the
nationalization of all church property. Within weeks, the misguided writer Maxim
Gorky had helped fill countless warehouses with artwork, jewels, cutlery,
silver, gold, furniture, books, and other artifacts for sale abroad. By December
1921, the swag was worth $450 million ($45 billion in today's money).
The Bolsheviks were desperate for guns and food to maintain their new state. All
these treasures had to be sold abroad. Soon Bolshevik operatives, some of them
trusted veterans and others shadowy wheeler-dealers, brought back hundreds of
millions in cash in suitcases. In less than two years, Lenin had raised, through
gold sales, $353 million ($35 billion in today's money).
The regime survived the Civil War to oppress its own people and threaten the
peace of the world, costing millions of innocent lives in its quest to create a
workers' paradise. This heist really was history's greatest.
Was Hitler a Bookworm?
By Ritchie Robertson
The Times Literary Supplement, March 4, 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life
By Timothy W. Ryback
Bodley Head, 278 pages
We think of Hitler as ranting rather than reading. But August
Kubizek and Rudolf Häusler, who shared lodgings with him in pre-war Vienna and
post-war Munich, recall him as immersed in books. A surviving list of books
Hitler borrowed from the National Socialist Institute in Munich between 1919 and
1921 includes not only anti-Semitic diatribes but serious works from Montesquieu
and Rousseau to Ranke and Spengler. The American journalist Frederick Oechsner
estimated that at Berchtesgaden and Berlin Hitler had some 16,300 books. These
collections were soon dispersed.
Timothy W. Ryback examined a large number of books known to have been Hitler's.
They tell us a good deal about Hitler's mental world. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
are absent, confirming the suspicion that Hitler knew them only at second hand.
There is a handsome edition of Fichte, given by Leni Riefenstahl, but the
annotations are by someone else. Hitler did read the right-wing and racist books
regularly presented to him by their publisher J. F. Lehmann. Paul de Lagarde's
anti-Semitic German Essays have been thoroughly annotated, and Hans F. K.
Günther's Racial Typology of the German People is almost falling apart from
frequent use. Hitler owned all the Wild West adventure stories by Karl May and
all the detective fiction of Edgar Wallace.
Each of Ryback's chapters discusses a book that played a part in Hitler's life.
During a quiet period on the Western Front, Hitler bought in the French town of
Fournes a copy of Max Osborn's architectural guide to Berlin. In the next
chapter, we hear about the adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt made by Dietrich
Eckart and given to Hitler with an inscription. Ryback uses it as a peg on which
to hang an account of the early days of the National Socialist German Workers'
Party. In the last chapter, Hitler's downfall is associated with Carlyle's
History of Frederick the Great. Goebbels gave it to him on March 11, 1945.
Though these links between Hitler's books and his life are sometimes neat, at
other times they can feel arbitrary. Little can be said about Hitler's response
to most of the books discussed. Though carefully researched, the book is
carelessly written.
Ritchie Robertson teaches at St John's College, Oxford.
AR Hitler and Stalin were made for each other — both thugs on a monstrous scale. I think the Germans voted him into power as a mad dog to see off the Bolshies in Russia — but then saw the magnitude of their folly too late, when the whole racist thing got out of hand.
