Saying Hitler was insane is just an apologia for him, isn’t it? He’s not in charge of his actions, not responsible for his deeds. Maybe the project was mad, but the man was not. But it should also be rejected on another level. People with medical backgrounds have examined the evidence and rejected the idea that Hitler was insane. The one-volume work is more Hitler-centric. Since my aim was to document the relationship between Hitler and the environment that produced him, I felt uneasy about that. One choice was to eliminate context, like the descriptions of Vienna in Hitler’s youth. Then I had to reduce the text from 1,400 to 800 pages. It was like Mozart in Amadeus: “What do you think, Majesty?” “Oh, quite good, Mozart, but too many notes.” Reducing 2,000 pages to 800 meant eliminating the footnotes and bibliography-something no historian likes to do.

He uncovers the thin ice on which modern civilization rests, and shows us what we’re capable of as human beings.”Ĭrunching two volumes into one-what was that like?Įxtremely painful. Here he painstakingly traces the many tangled contexts-historical, psychological, cultural-that enabled this incurious narcissist’s rise to power on the wings of revenge, and culminated in the horrors of World War II.įor Kershaw, Hitler’s life teaches powerful lessons: “He comes to power in a democracy. “Hitler,” says Ian Kershaw, “had a deep-seated, lasting sense of revenge-something you don’t come across in history too often.” In Hitler, his magisterial two-volume biography now condensed into one, Kershaw caps 30 years of studying the führer and Nazi Germany in key works like The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich and Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. “Weimar Germany was a comprehensive crisis, and thus a very peculiar, specific time when people were ready to see the qualities of a national savior in Hitler”

Hitler by Ian Kershaw