HITLER
Ascent 1889-1939
By Volker Ullrich
Translated by Jefferson Chase
Illustrated. 998 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40.
Ascent 1889-1939
By Volker Ullrich
Translated by Jefferson Chase
Illustrated. 998 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $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. As a young man, he had dreamed of being a painter or an architect, but he was rejected twice from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. He had never held a job; during his years in the Austrian capital before World War I, he survived by peddling his paintings and postcards, and was sometimes homeless. 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, the regimental adjutant explained, because he “lacked leadership qualities.”
Yet within a few years, large crowds of Nazi supporters would be hailing this anonymous failure as their Führer. At 43, Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and by 52 he could claim to be the most powerful man in the history of Europe, with an empire that spanned the continent. In the sheer unlikely speed of his rise — and then of his catastrophic fall — Hitler was a phenomenon with few precedents in world history. Extraordinary, too, was the amount of destruction and suffering for which he was responsible: the tens of millions of soldiers and civilians killed in World War II, the six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust, the countless prisoners tortured and murdered in his concentration camps. Hitler’s very face has become a universally recognizable icon of evil, along with the swastika, the symbol of his Nazi Party.
Ever since Hitler came to power in 1933, writers have been trying to fathom him, and he is already the subject of major biographies by Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest and Ian Kershaw. The goal of these books, and thousands of others, is — in the words of the title of Ron Rosenbaum’s fascinating study — “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 come to grips with these questions is “Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939,” the first of two planned volumes of a new biography by the German historian and journalist Volker Ullrich. Every generation of historians produces its own version of Hitler, and Ullrich, writing more than 15 years after Kershaw, 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, as many of Hitler’s admirers and enemies were inclined to do, nor as a nonentity who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to capitalize on Germany’s rage and disorder. Rather, Ullrich sees his subject as a consummate political tactician, and still more important, as a gifted actor, able to show each of his audiences — from the rowdies at mass meetings in beer halls to the elites in the salons of rich industrialists — the leader it wanted to see.
Like most biographers of Hitler, 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 capitalized on the chaos in Germany 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, however, and after a short stint in jail, Hitler decided it would be easier to destroy the deeply unpopular Weimar Republic by legal means. He maneuvered 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. Hitler came to power because other, more respectable politicians thought they would be able to control him.
Once in office, Hitler quickly proved them wrong. With dizzying speed, he banned and imprisoned political opponents, had his party rivals murdered, overrode the constitution and made himself the center of a cult of personality to rival Stalin’s. These moves did not dent Hitler’s popularity. On the contrary, after years of internecine ideological warfare, the German people went wild with enthusiasm for a man who claimed to be above politics. The fact that he hated Jews with a demented passion only added to his popularity in a deeply anti-Semitic society. Ullrich’s first volume concludes in the spring of 1939, on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland, which would set off World War II and lead to Hitler’s destruction.
Of course, these events were much larger than the life of one man, and Hitler sometimes disappears from Ullrich’s narrative for pages at a time. But if “Hitler: Ascent” is as much a work of history as a biography, this is only appropriate. For Hitler was a man who evacuated his inner self, as much as possible, in order to become a vessel for history and what he believed to be the people’s will. On a podium, he could mesmerize huge crowds with his rhetoric about Germany’s destiny. But everything we learn from Ullrich about Hitler’s personal life — what he ate for breakfast (cookies and chocolate), how he bored his guests with endless monologues, even his clandestine love affair with Eva Braun — 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 Ullrich calls his “inferiority complex” was inflamed, and he grew fidgety and irritable.
Hitler’s mediocrity is all the more noticeable in this book because Ullrich strives not to mythologize 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 that 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.
More important, Ullrich is consistently skeptical of the myths Hitler tried to create about himself. Much of the evidence we possess about the early life comes from the stories he told, and from the tendentious propaganda of “Mein Kampf.” These were designed to further Hitler’s image as a man of destiny, which meant that they were highly melodramatic. For instance, in 1939, while visiting the Bayreuth Festival, Hitler remarked that it was seeing a performance of Wagner’s opera “Rienzi” as a teenager that first gave him a sense of his heroic destiny: “That was the hour everything started.” Ullrich chalks this story up to “Hitler’s need for exaggerated self-importance.”
Yet he doesn’t deny that Wagnerian opera had a profound influence on the young Hitler’s view of the world. In fact, 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.
