Central European History

Table of Contents - 1981 - Volume 14, Issue 03  

Articles

Hitler in a Social Context

Michael H. Kater

In recent years the biographical literature about Adolf Hitler has continued to grow. Publications centering on the Führer of the Nazi party are now so numerous that not long ago, one reputable British historian felt compelled to apologize for introducing yet “another book about Hitler.” But with all this activity, most scholars agree that few if any of the new studies on Hitler have significantly extended our understanding of the German dictator beyond that provided by Lord Alan Bullock's authoritative biography, first published in 1952 and now a classic. Novel and trendy approaches to the subject, such as those of the “psychohistorians,” have not broken new ground. Gerhard L. Weinberg's balanced judgment of Robert G. L. Waite's psychobiography of Hitler is that “the very great strengths of the book are precisely in the more traditional portions, and the weaknesses in the least traditional.” The more current life histories—such as Joachim Fest's, which was clearly designed to supersede Bullock's work as well as to be a huge commercial success—remain of questionable value either because they restrict themselves to known factual information as their basis of documentation or because they lack truly original insights.

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