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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Germany History > Item 114
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The Hitler of History
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by John Lukacs
Sales Rank: 605984
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List Price: $15.00
$12.00
At Amazon
on 9-12-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 304 pages
Published by: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition November 3, 1998
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0375701133
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0375701139
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
Weighs: 8 ounces
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Hitler of History, The (Hardcover)
Lukacs is an emigre Hungarian professor, and is known in the literary community as a historian of moderately conservative Christian Democratic opinions. Several times through this book Lukacs declares that he is writing a history of Hitler, not the Third Reich. Concentrating largely on biographies of Hitler, Lukacs argues that the key experience of Hitler was his experience in Munich during the Bavarian Revolution, not is life in pre-war Vienna. Hitler was sane; he was a nationalist, not a patriot, and he did not really take racism or anti-communism very seriously. His domestic programs were radical, not conservative, and he attacked the Soviet Union largely to remove Britian from the war. His combination of nationalism and socialism makes him the most influential leader of the century. The book's key flaw comes from its emphasis on biography. No historian would wish to study Roosevelt's life simply by looking at this biographies, while ignoring William Leuctenberg or Robert Dallek. Lukacs spends too much time criticitizing minor quasi-apologetic works by John Toland and David Irving. But he ignores Kershaw's invaluable historiographical guide, The Nazi Dictatorship. Books on foreign policy by Gerhard Weinberg and Noprman Rich, works on the German economy by Harold James and Richard Overy, specific monographs by Tim Mason, Robert Gellately, and Claudia Koonz; all these go unmentioned. Lukacs does not look at the functionalist studies of Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, nor at the biographies of other Nazis, such as Richard Breitman on Himmler, Gitta Sereny on Speer and Richard Overy on Goering. Particularly striking is his attempt to argue that Hitler was not really hostile to Communism, in contrast to a large historical consensus that Hitler's expansionist plans against the Soviet Union were at the core of his ideology. He seems to argue that the attack, which Hitler began making plans for as soon as France was defeated, was almost exclusively defined to knock Britain out of the war. He ignores the work of Arno Mayer and Omer Bartov who have found that for German soldiers the concept of "Judeo-Bolshevism" was a very real and very lethal concept." He makes not mention of them, or the Commissar Order, or the whole despoilation of Russia. Like many historians Lukacs can be hostile to theory, with unsatisfactory results. He makes the emotionally satisfying but intellectual adequate contrast between good, humane, conservative Patriotism and bad modern abstract Nationalism. At one point he suggests that patriotism can be racist but not inhumane, since American Southerners would not deny that blacks are Americans. Apparently he is unaware that plans for deporting African-Americans were common currecny for more than a century after independence. Lukacs makes no reference to the more historical approach to nationalism made by his fellow Central European emigres, Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner, or by the Czechoslovak historian, Miroslav Hroch. Lukacs praises the military conspirators of 1944 and ignores their anti-democratic and anti-Semitic views, while dismissing worker resistance. At one point he quotes a 1952 account who declares that Nazism was a movement of the "masses of the city," which muddles the fact that the core of Nazi support was in small Protestant villages. After spending ten pages belaboring the obvious conclusion that Hitler was worse than Napolean, Lukacs finally ends with a sententious conclusion meandering on the depths of Hitler's evil. All in all, a rather overrated book.
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The Hitler of History
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