Hitler's Private Library
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Washington Post Notable Book
With a new chapter on eugenicist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race
In this brilliant and original exploration of some of the formative influences in Adolf Hitler’s life, Timothy Ryback examines the books that shaped the man and his thinking.
Hitler was better known for burning books than collecting them but, as Ryback vividly shows us, books were Hitler’s constant companions throughout his life. They accompanied him from his years as a frontline corporal during the First World War to his final days before his suicide in Berlin. With remarkable attention to detail, Ryback examines the surviving volumes from Hitler’s private book collection, revealing the ideas and obsessions that occupied Hitler in his most private hours and the consequences they had for our world.
A feat of scholarly detective work, and a captivating biographical portrait, Hitler’s Private Library is one of the most intimate and chilling works on Hitler yet written.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hitler's personal library of over 16,000 volumes was picked clean by American troops. But Ryback found 1,200 of Hitler's volumes in the Library of Congress and other caches scattered through the U.S. and Europe. By looking at the books Hitler read (sometimes obsessively, judging from marginalia and other signs of wear and tear), Ryback paints an unusually vivid and nuanced portrait of the dictator. Among the authors and works Hitler was most interested in were Shakespeare (in translation), whose grand historical subjects, Hitler felt, made him superior to Schiller and Goethe; Henry Ford's anti-Semitic The International Jew; adventure novelist Karl May; Dietrich Eckart's interpretation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt; works of the occult and esoterica; and Thomas Carlyle, particularly his biography of Frederick the Great. Ryback (The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau) offers a unique view of Hitler's intellectual life. 47 photos.
