Books like Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913 by J. Sydney Jones

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.

"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.

A scholarly examination of Adolf Hitler through the lens of his many biographers, analyzing how historians’ biases shape the portrayal of the Führer and the historiography of National Socialism.

Ian Kershaw's 'Hitler' offers a new perspective on the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, providing a detailed account of the man and the events that led to his ascent to power and the subsequent Nazi regime.

"A new and definitive account of the anti-Nazi underground in Germany and its numerous plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler"--

Hitler's Vienna explores the critical years that the young Adolf Hitler spent in Vienna, the city that in so many ways furnished the future dictator's education. It is both a cultural and political portrait of the Austrian capital and a biography of Hitler during his years there, from 1906 until his departure for Munich in 1913 at the age of twenty-four. Hitler's was not the modern, artistic "fin-de-siecle Vienna" we associate with Freud, Mahler, Schnitzler, and Wittgenstein. Instead, it was a cauldron of fear and ethnic rivalry, a metropolis teeming with "little people" who rejected Viennese modernity as too international, too libertine, and too Jewish. It was a breeding ground for racist political theories, where one leading member of parliament said, to the cheers of his colleagues, "I would like to see all Jews ground to artificial fertilizer." Brigitte Hamann vividly depicts the undercurrent of disturbing ideologies that flowed beneath the glitter of the Hapsburg capital. Against this background, Hamann tells the story of the moody, curious, intense, painfully shy young man from the provinces, Adolf Hitler. Drawing on previously untapped sources that range from personal reminiscences to the records of homeless shelters where the unemployed Hitler spent his nights, Hamann gives us the fullest account ever rendered of this period of Hitler's life and shows us how profoundly his years in Vienna influenced his later career. Hitler's Vienna is a major addition to present Hitler scholarship.