Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

advanced in Rainer Zitelmann’s essays, ‘Nationalsozialismus und Moderne. Eine Zwischenbilanz’, in Werner Süß (ed.),
Übergänge. Zeitgeschichte zwischen Utopie und Machbarkeit,
Berlin, 1990, 195–223, and ‘Die totalitäre Seite der Moderne’, in Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.),
Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung,
Darmstadt, 1991, 1–20.
    22 . Fest,
Hitler,
(paperback edn, 1976), 25.
    23 . The role of the individual – directed by the notion that ‘men make history’ – was a central feature of the German ‘historicist’ tradition which tended to idealize and heroize historical figures (notably Luther, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck) in its emphasis on the idea, intentions, and motives of great personalities as the framework of historical understanding. Even if ‘greatness’ could override conventional laws of morality, it was taken to embrace a certain – indefinable – nobilityof character. ‘We cannot look, however imperfectly, on a great man,’ wrote the British Germanophile biographer of Frederick the Great, Thomas Carlyle, himself much admired by Goebbels and Hitler, ‘without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near,… of native original insight, of manhood, and heroic nobleness.’ (Cited, from Carlyle’s ‘Lecture One’ ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History’, in Fritz Stern (ed.),
The Varieties of History. From Voltaire to the Present,
2nd Macmillan edn, London, 1970, 101.) In the last weeks of the Third Reich, Goebbels spent time reading Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great and recounted parts of it to Hitler who, the Propaganda Minister claimed, knew the book very well
(TBJG,
II.15, 384 (28 February 1945)).
    24 . See the ‘aesthetic’ more than moral doubts which Fest
(Hitler,
19–20) emphasizes. Fest’s answer to the question he himself raised
(Hitler,
17): ‘should he be called “great”?’ is, accordingly, ambivalent. Elsewhere, however, he was less ambiguous. ‘Any consideration of the personality and career of Adolf Hitler will for a long time to come be impossible without a feeling of moral outrage. Nevertheless he possesses historical greatness’ (Joachim Fest, ‘On Remembering Adolf Hitler’,
Encounter,
41 (October, 1973), 19–34, here 19).·Fest’s biography was written at a time when the biographical genre had fallen in Germany into disrepute, as part of the general rejection of the historicist tradition and its replacement by ‘structural history’ and ‘historical social science’ from the 1960s onwards. The introduction to his biography seems in part at least to have been a self-conscious defence against the contemporary scepticism. For the difficulties facing biography through the advance of ‘structural history’, see Imanuel Geiß, ‘Die Rolle der Persönlichkeit in der Geschichte: Zwischen Überbewerten und Verdrängen’, and Dieter Riesenberger, ‘Biographie als historio-graphisches Problem’, both in Michael Bosch (ed.),
Persönlichkeit und Struktur in der Geschichte,
Düsseldorf, 1977, 10–24, 25–39. Attempts to rehabilitate biography – though not of ‘great’ figures – as part of ‘social’ and ‘mentality’ history can be seen in Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch, and Helga Merkel,
Biographie – sozialgeschichtlich,
Göttingen, 1988.
    25 . Fest, ‘On Remembering Adolf Hitler’, 19, explained that what he saw as Hitler’s ‘greatness’ lay chiefly in the fact that ‘the things which happened in his time are inconceivable without him, in every respect and in every detail’.
    26 . Churchill’s remark was his characterization of Russia in speaking of the uncertainties of Soviet actions in a broadcast he made on 1 October 1939 (Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm,
London, 1948, 403). I am grateful to Gitta Sereny for providing me with the reference.
    27 . Fest,
Hitler,
697–741, devotes a chapter to a ‘glance at an unperson’
(Blick auf eine Unperson).
    28 . Cited in Dmitri Volkogonov,
Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy,
London, 1991, xxvi. This is a somewhat loose translation of the passage, defending the prowess and virtue of Alexander the Great, in Plutarch’s
Moralia,
Loeb edn, vol. 4, London/Cambridge, Mass., 1936, 443f. I am grateful to Richard Winton for locating the text for me.
    29 .An insight offered in an extraordinarily perceptive early study by Sebastian Haffner,
Germany: