'Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939' is the richest, most convincing portrait yet

After Ian Kershaw's universally praised similar 1998 biography, do readers really need another Hitler study? The answer is yes.

Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 By Volker Ulrich; translated from the German by Jefferson Chase Knopf 1,008 pp.

There is a search implicit in the biography of any monster's youth. In the stations of early life – the parents, the birth, the nursery, the schooling, the adolescence – biographers (and others, in some cases whole nations) study these quotidian details looking for the first deviations, the first signs visible to an impartial onlooker that this person, unlike the dozens of his peers on either side of him, will not grow up normal or sane or morally sound. And the worse the monster, the more thorough, the more strenuous, the search. Hence the ongoing market for studies of Adolf Hitler's early years: how, biographers continuously ask, did he become what he was? When was it earliest apparent that Hitler would become Hitler?

This quest very much animates Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, Volker Ullrich's enormous biography of Hitler first published in Germany in 2013. Ullrich's book follows the universally praised similar 1998 study by Ian Kershaw, "Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris," and readers who forced themselves to read that book (then, now, and always, Hitler is depressing company) might legitimately wonder how this latest telling of the story even differentiates itself, much less makes itself necessary reading.

Ullrich himself opens his account with just these questions. He writes generously about the great Hitler biographers, from Konrad Heiden to Joachim Fest to Kershaw, and he justifies his own massive endeavor (a second volume will follow "Ascent") on two grounds. The first is the extensive amount of Hitler research that's been done since Kershaw's second volume appeared nearly 20 years ago; the second and more intriguing is the need Ullrich sees to shift the focus more fully onto Hitler the person. “It is a huge mistake,” he contends right at the beginning of his book, “to assume that a criminal on the millennial scale of Hitler must have been a monster.”

The outlines of Hitler's early years are well-known: his birth in 1889 to a modestly middle-class family, his life as a struggling, penniless artist in Vienna, his service in the First World War, where he was wounded, gassed, and decorated, and his eventual entry into politics, joining the movement that would become the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) and thereby finding what Ullrich considers his true calling in life. “His great gift was for politics alone,” Ullrich writes, and he possessed that gift to a far greater extent than the men who thought to control him, men like German President Paul von Hindenburg or former Chancellor Franz von Papen, establishment figures who viewed Hitler as a useful demagogue but not much more. “In his ability to instantaneously analyse and exploit situations,” according to Ullrich, “he was far superior not only to his rivals within the NSDAP but also to the politicians from Germany's mainstream parties.” In a pair of virtuoso chapters, “Month of Destiny: January 1933” and “Totalitarian Revolution,” Ullrich gives readers a very shrewd and insightful account of the precise maneuverings by which Hitler seized power in Germany.

As Ullrich writes, when Hitler declared in December 1922 “We need a strong man, and the National Socialists will produce him,” he was clearly talking about himself, and the heart of "Ascent" – and its most important revelation – is a dissection of how Hitler went about becoming the absolute ruler he is in the book's concluding pages. This is in many ways the most pressing question of the 20th century: How did such naked barbarity as Hitlerism overtake one of the most advanced and cultured nations on Earth in the modern era? How did it come about that the Germany of the 1930s could unleash such murderous chaos on the world, particularly against the Jews of Europe? Ullrich shows it as a tandem process: “Once again it was Hitler who gave the decisive signal for German to give free rein to their hatred and destructive desires.”

Ullrich's Hitler is much more than a simple strong man. Countless anecdotes throughout the book (and its linchpin chapter, “Hitler as Human Being”) serve to paint a more nuanced picture of a man who could be both masterful and debilitatingly insecure, a ranter who could precisely deploy his rants, a savage bully who might also bring flowers to the bedside of a sick employee. Ullrich contends that Hitler was an actor of unerring perception, having perfected the ability to “conceal his personal antipathies behind solicitous gestures.” It's only as power solidifies in his grasp that this chameleon Hitler gradually drops his various smiling guises; as Ullrich's chapters progress, Hitler's various underlings increasingly report their boss withdrawing further and further from normal personal interaction. In the book's closing segments, the familiar crazed dictator of the World War II years is all but fully formed.

The account of that formation in "Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939" is the richest and most convincingly three-dimensional one yet produced by a major biographer. And the fully-human Hitler who emerges from these pages is, inevitably, far more horrifying than a simple monster ever could be.

[Editor's note: The original version of this review misspelled Volker Ullrich's name.]

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to 'Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939' is the richest, most convincing portrait yet
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2016/1007/Hitler-Ascent-1889-1939-is-the-richest-most-convincing-portrait-yet
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe