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 1200 books from the collection of Adolf Hitler stand tightly
packed on steel shelves. These are almost all that remains of the more than
16 000 books that Hitler assembled.
Hitler was a reader. As a young man he
claimed to have 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. An annotated draft typescript of Mein Kampf shows just how little
literary culture Hitler had, a point that impressed itself on those who tried to read
the published book.
Hitler read a great deal during the years when he
rose to power. In Munich, he spent much of his income in used-book stores. While in
prison after the Beer Hall Putsch, he withdrew from politics to 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. 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."
Hitler the reader 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.
During the war, Hitler told his generals to study May's
books. 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. He told Albert Speer that he would reach for these stories
because "they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the
Bible for elderly people."
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.'"
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."
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 tells how a radical and illicit government plundered the
treasure of Russia's tsarist regime to buy arms and fund the Soviet Union.
From the beginning, the
Bolsheviks embraced violence and terror. But Lenin also 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.
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, worth $680 million.
This involved the
murder of the Romanov imperial family. The next stage was the
nationalization of all church property. Within weeks, 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,
and all these treasures were sold abroad. Soon
Bolshevik operatives brought back hundreds of millions in cash in suitcases. In
less than two years, Lenin raised $353 million.
The regime survived the Civil War to
oppress its own people and cost millions of innocent lives in its quest to
create a workers' paradise.
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
Hitler's books
tell us a good deal about his 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.
Little can be said about Hitler's response to most of the books.
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