In November 1915 a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, two miles behind the front
lines in northern France, and walked into town. Instead of enjoying the traditional soldiers’ comforts of visiting a brothel or purchasing cigarettes and schnapps, he
spent four marks to buy a slender book about Berlin’s cultural treasures. Referred to as “the artist” by his fellow message runners, he was something of a figure of
amusement to them, partly because it was easy to get a rise out of him by declaring that the war was lost, and partly because he spent hours in the trenches
hunched over newspapers and books during lulls in his duties. This withdrawn infantryman had denounced the Christmas Truce of December 1914, when British
and German soldiers fraternized for a day. The only living being he reserved his affection for was a white terrier that strayed across enemy lines and obeyed him
unconditionally.
Nor did his habits ever really change. Decades later he would abandon his companions late in the evening to retire to the solitude of his study, where reading
glasses, a book and a steaming pot of tea awaited him. When his girlfriend was once so indelicate as to intrude upon his reveries, she met with a tirade that sent
her running red-faced down the hallway. A sign hanging outside, after all, adjured “Absolute Silence!” By the end of his life, when he had been abandoned by most
of his retinue and staged his own Götterdämmerung, the only personal effects the invading Soviet soldiers found in his Berlin bunker were several dozen books.
Adolf Hitler may be better known to posterity for burning rather than cherishing books, but as Timothy W. Ryback observes in “Hitler’s Private Library,” he owned
more than 16,000 volumes at his residences in Berlin and Munich, and at his alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg. Ryback, the author of “The Last Survivor,” a study
of the town of Dachau, has immersed himself in the remnants of Hitler’s collection, which are mostly housed at the Library of Congress. In poring over Hitler’s
markings and marginalia, Ryback seeks to reconstruct the steps by which he created his mental map of the world. The result is a remarkably absorbing if not
wholly persuasive book.
Hitler may never have completed any formal education, but as his friend from his early days in Vienna, August Kubizek, recalled, books “were his world.” As
Ryback shows, in the early 1920s, Hitler not only plowed through hundreds of historical and racist books to shore up his ideological bona fides as the leader of the
fledgling Nazi Party, but also went to great lengths to construct a canon for it. He furnished a list of recommended readings stamped on party membership cards
that stated in boldface, “Books that every National Socialist must know” (weakly translated by Ryback as “should read”). It included such gems as Henry Ford’s
“International Jew” and Alfred Rosenberg’s “Zionism as an Enemy of the State.” Confirmation of Hitler’s bibliophilic inclinations also appears in the form of a rare
photograph of his small apartment in Munich showing “Hitler posed in a dark suit before one of his two bookcases” — a handsome piece of furniture with scalloped
molding — “his arms crossed in an assertively proprietary gesture.”
After Hitler’s failed 1923 beer hall putsch in Munich, a sympathetic court sentenced him to the minimum five years for high treason, with likely early clemency, a
slap on the wrist administered, fittingly enough, on April Fools’ Day. At Landsberg prison, where he was cosseted by his jailers, Hitler wrote his first book, “Mein
Kampf.” According to Ryback, “the one book among Hitler’s extant prison readings that left a noticeable intellectual footprint in ‘Mein Kampf’ is a well-thumbed
copy of ‘Racial Typology of the German People,’ by Hans F. K. Günther, known as ‘Racial Günther’ for his fanatical views on racial purity.” Though Ryback does
not mention it, Hitler also received weekly tutorials in Landsberg from Karl Haushofer, a University of Munich professor of politics and a proponent of Lebensraum.
Ryback singles out the Munich publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann as possessing “the dubious double claim to being both the single most generous contributor to
Hitler’s private book collection and the public architect for the Nazi pseudoscience of biological racism.” Ryback continues, “With this cache of Lehmann books we
are in possession of a core collection within the Hitler library and the primary building blocks not only for Hitler’s intellectual world but for the ideological foundations
of his Third Reich.”
But are we? Hitler was tapped in 1919 by Capt. Karl Mayr to attend propaganda sessions at the University of Munich and to lecture to soldiers about the Bolshevik
peril. As early as September of that year, in response to a soldier’s written inquiry about the “Jewish Question,” Hitler declared that rational anti-Semitism’s “final
aim must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether.” As the historian Ian Kershaw has observed in his biography of Hitler, this response indicates that he
adhered unswervingly, from the end of World War I until his final days in the Berlin bunker, to nationalism and radical anti-Semitism. In short, Hitler’s brooding over
texts seems far more likely to have confirmed rather than created his virulent hatreds.
What’s more, Ryback overlooks the importance of the city where Hitler first imbibed anti-Semitism. Hitler’s Vienna, to borrow the title of a book by the Austrian
scholar Brigitte Hamann, was a cauldron of Jew hatred. Hitler admired the city’s anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger and steeped himself in racist newspapers and
pamphlets. He also fell under the spell of German Romanticism, in the form of Wagner’s operas, which nourished the illusion that he was a new Rienzi, with a
mission to resurrect the old German Reich.
For Ryback, the essence of Hitler is “a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which provided the
justification for a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.” But there was more to it than that. While Hitler had no original thoughts, he wasn’t a primitive carnival
barker. On the contrary, he championed notions that had percolated in Wilhelmine Germany and had been steadily gaining credence in intellectual and bourgeois
circles. Hitler’s genius was to fuse German cultural nationalism with politics, allowing him to exert an aesthetic fascination on his contemporaries. As Thomas
Mann unflinchingly and keenly recorded in his 1938 essay “Brother Hitler,” the Führer might have been “unpleasant and shameful,” but he was not someone whose
kinship Mann could simply wish away.
Still, Ryback has provided a tantalizing glimpse into Hitler’s creepy little self-improvement program. While being a bookworm may not be a precondition for
becoming a mass murderer, it’s certainly no impediment. Stalin, too, was an avid reader, boasting a library of 20,000 volumes. “If you want to know the people
around you,” Stalin said, “find out what they read.” When Ryback began exploring Hitler’s collection, he discovered that a copy of the writings of the Prussian
general Carl von Clausewitz was nestled beside a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed to “Monsieur Hitler végétarien.”
