The Hitler of History
by John Lukacs
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In this brilliant, strikingly original book, historian John Lukacs delves to the core of Adolf Hitler's life and mind by examining him through the lenses of his surprisingly diverse biographers. Since 1945 there have been more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, and countless other books on him and the Third Reich. What happens when so many people reinterpret the life of a single individual? Dangerously, the cumulative portrait that begins to emerge can suggest the face of a mythic show more antihero whose crimes and errors blur behind an aura of power and conquest. By reversing the process, by making Hitler's biographers--rather than Hitler himself--the subject of inquiry, Lukacs reveals the contradictions that take us back to the true Hitler of history. Like an attorney, Lukacs puts the biographies on trial. He gives a masterly account of all the major works and of the personalities, methods, and careers of the biographers (one cannot separate the historian from his history, particularly in this arena); he looks at what is still not known (and probably never will be) about Hitler; he considers various crucial aspects of the real Hitler; and he shows how different biographers have either advanced our understanding or gone off track. By singling out those who have been involved in, or co-opted into, an implicit "rehabilitation of Hitler," Lukacs draws powerful conclusions about Hitler's essential differences from other monsters of history, such as Napoleon, Mussolini, and Stalin, and--equally important--about Hitler's place in the history of this century and of the world. show lessTags
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Lukacs is an opinionated cuss, and doesn't care if you think so. This book about Hitler is good, this is bad; that historian is horrible, that historian is intelligent. Etc. This, Lukacs makes clear, is NOT a biography of Hitler, but a historiography of biographies of Hitler and other secondary sources on Hitler, Hitlerism, and Nazi Germany. Though he sometime talks of the minutiae of the sources for Hitler's biography, he mostly talks about major themes in Hitler's life and Hitler's place in the wider context of the telling of history. So, for instance, there are chapters on when did he become a convinced anti-Semite (ch. 2), was he a reactionary or a revolutionary (ch. 3), was the Third Reich an anomaly in German history or a show more culmination of German history (ch. 7), etc. The writing is sometimes hard and the reasoning sometimes dense, but it is well worth the effort if you've read enough about World War II, the Nazis, and/or Hitler. The work is copiously footnoted with long discursive footnotes, and sometimes the stuff in the footnotes is more interesting than the main text. The only problem I have with this (normally I LOVE proper footnotes) is that Lucaks uses a weird system of abbreviations for the works he writes about. Thus "JH" stands for Jäckel's Hitler in History and "GR" for Giesler's Ein anderer Hitler, etc. Why not use proper full citations and shortened citations? I don't know. Lukacs claims that the best overall biography of Hitler is Joachim Fest's. However, this book was written in 1997, one year before the first volume of Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography came out. Lukacs said mostly nice things about Kershaw in this book, so I wonder what he thinks of Kershaw's biography. (I know nothing of Volker Ullrich's new biography, the first volume of which has just been published in English.) show less
Quite interesting but he tends to ramble a little. A lot of views presented from different historians and biographers of Hitler. I have less respect for John Toland now, and David Irving made up a lot of stuff out of his imagination ! Hitler was not a demon, but he sure was a hate-filled sort of genius that the Germans just loved at the time.
3092. The Hitler of History, by John Lukacs (read 11 Jul 1998) This is by an able historian, born in Hungary who came to U.S. in 1946. A very learned book, it talks of controversies about Hitler I was ignorant of. The author is opinionated but makes lots of sense. One could spend a lifetime studying Hitler. He says the best bio of Hitler is Joachim Fest's, which I did read back in August of 1978.
Refers to Irving and Toland far too much to be considered seriously.
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Author Information
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John Lukacs was born Janos Adalbert Lukacs in Budapest, Hungry on January 31, 1924. His father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish. He received an advanced degree in history from the University of Budapest. Although he was a practicing Catholic, he was considered Jewish enough to be conscripted into an army labor battalion when the Nazis show more occupied Hungary. He deserted in late 1944. When things did not improve under Soviet occupation and a Communist government, he fled illegally to the United States in July 1946. He was hired as a part-time lecturer in history at Columbia University to accommodate an influx of returning veterans. In 1947, he was hired by Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia to teach full time. He taught there for 47 years, retiring in 1994. He wrote numerous books including The Last European War; Confessions of an Original Sinner; The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler; The Hitler of History; A Student's Guide to the Study of History; Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian.; At the End of an Age; George Kennan: A Study of Character; and A Short History of the Twentieth Century. He died from heart failure on May 6, 2019 at the age of 95. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original title
- The Hitler of history
- Original publication date
- 1997
- People/Characters
- Adolf Hitler
- Important events
- World War II
- Original language
- English
Classifications
- Genres
- History, Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir
- DDC/MDS
- 943.086 — History & geography History of Europe Central Europe: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech, Poland, Hungary Historical periods of Germany Germany 1866- Third Reich 1933-1945
- LCC
- DD247 .H5 .L84 — History of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania Germany History of Germany History By period Modern, 1519- 19th-20th centuries Revolution and Republic, 1918-
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 270
- Popularity
- 119,212
- Reviews
- 5
- Rating
- (3.58)
- Languages
- 7 — Dutch, English, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 14
- ASINs
- 1
