BOOK REVIEW: Jewish question and the Palestinian connection —by Iftikhar Ahmad

Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life
By Timothy W Ryback
The Bodley Head; Pp 278, £ 18.99

Books that we happen to own and read do impact our thoughts and actions. How we perceive, interpret and respond depends on forces in the general and specific environment and circumstances that impact us as readers. A writer may or may not have a special agenda or a motive. Similarly, a reader may or may not read for confirming his or her own ideas and to look for support, justification or rationalisation. Adolf Hitler, as a reader, was no exception in this context.

Timothy W Ryback, author of Hitler’s Private Library, has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. At the time of the publication of his book, Ryback was co-director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. With his kind of experience and background, Ryback was expected to be objective in his writing. However, a reader gets the impression that the writer was trying to prove or sell/tell a point beyond facts. The writer could be biased for some reasons.

Hitler was better known for burning books than collecting them and yet by the time he died, he owned an estimated 16,000 volumes — the works of historians, philosophers, poets, playwrights and novelists. A passionate reader, his worldview was largely formed by the books he read. For over 50 years, Hitler’s remarkable collection (the remnants of his private library) occupied shelf space in the rare book division of the Library of Congress. Timothy Ryback was the first to systematically explore this collection and several other caches, which he subsequently discovered in Europe and elsewhere.

The volumes in Hitler’s library are fascinating in themselves but it is the marginalia — the comments, the exclamation marks, the questions and underlinings, even the dirty thumbprints on the pages of a book he read in the trenches of the First World War — which are so revealing. Together they take us closer to the man and his thinking than ever seemed possible.

The books he read provide a remarkable view of Hitler’s evolution and insight into his emotional and intellectual world. Hitler’s Private Library is also a landmark that provides understanding of the Third Reich.

Through his exploration of books that Hitler had read, Ryback seems to drive at the point that nationalist philosophy and anti-Semitic writings had a vivid impact on Hitler. Every night he would read one or two books. He said that these readings were his primary source of knowledge, the grist from which he derived his public speeches: “When a person ‘gives’ he also has to ‘take’ and I take what I need from books.” When a friend asked Hitler what he liked to read, he allegedly replied, “Schopenhauer.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte was in fact the philosopher closest to Hitler and his National Socialist Movement in tone, spirit, and dynamic. On the eve of the decisive battle against Napoleon at Leipzig, Fichte appeared before his students, armed for battle. He believed in action and action and action. Like Fichte, Hitler called for the “overthrow of the political elite” through a populist uprising. Fichte spoke of a people’s war. Like Fichte, Hitler wanted to see the sundered German nation united. When Hitler denounced the political dialogue of parliamentary democracy and called for direct dialogue with the German people, he assumed a distinctly Fichtean rhetorical stance and called for “speeches to the German nation”. Most consequentially, Fichte helped pioneer the nation of German exceptionalism. The Germans were, he claimed, unique among the people of Europe. The Nazi efforts to purge the German language of foreign elements were grounded in this Fichtean precept, which Hitler articulated when he mused on the concept of the word “Fuhrer” (a typical German title).

Fichte believed that the Jews would always remain a “state within the state” and thus a threat to a unified German nation. He proposed ridding Europe of their presence by establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. His other solution was “to cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea”. Today, the Fichte volumes represent the only serious works of philosophy among Hitler’s surviving books.

Those who dedicated books to Hitler refer to these books as “building blocks” for the Nazi movement and in some cases, as educational primers for Hitler himself. The titles included, Human Heredity Teaching and Racial Hygiene, The Passing of The Great Race, published material on racial typology and racial anthropology.

Hitler’s Germany was confronted with conflicting philosophies, theses and antitheses. Even religion was the focus of controversies involving the church. The effort, however, was to have one religion for a united Germany. Hitler avoided discussing the Jewish question though scholars and philosophers closer to him often had an opinion to express on this issue. There existed a fear that the Germans were unable to compete with the Jews in spite of their claim of racial superiority. The idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine emerged in Hitler’s Germany. How it got a practical shape is a different story. In this sense Hitler can be blamed not only for what happened to the Jews in Europe but also the injustice that was done to the people of Palestine who are suffering up to now for no fault of theirs.

The Jewish question and the Palestinian connection is a source of headache for those who continue to suffer. It involves a grave threat to world peace. Correcting perceptions is the need of the time. Hitler was criticised for his approach to reading and collection information. Others are equally to blame for using the same approach and applying shortcuts. Most of the dangers are due to less knowledge.

The reviewer is former director, National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA), Pakistan, and can be reached at iftahmad786@hotmail.com