Books like Hitler, 1889-1936 by Ian Kershaw

A comprehensive history of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, detailing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the collapse of the Third Reich during World War II.

Ian Kershaw's Hitler offers an intimate and compelling biography of Adolf Hitler, focusing on his rise to power through vivid descriptions of key events and figures in Germany's history. The author's research is supported by many previously untapped sources, bringing us closer to understanding the mysterious and controversial figure that Hitler was.

A comprehensive study of Hitler’s rise and the conditions that enabled the Nazi takeover of Germany.

An in-depth exploration of how Hitler's cult of personality became a crucial element in Nazi politics and propaganda.

Abridgement of: - [Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris](/works/OL1924194W) - [Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis](/works/OL1924193W)

"In a remarkable synthesis of key scholarship and historical resources, Frederic Spotts portrays the "National Socialist revolution" as much less a social than a cultural revolution. Spotts maintains that Hitler viewed himself first and foremost as an artist, that his activities were largely directed to the promotion of the arts, and that his driving ambition was to create a supreme culture state, while at the same time using the arts to disguise the heinous crimes that were the means to fulfilling his ends." "Unlike the traditional biographical view that Hitler was an "unperson," who had no life outside politics, Spotts, author of the distinguished Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, shows that Hitler's interest in the arts was as intense as his racism. Spotts offers the first analysis of Hitler's own work as a painter as well as of his art collection - one Hitler intended to make the finest in the world. Spotts's argument is punctuated with evocative photographs and reproductions from Hitler's 1925 sketchbook." "Hitler's vision of the Aryan super-state was, as Spotts points out, to be expressed as much in art as in politics. Culture was not only the end to which power should aspire, but the means of achieving it. This fundamental assessment of Hitler's career and artistic life in the Third Reich boldly shows how the arts were at the center of his life and that he was at the center of the arts. He dissolved the line between art and politics and - through the notorious spectacles, parades, festivals, films, rallies, Wagner's operas and (late in life) Lehar's operettas, political theatrics, monumental architecture, even the autobahn and the Volkswagen - turned the entre German populace into participants in his National Socialist drama." "A revealing, detailed, and highly conceptual work, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics provides an additional key to an understanding of the Third Reich - in many ways the key to the first lock on the first door. It has, until now, been only noted in the more speculative psychological portraits, biographies, and straightforward histories of the Third Reich."--Jacket.

This book is a major new biography -- an extraordinary, penetrating study of the man who has become the personification of evil. For all the literature about Adolf Hitler there have been just four seminal biographies; this is the fifth, a landmark work that sheds important new light on Hitler himself. Drawing on previously unseen papers and a wealth of recent scholarly research, Volker Ullrich reveals the man behind the public persona, from Hitler’s childhood to his failures as a young man in Vienna to his experiences during the First World War to his rise as a far-right party leader. Ullrich deftly captures Hitler’s intelligence, instinctive grasp of politics, and gift for oratory as well as his megalomania, deep insecurity, and repulsive worldview. Many previous biographies have focused on the larger social conditions that explain the rise of the Third Reich. Ullrich gives us a comprehensive portrait of a postwar Germany humiliated by defeat, wracked by political crisis, and starved by an economic depression, but his real gift is to show vividly how Hitler used his ruthlessness and political talent to shape the Nazi party and lead it to power. For decades the world has tried to grasp how Hitler was possible. By focusing on the man at the center of it all, on how he experienced his world, formed his political beliefs, and wielded power, this riveting biography brings us closer than ever to the answer. - Publisher.

Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history. Yet millions of Germans and Russians enthusiastically supported them and the values they stood for. In this first major study of the two dictatorships side-by-side Richard Overy sets out to answer the question: How was dictatorship possible? How did they function? What was the bond that tied dictator and people so powerfully together? He paints a remarkable and vivid account of the different ways in which Stalin and Hitler rose to power, and abused and dominated their people. It is a chilling analysis of powerful ideals corrupted by the vanity of ambitious and unscrupulous men.

The writings are arranged in three sections—Hitler and the Final Solution, popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Final Solution in historiography—and Kershaw provides an introduction and a closing section on the uniqueness of Nazism.

"As an exploration of the interpretational issues that eddy around the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw's Nazi Dictatorship has become a classic account. But if its core remains unchanged, its contents must necessarily reflect both new public controversies and the onrush of fresh research. In the forth edition there are many changes of detail to accommodate this need and substantial rewritings of two chapters. No subject among those dealt with in earlier editions has been the subject of such intensive research - and bringing such rapidly changing interpretations - as 'Hitler and the Jews' and, accordingly, that chapter has been considerably changed. The book's final chapter has also undergone significant revision, to take account of the 'Goldhagen phenomenon', and also to glance back over the changing trends of research on the Third Reich as, with the passing of the generations, Hitler and his regime themselves pass into history."--Jacket.

Benjamin Carter Hett explains how political missteps, populist insurgencies, and a fragile Weimar Republic ushered Adolf Hitler into power, offering a stark lesson on the fragility of democracy in 1930s Germany.