"One of the few instructors Hitler seems to have liked was Professor Theodor Gissinger, who strove to teach him science. Gissinger later recalled, 'As far as I was concerned, Hitler left neither a favorable nor an unfavorable impression in Linz. He was by no means a leader of the class. He was slender and erect, his face pallid and very thin, almost like that of a consumptive, his gaze unusually open, his eyes brilliant.'"
Volume One of Shirer's classic history of Nazi Germany recounts the life and times of a young Adolf Hitler; the birth of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) amidst the political chaos, economic ruin, and national humiliation that befell Germany following World War I; the almost-comical failure of Hitler's first power grab, the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, and his subsequent trial and imprisonment; and a brief overview of German history and intellectual thought, which not only had a direct impact on Hitler's famous Weltanschauung (or "worldview"), but in Shirer's opinion also made Germany a fertile ground for Hitler's ideas.
Shirer's book is immensely readable and full of fascinating tidbits. For example, I wasn't aware that Hitler's original title for Mein Kampf, which he began writing in prison, was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. It is a revealing anecdote: the crudeness of the title betrays a lack of formal education, while the juxtaposition of himself against a mentally inferior and dishonorable world smacks of megalomania. Mein Kampf itself, quoted at length by Shirer, is similarly instructive, with its deranged theories on the Aryan master race, ultra-nationalism, syphilis (yes, syphilis), and Lebensraum, which means "living space." (Hitler thought it vitally necessary to have much more of it, which explains some of his later expansionist policies.)
If only we could write off Hitler as a mere crackpot! If only he had remained the young bohemian in Vienna who went everywhere in a shabby black overcoat, with no money, no job, and no talent to become the artist he so badly wanted to be. If only the NSDAP had remained the tiny German Workers' Party, one of the hundreds of political clubs that were all the rage during the Weimar Republic, many of which turned out to be as harmless as the rock bands now proliferating in Williamsburg. The group was led by the failed painter Hitler, a locksmith, a drunken poet, an ex-soldier, and a self-described economist who had written tracts railing against "interest-rate slavery."
But this pitiful band of losers created Nazism, the great scourge of Europe. And this is why even as we learn of Hitler's humble origins, and recognize his naive dreams of artistic glory, he never emerges as a man of flesh and blood. He remains a demon obscured by his aura of evil, as well as one of those phenomenal forces of the human race that have appeared only half a dozen times throughout history. Hitler had a mother, just like the rest of us, but somehow I don't believe it.
As you read passages of Mein Kampf, it is hard not to be impressed by his unquenchable thirst for power. Even as a young man, he saw himself as the creative political genius who would become lord of the earth, and restore Germany to greatness. He was the one man chosen by Providence who "with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses...until from the shifting waves of a free-thought world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will." In this day and age, when so many regimes couch their totalitarian intentions in Orwellian double-speak, it is perversely refreshing to read a straight-up call for dictatorship, and mercilessly violent means of attaining it. How the rest of Germany embraced Hitler's Weltanschauung, and how the world came to know of it, is a story for later volumes.
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