brendan simms hitler a global biography

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B rendan S imms . Hitler: A Global Biography .

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Benjamin Carter Hett, B rendan S imms . Hitler: A Global Biography ., The American Historical Review , Volume 126, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 403–404, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab132

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Is there still something to be said about Adolf Hitler? Twenty years ago most historians thought the last word had been given by Ian Kershaw. But since then, research and writing has continued, sometimes with important and fruitful results—as in Thomas Weber’s work—and sometimes only emphasizing that at least one of the big four—Konrad Heiden, Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, and Kershaw—has already covered the issue. Now Brendan Simms has added his voice to the post-Kershaw conversation.

Simms is perhaps not the most obvious candidate for this task. A highly able and wide-ranging historian, he has previously written about such subjects as the Battle of Waterloo ( The Longest Afternoon [2015]), and European politics since the fifteenth century ( Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present [2013]). He does not come to the task of writing about Hitler with the career-long experience in recent German history of Wolfram Pyta or Peter Longerich, for example. We could say of Simms, born in 1967, what Richard Evans once wrote of Adam Tooze: the global preeminence of the United States has been the dominant fact of the world he has lived in, and this generational experience almost inevitably brings a change in focus. It is perhaps for these reasons that Simms’s account of Hitler, Hitler: A Global Biography , is much more original and stimulating than most recent writing about the Führer.

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• #1,130 in Head of State Biographies (Books)
• #1,961 in German History (Books)
• #2,785 in U.S. History of World War II

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Hitler: A Global Biography

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Revisiting Hitler, in a New Authoritarian Age

With nationalism and anti-Semitism on the rise around the world, two big new biographies look at the Nazi leader’s march to power.

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By Talya Zax

When not at work on a book about the roots of anti-Semitism in his country, the German historian and Holocaust expert Peter Longerich has been thinking about 1923.

In that year, Longerich explained, Germany faced a severe crisis. The economy teetered, separatist movements accelerated in multiple states and, in November, the upstart politician Adolf Hitler attempted a putsch in Bavaria. Still, “the Weimar Republic managed to get through the crisis and stabilize itself.”

A decade later, another crisis had a very different outcome: Hitler became Reich Chancellor, quickly eliminated institutional checks on his power, and launched a dictatorship.

How was Hitler able to turn a democratic nation into an autocracy organized around race-based hatred? In recent years, as much of the Western world has seen a notable, sometimes violent turn toward nationalism and anti-Semitism, that question has become one of broad, anxious interest. This fall, two new books seek answers: Longerich’s “ Hitler : A Biography” and the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms’s “Hitler: A Global Biography.” Both were underway well before the tumult of current events, but both biographers recognize that recent political trends have made their subject especially charged.

“The questions that Hitler was addressing — inequality, migration, the challenge of international capitalism — they’re as salient as they were when he set out to provide his peculiarly destructive and demented answers,” Simms said. “In a very alarming and upsetting way, Hitler is actually less strange today than he was 20 or 30 years ago.”

For Longerich, only a few factors separate the events of 1923 and 1933. An alliance between conservative factions that lasted just long enough. A steady degradation of the country’s constitution to prime the path. Most important, a leader who, through acumen, willpower and charisma, united a movement given to immobilizing infighting.

For decades, prevailing scholarly attitudes have de-emphasized the centrality of that leader, preferring instead to examine the structures that enabled the broad terror of the Third Reich. “The individual events that were happening, from Warsaw to Norway, from Italy to France, and deep into the Soviet Union, cannot be explained simply by central decision-making,” said Jürgen Matthäus , head of research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

But Longerich and Simms are among several historians to reassess that attitude lately. (Another is Volker Ullrich, author of a recent two-volume biography of Hitler .) It’s not the case that “dangerous developments only stem from social movements or structural trends,” Longerich said. “It can also be, simply, that a person has the abilities to use a certain political situation to set a new agenda.”

In a 2018 volume of the German Yearbook of Contemporary History devoted to new research on Hitler, the editors Elizabeth Harvey and Johannes Hürter identified a recent “Hitler boom,” an unexpected increase in German research into Hitler beginning around 2013. But they’re wary of ascribing that upswing to public concerns. Academics, Harvey said, are largely not responding to “the worrying upsurge today of right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism, racism, right-wing populism, extremist leader figures” by thinking, “Right, I’m going to go write a better biography of Hitler to cure that.”

Indeed, professional historians are wary of drawing too many parallels between Hitler and authoritarian-minded present-day leaders. “History,” Matthäus said, “is probably more complex than these analogies would like to have it.”

Simms shares that view. “I don’t think there are any simple partisan points you can make today drawing on the findings of these books,” he said. “If there’s a comparison or a lesson, it’s to take seriously and look closely at what people say and what they argue before they come to power, and not to assume they will be tamed by the structures.” In writing about Hitler’s furious obsession with German emigration to America, Simms (who is British) did include one reference to the contemporary landscape: “The president is mentioned in the book, but only in the context that his grandfather, Frederick Trump, was one of those Germans that left Germany,” he said.

Simms is a political scientist and a professor of international relations; this is his first biography and his first book to focus on World War II. A significant motivation was personal: “My mother is German, and I grew up for quite a lot of my childhood in Germany,” he said. “My grandfather served in the Second World War on the German side.”

Longerich — whose previous books include biographies of the Nazi leaders Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels , as well as “Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews” — has personal reasons for his interest as well. “Of course, you ask yourself: Why are you doing this?” he said. “Why are you so obsessed with this period?”

One reason, he said, is that he was born in Germany only a decade after the war ended. “My teachers actually served in the Wehrmacht. My history teacher was a former SS man. It’s difficult to see, the elderly people you know were actively involved in this system.” That difficulty, for him, turned to curiosity over “how rapidly the democratic Weimar Republic, center of modern culture, could turn into a dictatorship — and how quickly this dictatorship could be transformed, again, into a relatively normal democratic society.”

Academic caution aside, that curiosity isn’t detached from action; Longerich and Simms have both joined the growing ranks of historians speaking publicly about threats they see in contemporary society. Longerich helped lead a 2012 German parliamentary commission examining anti-Semitism in the country, and Simms is the president of a think tank, the Project for Democratic Union, that supports the constitutional creation of a single European state.

“For historians working on the history of National Socialism,” Elizabeth Harvey said, there’s “a feeling of obligation to intervene in current debates.” The timing of history is delicate, and the life of Hitler remains one of the most incomprehensible examples of how quickly the touch of the wrong person, at the wrong time, can shatter an order that appeared stable. “It was unimaginable,” Longerich said, “how the world I grew up in, only 25 years before, could be so different.”

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• Print length 704 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Basic Books
• Publication date 1 October 2019
• Dimensions 16.51 x 5.72 x 24.13 cm
• ISBN-10 0465022375
• ISBN-13 978-0465022373
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; 1st edition (1 October 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 704 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465022375
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465022373
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 975 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 5.72 x 24.13 cm
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
• #441 in Holocaust
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