Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

Jekyll and Hyde,
London, 1940, 16. For an evaluation of this study, see Hans Mommsen, ‘Ein schlecht getarnter Bandit. Sebastian Haffners historische Einschätzung Adolf Hitlers’,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
7 November 1997.
    30 . See Max Weber,
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,
5th revised edn, Tübingen, 1972, 14off. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘30 January 1933 – Ein halbes Jahrhundert danach’,
Aus Parlament und Zeitgeschichte,
29 January 1983, 43–54, here 50, expressively recommended the application of Max Weber’s concept of ‘charismatic rule’ as an interpretative model capable of overcoming some of the deep divides in approaching the historical problem of Hitler. See also Schreiber,
Hitler. Interpretationen,
330.
    31 . See Franz Neumann,
Behemoth: the Structure and Practice of National Socialism,
London, 1942, 75.
    32 . Haffner,
Germany: Jekyll and Hyde,
24. Sebastian Haffner’s later work,
Anmerkungen zu Hitler,
Munich, 1978, remains, in its seven brilliant thematic essays, one of the most impressive studies of the Nazi dictator.
    33 . This stands in contrast to Alan Bullock’s announced aim (13), at the beginning of his early and magisterial biography: ‘My theme is not dictatorship, but the dictator, the personal power of one man.’
    34 . For the term and its implications, see Hans Mommsen, ‘Cumulative Radicalisation and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the Nazi Dictatorship’, in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.),
Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison,
Cambridge, 1997, 75–87.
    35 . See note 1 to Chapter 13 , below, for the reference to this document, which was published for the first time (in English translation) in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.),
Nazism 1919–
1945.
A Documentary Reader,
vol. 2, Exeter, 1984, 207.
    36 . While a tension in method between classical biography and social (or structural) history is undeniable, the irreconcilability is arguably fictive if ‘power’ is taken as the key focus of inquiry – particularly if the view of one prominent social historian is accepted that ‘power, after all, is the key concept in the study of society’ (Tony Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’,
History Work-shop Journal,
7 (1979), 66–94, here 72).
    37 . Gerhard Schreiber ends his superb historiographical survey of differing interpretations of Hitler with a plea to seek, through a pluralism of methods, an understanding of the dictator and his regime – for which he sees the notion of ‘charismatic rule’ as offering a framework – anchored in a ‘depiction of the National Socialist epoch’ (Schreiber,
Hitler. Interpretationen,
329 – 35). See also Gerhard Schreiber, ‘Hitler und seine Zeit-Bilanzen, Thesen, Dokumente’, in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.),
Die Deutsche Frage in der Weltpolitik,
Stuttgart, 1986, 137–64, here 162: ‘What is still missing is an interpretation of Hitler and his era which integrates all essential components of the National Socialist system, acknowledging – and deploying where necessary – in unprejudiced fashion the given plurality of methodological approaches.’
    38 . For the phrase, see Mommsen, ‘Hitlers Stellung’, 70.
    39 .As Jürgen Kocka put it (‘Struktur und Persönlichkeit als methodologisches Problem der Geschichtswissenschaft’, in Bosch (ed.)
Persönlichkeit und Struktur,
152–69, here 165); ‘Every worthwhile explanation of National Socialism will have to deal with the person of Hitler, not reducible just to its structural conditions.
CHAPTER 1: FANTASY AND FAILURE
    1 . August Kubizek,
Adolf Hitler. Mein Jugendfreund,
Graz (1953), 5th edn 1989, 50.
    2 . Hans-Jürgen Eitner,
‘Der Führer’. Hitlers Persönlichkeit und Charakter,
Munich/Vienna, 1981, 12.
    3 . Franz Jetzinger,
Hitlers Jugend,
Vienna, 1956, 16–18.
    4 . Bradley F. Smith,
Adolf Hitler. His Family, Childhood, and Youth,
Stanford, 1967, 19. Thomas Orr, ‘Das war Hitler’,
Revue,
Nr 37, Munich (13 September 1952), 4, states – though without a source – that Maria Anna (whom he misnames Anna Maria) brought 300 Gulden, the price of fifteen cows, into the marriage, contributed by her relatives and probably the reason why Hiedler was prepared to marry her at all. Thomas Orr was a pseudonym for a former employee of the NSDAP-Hauptarchiv (Werner Maser,
Adolf Hitler. Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit,
3rd paperback edn, Munich, 1973, 541).
    5 . Smith, 19 n.7; Jetzinger, 19.
    6 . His