Reading Kershaw's Hitler: Hubris

I just finished Hitler: Hubris by Ian Kershaw, the first volume of his two-part biography.

When I picked it up, I was nervous. A biography this long seems to demand a level of sustained attention to its subject that can quietly slide from understanding into empathy, and from empathy into something like hidden or partial admiration. I didn't want that. But I picked it up anyway, because I wanted an answer to a basic question — one Kershaw himself frames sharply. How do we explain how someone with so few intellectual gifts and social attributes, no more than an empty vessel outside his political life, unapproachable and impenetrable even to those closest to him, seemingly incapable of genuine friendship, without the background that breeds high office and without any experience of government before becoming Reich Chancellor, could nevertheless have such an immense historical impact — could, in Kershaw's phrase, make the entire world hold its breath?

What I'm coming to understand as I read is that the answer can't be presumed to lie in those personal attributes, such as they were. If it doesn't lie there, then it has to be sought chiefly in German society — in the social and political conditions that went into the making of Hitler.

Kershaw leans on Karl Marx's line that men make their own history, but under given and imposed conditions. That framing sets up the real questions. How far did impersonal developments, beyond the control of any individual however powerful, shape Germany's destiny? How much comes down to contingency, even historical accident? And how much can be attributed to the actions and motivations of the extraordinary man ruling Germany at the time? All of it needs investigation, and none of it resolves into a tidy great-man story.

So this book is a beginning, not an end in a longer attempt to understand how democracies slide into something else far more dangerous. I'm going to follow it with reading on the circumstances that let this initially unlikely pretender to high office gain power in the first place. And I'm going straight into the second volume to understand how he extended that power until it became absolute — until field marshals obeyed a former corporal without question, and skilled professionals and clever minds across every walk of life paid uncritical obeisance to an autodidact whose one indisputable talent was for stirring the base emotions of the masses.

Two things I'm taking with me

A history of Hitler has to be a history of power. Kershaw describes him as an opportunist entirely without principle, barren of all ideas save one — the further extension of his own power and that of the nation with which he had identified himself. If that's right, then the biography has to track the power itself: how he came to get it, what its character was, how he exercised it, why he was allowed to break every institutional barrier, why resistance to it was so feeble. And those questions are aimed at German society as much as at Hitler.

It happened in a modern country. What took place under Hitler took place — in fact, could only have taken place — in a modern, cultured, technologically advanced, highly bureaucratic society. Not in spite of those things. Through them. That's the part that stays with me, and the part the rest of my reading is going to chase.

Volume two next.