The Hitler of History - Hardcover

John Lukacs

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 029764646X ISBN 13: 9780297646464

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001

Synopsis

Since 1945 there have been over a hundred biographies of Hitler. What happens when so many people reinterpret the life of a single individual? Does Hitler emerge as a mythic anti-hero whose crimes and errors blur behind an aura of power and conquest? By making Hitler's biographers, rather than Hitler himself, the subject of inquiry, Lukacs reveals the contradictions that take us back to the true Hitler of history. By examining those like the controversial historian David Irving who have been involved in a rehabilitation of Hitler, Lukacs draws powerful conclusions about Hitler's differences from other monsters of history, such as Napoleon, Mussolini and Stalin. As the New York Times said of this book: 'Surprising, even shocking. Mr Lukacs arrives at his conclusions with painstaking, exhaustive logic that is hard to resist.'

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Review:

The horrible life and work of Adolf Hitler have long raised puzzling questions for historians: How could the putatively civilized German nation allow a leader to plunge it into murderous barbarism? Why did the rest of Europe not put a stop to Hitler's rise before Germany could amass imperial power? How did Hitler transform bourgeois anti-Semitism into the Holocaust? John Lukacs addresses these and many other questions in this book of essays on the many problems Hitler and his regime present to historians. He assesses the contemporary, too-abundant literature, and makes some surprising and controversial evaluations.

From the Inside Flap:

able service . . . serious, entertaining, provocative and distinctive." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

In the fifty years since his suicide amid the ruins of Berlin, Adolf Hitler has been the subject of more biographies than any comparable figure of our time--and at the center of a crucial historical debate over the nature of evil and moral responsibility in the twentieth century. In this brilliant and original book, the historian John Lukacs climbs above the fray to produce a definitive "history of a history: the history of the evolution of our understanding of Hitler's life and our debates about its meaning."

Like an expert attorney, Lukacs puts the biographies on trial, identifying their strengths, weaknesses, and hidden agendas. And through their intersecting and conflicting accounts, he addresses the enduring enigmas surrounding the demiurge of the Third Reich. Was Hitler a revolutionary or a reactionary? How successful was he as a statesman and a strategist? W

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 029764646X
• ISBN 13: 9780297646464
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288