Product Description

Few twentieth-century political leaders enjoyed greated popularity among their own people than Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. This remarkable study of the myth that sustained one of the most notorious dictators, and delves into Hitler's extraordinarily powerful hold over the German people. In this 'major contribution to the study of the Third Reich' (Times Literary Supplement), Ian Kershaw argues that it lay not so much in Hitler's personality or his bizarre Nazi ideology, as in the social and political values of the people themselves. In charting the creation, rise, and fall of the `Hitler Myth', he demonstrates the importance of the manufactured 'Führer cult' to the attainment of Nazi political ends, and how the Nazis used the new techniques of propaganda to exploit and build on the beliefs, phobias, and prejudices of the day.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16571 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Before writing Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris the first volume of his substantial biography of Adolf Hitler, Ian Kershaw focused on the popular appeal of the Nazi dictator in The Hitler Myth. Arguing that "the sources of Hitler's appeal must be sought...in those who adored him, rather than in the leader himself," Kershaw shows how Hitler's public image welded together antagonistic forces within the Nazi state, mobilised the nation for war, and contributed to the ethos that animated systematic and genocidal violence.

Responding to historians who maintain that Hitler's personality or ideological fixations accounted for his broad acceptance, Kershaw argues that, in the early 1930s a sizeable plurality of Germans hungered for an omnipotent Führer to stand above the political disharmonies of the Weimar state. Later, foriegn policy and military victories attracted many more to the Hitler legend. However, victories were the price for popularity; and Hitler became more and more bloodthirsty as both his image and regime foundered under the blows of the Allied powers. The Hitler myth, then--a cultural phenomenon the Reich Minister Joeseph Goebbels claimed as his greatest propaganda triumph--became a fundamental cause for the collapse of the Nazi State.

Kershaw's authoritative history of political culture in Hitler's Germany forcefully demonstrates that the Führer's popularity rested less on "bizarre and arcane precepts of Nazi ideology, than on social and political values...recognisable in many societies other than the Third Reich." In our present political environment, which repeatedly features outcries for "leadership" from pundits and public servants alike, the disturbing lessons of The Hitler Myth are an urgent warning. --James Highfill

About the Author
Ian Kershaw is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. His publications include Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-45 (OUP, 1983); (ed.), Weimar: Why did German Democracy Fail? (Weidenfeld, 1990); Hitler: A Profile in Power (Longman, 1991); The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Edward Arnold, 3rd edn, 1993); (ed., with Moshe Lewin), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge U. P., 1997);
Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (Penguin, 1998). His focus includes numerous aspects of German history in the periods of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the postwar era.

His research interests extend to include numerous aspects of German history in the periods of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the postwar era.