Young Hitler
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just twenty-five years old. It was a time he would later call the “most stupendous experience of my life.” That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world he eventually opened his newly healed eyes to was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled, and the army had been resolutely humbled. By peeling back the layers of Hitler’s childhood, his war record, and his early political career, Paul Ham seeks the man behind the myth. More broadly, Ham asks the question: Was Hitler’s rise to power an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue—a politician who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this serviceable but not comprehensive analysis, journalist and historian Ham argues that Adolf Hitler's experiences in WWI "acted like a forge for his character, hammering his embittered mind into a vengeful political machine." Ham describes Hitler's WWI service as fundamentally different from that of the ordinary soldier: he was a message-runner. It was an elite job involving periodic episodes of high risk and demanding great alertness and self-reliance, followed by ample time for self-contemplation and self-cultivation that evaporated with the armistice. Ham presents a post-defeat Hitler devastated and drifting, turning to politics out of opportunism and desperation. In expressing his personal fury and frustration, Ham argues, Hitler found success replicating his wartime experience: calling on the qualities necessary to get a message through and bring back the reply. His situational awareness made him both a loudspeaker and an echo chamber for those Germans dislocated and brutalized by the Great War and its consequences, correspondingly susceptible to a rhetoric of hatred. This is a useful general-audience perspective on Hitler as more drummer than leader.
