Ian kershaw hitler a biography
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I think, even now, at the very end of my twenties, I’m still trying to grasp the towering magnitude and meaning of World War II (despite its extremely potent standing in our culture). Not surprisingly, there are a large number of excellent books focused on his life and legacy including well-known biographies by Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, John Toland and Volker Ullrich, among others.
Readers seeking an uplifting and entertaining biography would do well to steer clear of Hitler, of course.
Kershaw’s riveting dissection of Hitler’s persona eventually transitions to an exhaustive chronicle of events which fans of the era will find intellectually invigorating. These two passages were where I felt Hitler’s psychology was most obviously on display. But I'm a citizen of Russia and its head of state.
I’ve carried it around Europe with me over the last two and a half months and it has seen, first-hand, most of the major cities once embroiled in Hitler’s sordid (albeit epic) life. You begin to contemplate the most difficult question of all: the one which asks whether humanity can ever truly find redemption in light of the places its failings have previously taken it.
presents the twentieth century's most controversial life in a single sweep
Michael Kerrigan, ScotsmanAbout Ian Kershaw
Ian Kershaw is the author of Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, which received the Wolfson Literary Award for History and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugural British Academy Book Prize.
Interestingly enough, the parts of the book I found most engaging were the two most “intimate” sections, the first of which was concerned with Hitler’s time as a young man in Vienna, where he was a layabout wannabe art student who spent his time imposing his views on everything — but mostly the supremacy of German music — on his gullible friend, August Kubizek; and the second of which described the “end of days” atmosphere down in the Führerbunker during the dramatic downfall of Berlin.
It is the absolute pits. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.”
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“…if someone decides to annihilate Russia, we have the legal right to respond.What do you mean they joyfully followed him into “what turned out to be an apocalyptic genocidal war that left Germany and Europe not just riven by an Iron Curtain and physically in ruins, but morally shattered”? Why do we need a world without Russia in it?”
— Vladimir Putin, 2018
Reading the Best Biographies of All Time
Hitler: A Biography
by Ian Kershaw
1,072 pages
W.
W. Norton
Published: Nov 2008
“Hitler: A Biography” is Ian Kershaw’s 2008 abridgment of his masterful two-volume series on Adolf Hitler. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that when I finally finished it this morning, back home on my bed, I closed my Kindle in a complete flood of tears, tears which came entirely at odds with Kershaw’s deliberately emotionless academic prose, and which caught me by surprise.
anyone who wishes to understand the Third Reich must read Kershaw, for no one has done more to lay bare Hitler's morbid psyche
Niall Ferguson, Sunday TelegraphFor the present generation, Kershaw's Hitler stands out as a clear beacon of truth, illuminating a dark age of terror and mendacity
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
The definitive biography of the Führer
Juliet Gardiner, Sunday Times
An achievement of the very highest order
Michael Burleigh, Financial Times
Mesmerizing ...
First, you learn about the nuts and bolts of history; then, the wide-reaching geopolitical implications that shape your contemporary world. But when I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere… then I think, not of Germans, but of men and women.
They will drag the rest of us down with them to prove it.
“Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.There is pride instilled by the knowledge that your side “won” and you are grateful the world has comfortably moved on. Where Ahab needed the white whale — a mysterious and alien object onto which he could project all his bitterness and resentment —, I think Hitler’s antisemitism can be understood as a similar item of self-preservation. From there on out the conspiracy theories surrounding the Jewish people must have been like catnip to his mind, monomaniacally controlled, as it was, by a “characteristic ‘either-or’ way of thinking”.
And here the “why” questions begin to overtake the “what” questions. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
The series was originally conceived as a study of power – much like Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon B. Johnson – but grew into something even deeper and more substantial than expected.