TLS on Hitler's reading

a review of HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY
The books that shaped his life
278pp. Bodley Head. £18.99 (US $25.95). 978 1 84792 072 0

We think of Hitler as ranting rather than reading. But August Kubizek and Rudolf Häusler, who shared lodgings with him in pre-war Vienna and post-war Munich, recall him as immersed in books. A surviving list of books Hitler borrowed from the National Socialist Institute in Munich between 1919 and 1921 includes not only anti-Semitic diatribes but serious works from Montesquieu and Rousseau to Ranke and Spengler. Hitler’s own books are briefly described by the American journalist Frederick Oechsner, who, in an account reprinted here as an appendix, estimated that at Berchtesgaden and Berlin he had some 16,300 books. These collections were soon dispersed. American soldiers in Bavaria carried off Hitler’s books piecemeal as trophies. In Berlin, Soviet forces did their share of plundering. Eighty remaining books were given to the American diplomat Albert Aronson by his Soviet hosts. The only substantial collection to remain intact was the 3,000 books stored in an Alpine salt mine, of which 1,200 are now in the Library of Congress. Aronson’s hoard was donated by his nephew to Brown University. Individual volumes still occasionally emerge. It therefore cost Timothy W. Ryback some leg work to examine a large number of books known to have been Hitler’s and to reconstruct their place in his life. The task presented many difficulties. The surviving fraction of Hitler’s library is unrepresentative. Most of the 7,000 works on military history mentioned by Oechsner have gone, and so have the 1,000 volumes on health and nutrition, many of which Hitler annotated. A large proportion of the remainder are presentation copies which Hitler almost certainly never read.
Enough survives to tell us a good deal about Hitler’s mental world, though the reader of this book must not expect too much. Some readers’ marginalia record their argument with the text, like those in Thomas Mann’s personal library (now in Zurich). Not Hitler’s: in the books examined by Ryback, his marginalia consist of lines, thick or thin, single or double, drawn in the margin, occasionally accompanied by exclamation marks. In Mein Kampf Hitler recommends a highly focused method of reading, in which you first decide what you want to know, then collect building blocks which will confirm or correct your opinions. In keeping with this “Boy’s Bumper Book of Facts” approach to reading, he was always consulting encyclopedias. So his marginalia are not very revealing. Perhaps the health books would have offered some insights into vegetarianism – though the marginal comment quoted by Oechsner, “Cows were meant to give milk, oxen to draw loads”, hardly whets the appetite.
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Hitler’s library is most remarkable for what it didn’t contain. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are absent, confirming the suspicion that Hitler knew them only at second hand. There is a handsome edition of Fichte, given by Leni Riefenstahl to placate Hitler after a disastrous encounter, but the annotations are by someone else. What Hitler did read, as Ryback demonstrates, were the right-wing and racist books regularly presented to him by their pro-Nazi publisher J. F. Lehmann. Paul de Lagarde’s anti-Semitic German Essays have been thoroughly annotated, and Hans F. K. Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, a key work of racial pseudo-science, is almost falling apart from frequent use.
The other striking absence is literature. According to Oechsner, Hitler owned all the Wild West adventure stories by Karl May, all the detective fiction of Edgar Wallace, and many love stories by Hedwig Courths-Mahler (a German Barbara Cartland), but nothing that could send the imagination along unfamiliar tracks. Hitler’s mental world seems to have had no place for imagination. Instead, he relied on a naive conception of science, on which he claimed that National Socialism was based.
Each of Ryback’s chapters discusses a particular book that played an identifiable part in Hitler’s life. During a quiet period on the Western Front, Hitler bought in the French town of Fournes a copy of Max Osborn’s architectural guide to Berlin, which survives, fragile and mud-stained, in the Library of Congress. To his account of this book Ryback attaches an evocation of the front line, about which Osborn, by a convenient coincidence, wrote a series of journalistic reports. In the next chapter, we hear about the adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt made by Hitler’s mentor Dietrich Eckart and given to Hitler with an inscription. What Hitler thought of Peer Gynt we do not know, though Ryback thinks it must have appealed to the devotee of adventure fiction, but it serves as a peg on which to hang an account of the early days of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
In the last chapter, Hitler’s downfall is associated with a book – Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great – which Goebbels gave him on March 11, 1945, and which encouraged Hitler to hope for a last-minute deliverance. Though these links between Hitler’s books and his life are sometimes neat, at other times they can feel arbitrary. Little can be said about Hitler’s response to most of the books discussed. To explain their place in his life, Ryback has to take us on some long detours through relatively familiar historical territory. Still, much here is rewarding, notably the chapter documenting Hitler’s enthusiasm for the Swedish explorer and pro-Nazi Sven Hedin.
Though carefully researched, the book is carelessly written: Ryback writes “calumnious” for “calamitous”, “concordance” for “concordat”, talks of a “typewritten manuscript”, calls the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg “Schussnig”, and translates a parody of Hitler’s autobiography, Sein Krampf, as “It is Cramp” (instead of “His Cramp”). Somebody should have noticed the slips by which the putschist Wolfgang Kapp becomes “Alfred Kapp”, Fichte a “late nineteenth-century philosopher”, and Frederick the Great writes a letter in 1862. Hitler at least knew the value of encyclopedias.

Timothy W. Ryback
HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY

The books that shaped his life

278pp. Bodley Head. £18.99 (US $25.95).

978 1 84792 072 0


Ritchie Robertson edited (with Katrin Kohl) A History of Austrian
Literature 1918–2000, 2006, and the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann,
2002. He teaches at St John’s College, Oxford.