HISTORY: Robert Gerwarthreviews Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped his Lifeby Timothy W Ryback Knopf, 304pp. £11.99.
IN THE early spring of 1945, in the midst of the rubble that was the capital of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler found comfort in reading Thomas Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great. The chapter that captured his particular attention concerned the "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg": the unexpected death of the anti-Prussian Tsarina Elizabeth at the height of the Seven Year's War (1754-1763) and her replacement with the unapologetically pro-German Peter III, which decisively changed Prussia's military fortunes.
A suicidal Frederick the Great, confronted with the almost certain collapse of his kingdom, emerged triumphant. Following Franklin D Roosevelt's death in April 1945, the beleaguered Hitler hoped for a similar miracle that might save him from the Red Army, already standing at the gates of Berlin.
Hitler's selective reading of Frederick the Greatin search of "fitting" historical analogies was indicative of the way in which the German dictator treated books. He did not so much seek intellectual enlightenment as a confirmation of his pre-existing beliefs. Yet despite such a functionalist approach to reading, Hitler came to own an extraordinary number of books. Most of these books were devoted to military history, but he was equally interested in architecture and adventure novels such as Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote. The novelist Hitler most admired was Karl May, a German writer of American-style cowboys-and-Indians stories, which he frequently recommended to his generals on the Eastern Front as a source of "inspiration".
Hitler had begun to read systematically during his incarceration after the failed putsch of 1923, a time he referred to as his "university paid for by the state". By the late 1930s, he had three separate private libraries for his ever-expanding collection of 16,000 volumes: one in Munich, one in his Alpine retreat above Berchtesgaden, and one in his official Berlin residence, where Albert Speer designed a vast library that occupied the entire west wing. Most of his books were confiscated by the victorious Red Army or picked up by Allied soldiers searching for war souvenirs in the ruins of the Third Reich. Yet around 3,000 of Hitler's books, discovered in schnapps crates in a Bavarian salt mine, found their way to a discreet section of the Library of Congress in Washington.
In his elegantly written and meticulously researched new book, Hitler's Private Library, Timothy Ryback explores this remarkably neglected collection of books that shaped Hitler's intellectual world. Based on Walter Benjamin's observation that "a private library serves as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector", Ryback analyses the books that Hitler studied during formative periods of his life, paying particular attention to the dictator's annotations and marginalia. By evaluating the passages that Hitler underlined, or added marginalia to, Ryback seeks to extract and elucidate what "occupied Hitler in his more private hours, often at pivotal moments in his career".
In exploring Hitler's reading habits, Ryback proceeds chronologically in nine chapters, beginning with one of the earliest works in the collection, an architectural guidebook to Berlin which Hitler bought in France during the Great War. Even at this early stage in his life, it was the section on Frederick the Great and his impact on Berlin's architecture that captured Hitler's imagination - a topic that continued to preoccupy him until his suicide in late April 1945. Ryback ends this chapter on a rather uncomfortable note, remarking that while going through the book he discovered "a wiry inch-long black hair that appears to be from a moustache".
From there, Ryback's analysis moves to Hitler's reading of Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen's epic of a Nordic Faust willing to betray friends and commit murder on his way to becoming "emperor of the whole world". He also devotes considerable attention to Hitler's close reading of anti-Semitic tracts such as Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century, Henry Ford's The International Jew, and Paul de Lagarde's German Essays. Sections underlined by Hitler and flagged with bold strikes in the margin include calls for the "relocation of the Polish and Austrian Jews to Palestine" and Lagarde's comment that "each and every irksome Jew is a serious affront to the authenticity and veracity of our German identity".
TWO OF THE MOST stimulating chapters of the book deal with Hitler's rather cursory reading in the field of philosophy and with his largely unknown interest in spiritual and occult matters. Ryback critically engages with the widespread misconception that Hitler drew on an intimate knowledge of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in his frequent references to the "master race" and the "will to power", and suggests that there is little credible evidence of Hitler's personal engagement with serious philosophy. By contrast, Hitler appears to have had a profound interest in spirituality - in particular the "demonic" forces and the "predetermined fate" of the "man of genius". More specifically, he studied The Predictions of Nostradamus, found in the plundered ruins of his private quarters in the Reich Chancellery, and Ernst Schertel's Magic, a book on Satanism and eroticism. A particularly thick pencil line, evidently drawn by Hitler himself, can be found beside the passage: "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world".
Ryback's journey through Hitler's private library is a fascinating and revealing account of the Führer's reading habits. Even if the subtitle's claim that the books under investigation "shaped his life" seems too strong for a man who primarily read books to confirm his pre-existing views, Ryback has produced a highly stimulating addition to our attempts to understand the German dictator better known for burning books than for collecting them.
• Robert Gerwarth teaches modern European history at UCD and is director of UCD's Centre for War Studies. His recent publications include The Bismarck Myth, Twisted Paths: Europe 1914-1945, and Wilhelmine Germany, both published by Oxford University Press