Becoming Hitler by Thomas Weber, Oxford, 422pp, £20
Hitler has been dead for 72 years, which is 16 years longer than he lived. There have been excellent biographies. Everything that can be known about him is known. And yet the books keep coming. Only a small number of misfits anywhere revere him. There is no Hitler myth. In 1945, Göring prophesied that in 40 years there would be statues of the Nazi leaders all over Germany – there are no such statues. The Führer is a busted flush. Yet, as any publisher will tell you, books about Hitler sell.
Even so, to be of genuine interest an author has to offer something new, or at least a bit different. It is the first merit of Professor Weber’s book that he does just that.
Hitler pretended in Mein Kampf that he had always been Hitler. Weber shows this was another of his lies. He was not, as he pretended, formed by his experience in pre-World War I Vienna. He became Hitler only in stages, and the creation of the Führer persona was made possible by the political and social condition of Munich, Bavaria and Germany itself after 1918.
The pre-Nazi Hitler was not a soldier admired by his comrades in the trenches, for as a dispatch runner he wasn’t in the trenches. Nor was he then a rabid anti-Semite, though as a Socialist he denounced Jewish finance capitalism. For more than two years after 1918 he remained in the army and “helped to prevent others from attempting to depose Bavaria’s Jewish Socialist leader from power, thereby defending a regime that he would claim – once he became a National Socialist – always to have fought against”. At this time he wasn’t even a German citizen, and at risk of being deported to Austria.
His ideas developed gradually over half-a-dozen years, in response to experience and the influence of a number of mentors. Weber traces this development in convincing detail. He gives us Hitler the magpie picking up ideas from others and from his voracious but selective reading.
He follows the course of Hitler’s intellectual journey from week to week. He exposes the lies Hitler told, and dwells on his narcissism and loneliness. He makes him understandable, and yet the puzzle remains. How did this inadequate failure, this awkward fellow who had drifted through adolescence and early manhood, emerge as a charismatic politician and leader? There’s no such mystery about his contemporaries Stalin and Mussolini – their path to power is straightforwardly explicable.
In the late 1930s, Thomas Mann wrote an essay entitled “Brother Hitler”. The fellow was a disaster, no doubt about that. Nevertheless, Mann recognised a kinship. The great and self-assured novelist saw Hitler as a brother artist, a lazy bohemian with his “I’m too good for ordinary life” attitude, waiting for the world to recognise his genius.
It was in public speaking that he realised himself. Film clips and recorded speeches lead us now to think of him as a ranter. He was that, of course. But his oratorical range was great. He could he funny, sharply sarcastic, but also tender – and his speeches were rooted in his understanding of history. He fed on his audience and they were fed by him.
It was in the beer halls of Munich that he discovered the power that would find its full expression in the great operatic rallies of Nuremberg. By the 1930s, he was the first rock-star politician.
Because we tend to think of Hitler in his years of power and are happily aware of the blunders which led his regime and Germany to disaster, we can easily underestimate, or perhaps forget, his genius as a politician. In Munich he learned “to master the problem of conjecture in politics, the art of being able to project beyond the known. He had the capacity to act in situations of great uncertainty, with an instinct for the right move.” He was alertly aware of what was possible and he “also had the habit of telling members of his entourage that many problems didn’t need to be solved” – I think “addressed” might be a better word – “ahead of time, stating ‘When the time is ripe, the matter will be settled one way or another.’ ”
Weber traces in great and persuasive detail the course of Hitler’s development from a feckless and lonely nonentity to a man who had established himself as a formidable politician, attracting admirers in all classes of German society. In doing so he shows the monstrous dictator in the making and demonstrates that his power lay in his ability to play on his audience’s resentments while at the same time inspiring them with hope. Of course Mann, viewing Hitler from his own lofty certainties, was right in declaring the fellow to be a disaster, but he was right too in seeing him as an artist-politician of rare gifts, put to repulsive ends.
One of the many merits of this absorbing book is that Weber shows not only how Hitler became Hitler, but also why so many Germans would fall for him, and be led by him into the abyss.
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