A baleful star in the ascendant

John Lukacs

HITLER, 1899-1936: HUBRIS by Ian Kershaw Allen LanelPenguin, £20, pp. 758 The long-awaited biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw — or at least its first volume — is now here, and it calls for serious attention, not only because of the persis- tent interest in Hitler, but because there are profound questions still extant about Hitler's character that require considera- tion.

This is the most impressive biography of Hitler in the English language. (His best biographies have been written by Germans and Englishmen, but Kershaw's work supersedes Bullock's celebrated book in every sense, as well as the excellent book by the late William Carr.) Kershaw's Hitler is near-encyclopaedic, demonstrating his extensive acquaintance with German sources and studies. It rests on the solid fundament of his earlier studies and researches about German opinion and sen- timent during the Hitler era:

A convincing study of Hitler must be . .. at the same time in a certain sense a history of the Nazi era.

A principal (though rather mediocre) participant in the German Historians' Quarrel (the Historikerstreit), Klaus Hilde- brand, said that there was no such thing as national socialism, there was only Hit- lerism. Kershaw does not cite Hildebrand but he rightly states:

The equation of national socialism with Hitler, the frequently heard claim that it is no more than Hitlerism always was a quite misleading over-simplification.

Yes, 'Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany'. The German 'masses, too, had played their part' in Hitler's coming to power.

We need to examine the dictatorship as well as the Dictator . . . What Hitler did not do, did not instigate but which was nevertheless set in train by the initiatives of others, is as vital as the actions of the Dictator himself in understanding the fateful 'cumulative radi- calisation' of the regime . . . The mentalities which conditioned the behaviour both of the elite and the masses, and which made Hitler's rise possible, were products of strands of German political culture that were plainly recognisable in the 20 years or so before the first world war . . . . Even so, Hitler was no inexorable product of a Ger- man 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German cul- ture and ideology.

These well-balanced statements reflect Kershaw's principal interest: how and why could Hitler come to power? Kershaw is correct in pointing out the recently accu- mulated evidence to the effect that Hitler's ideology, indeed his convictions, had not crystallised in Vienna but later, in Munich; also that there had been no trace of a leadership cult in the first years of the Nazi Party. The word `leader' (Fiihrer) had no special meaning attached to it.

These are significant matters. (Perhaps there was no need to support so many of them with referential footnotes, but that is a stylistic detail.) But now I must state a qualification. Kershaw writes:

Biography runs the natural risk of over- personalising complex historical develop- ments, over-emphasising the role of the indi- vidual . .. Avoiding this pitfall has been the very challenge of undertaking this biography at all. It has been the spur to attempting a new approach to Hitler.

Such an approach — Kershaw's inclina- tion not to separate the history of Hitler from the history of the Germany of his times — is meritorious. Yet Kershaw's understanding of Hitler raises a few ques- tions in my mind.

On the very first page of his long intro- duction, 'Reflecting on Hitler' (which per- haps could have been abbreviated or altogether avoided), he states that Hitler was a 'charismatic' figure. This is insuffi- cient. 'Charismatic' leaders and political figures abound, and not only in the modern world of the masses. True, Hitler had (or, rather, acquired) 'charismatic' influences. But when Kershaw writes that 'his power, in other words, was "charismatic" not insti- tutional', this is questionable. 'Power was Hitler's aphrodisiac.' Kershaw, as many others, thinks that 'ultimately' Hitler's ideas rested on crude imperialistic and Social Darwinistic notions. Like 'charismat- ic', 'Social Darwinism' is a very imprecise intellectual formulation. One need not be a Social Darwinist to believe in power, in the unavoidable superiority of the tough over the weak, a belief going back far beyond Machiavelli, perhaps to Cain and Abel themselves. Also, unlike most Social Dar- winists, Hitler was not a materialist, con- vinced as he was of the power of ideas. In one important passage (p. 316) Kershaw seems to recognise this when he writes that hatred as well as idealism helped to con- geal Hitler's national following. Yet else- where he states that

without the Depression. . . the Nazi Party may well have broken up and faded into oblivion.

That is arguable, even on the evidence of Kershaw's own researches. The rise in Nazi votes precedes 1930; there was, for exam- ple, a very impressive rise in the pro-Nazi vote among university students. One of the startling elements in Goebbels' diaries is that Hitler, for years before 1933, did not have the slightest doubts that he would become chancellor, because of the strength and the appeal of the nationalist ideas that he represented.

Kershaw largely dismisses Hitler's social and economic ideas and accomplishments, `lacking, as he did, a grasp of even the rudiments of economic theory'. But that may have been exactly Hitler's great advantage. As Simone Weil wrote in 1942: If Hitler despises economy, it is probably not simply because he understands nothing about it. It is because he knows . . . that economy is not an independent reality and as a result does not really have laws, since in economy as in all other spheres human affairs are ruled by force.. .

In one instance Kershaw cites Gregor Strasser on Hitler: 'a lack of knowledge of human beings, and with it a lack of sound judgments of them'. Alas, the opposite was true: Hitler's understanding of people, especially of the weaknesses of people of all kinds of people — was phenomenal: a kind of sixth sense, perhaps akin to the sense of a dog smelling fear.

The subtitle of this first volume is Hubris; Nemesis will follow. There is nothing very wrong with Kershaw's attribution of Hitler's 'progressive megalomania'. But here a caveat: The untrammelled personalised form of power that he represented could not dis- pense with bureaucratic organisation, but was nevertheless inimical to it . . . It was a recipe for chaos.

(Later: 'It was a recipe for disaster.') True, but perhaps not true enough. Chaos and disaster, yes, but not until Germany was conquered and overrun. For six years Hitler and his Reich defied the power of the greatest states of the world, with the institutions and the bureaucracy of his government and the majority of his people and the unbroken discipline of his armed forces, solidly behind him. The greatest of military defeats, the destruction of most German cities from the air had practically no effect on that national unity or even on the working of his mind. To describe and analyse this astonishing phenomenon is Ian Kershaw's task in his second volume. What he has accomplished in this first may be a substantial guarantee of his ability to do so. It will not be an easy task.

John Lukacs is the author of The Hitler History and A Thread of Years.