Hitler, almost the man
Donald Watt
Hitler by Werner Maser, translated by Peter and Betty Ross, (Allen Lane £5.00), The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler by Robert Payne (Cape £3.95).
To write a biography of Hitler is a peculiarly difficult task. We require of a biographer not only that he should be able to set his central character firmly against the backdrop of his times, and show how what he did and when he did it firmly influenced those times, but also that he should be able to penetrate inside the character of the man, and in some way make us feel what that man felt, what it was to be that man, what it was to answer some of the drives that inspired him.
To meet these requirements in the case of Hitler is almost impossible. The author has, first of all, to contend with what in the judgement of our time, is the almost unique aura of evil and wickedness associated with the man, Hitler, his entourage and his actions. To make matters worse that aura of evil on a daemonic scale is associated paradoxically with that of a man whose mind and personality, though out of the ordinary, were mean, small-scale, petty bourgeois, a mass murderer on a scale which would not have daunted Tamurlaine or Hulagu, but one established firmly against the background of a lower-middle class suburb, with tea and cream buns. Crude, powerful, violent and essentially fifth-rate are the qualities irretrievably associated in the received images of Hitler. To persuade his readers to identify with any part of that personality, exposure to which over any period of time (as by a prolonged reading of Mein Kampf) is like nothing so much as a prolonged railway journey with the most compulsive of bores, a biographer has to be something quite out of the ordinary. To go further than this and to persuade an audience that his story contains all the classic elements of Greek tragedy, albeit arranged by some satanically incomprehending hand, is, as the recent film and television attempts to display Hitler's last days have shown us, still beyond the imaginative grasp of even our most talented of actors. Small wonder that Sir Alan Bullock, whose biography. still stands unchallenged, preferred to make of his theme a modern morality rather than the tragedy evoking pity, terror and release it undoubtedly was.
Both Herr Maser and Mr Robert Payne have, in a way funked this central problem. Instead, in a quite remarkable way, both have chosen to provide us with a series of biographical sketches, in Mr Payne's case arranged chronologically, in Herr Maser's thematically. Of the two Maser's is the more interesting in that he has chosen to concentrate on a much smaller focus. Mr Payne has sought to write a rather more old fashioned 'life and times' kind of biography. The attempt has lured him necessarily onto the great stage, where evidence is still coming in on an enormous scale and the judgements of the past are under almost continuous rejection. His answers to so many of the historical as opposed to the biographical problems of Hitler's life are often trite and repetitious. as with his acceptance of General Halder's acceptance of Goering's joking claim to have been the author of the Reichstag fire, an acceptance which betrays not only a very naive attitude to historical evidence as such but which rides rough shod over the other problems connected with the authorship of the Reichstag fire with a truly staggering insouciance.
Herr Maser has concentrated entirely on Hitler, the man. The background is there, vaguely visible past the arms and legs and around the torso of the subject, and so far as it can be discerned to be of importance, Herr Maser seems to have got most of the details right. The main merits of Maser's account he in his concentration on the personal details of Hitler's life, his medical record, his amatory relations, his childhood and education, his career as an artist in Vienna and Munich, hig service in the Bavarian infantry in the first world war. Here he has provided what must be fairly close to,a definitive version. His work must be indispensable to any future biographer. But a biography itself it is not, only a contribution.
Donald Watt is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.
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