For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 2: Hitler by Ian Kershaw

It’s a truism among biographers that they all start by falling in love with their subjects – and end up hating them with a vengeance.  Quite how this works out for the objective historian self-tasked with the production of a biography of Adolph Hitler is a rather worrying question.  Only a propagandist would begin at the position above. Or do you reverse the process, start by hating and find that lurid attention to mind-defying evil has begun to fray your edges? 

In the latest edition of our bookchat readers’ podcast For Whom The Book Tolls, fellow-writer DK Powell and I discuss Professor Ian Kershaw’s numbingly comprehensive and enlightening biography ‘Hitler’.  We also consider how historical fiction has approached the problem of depicting monstrosity.  In ‘Young Adolf’ the great Beryl Bainbridge fictionalised a just-possibly-historical visit by Hitler to his half-brother in Liverpool in 1912, and we look at  Timur Vermes’ merciless satire of sweet-talking  fascism in the age of infotainment ‘Look Who’s Back’. 

You can find the podcast here –

https://youtu.be/Si3wR8n0sEo

and a further summary of our discussion on Ken’s excellent blog here –

https://writeoutloudblog.com/2024/11/03/for-whom-the-book-tolls-episode-2-hitler-by-ian-kershaw/

I should add that I’m more than a little sceptical of the tendency to pathologise Hitler as a form of reassurance – a canter through the bibliography suggests that at one time or another a diagnosis of practically every disease in the medical dictionary has been proposed as a means of explaining him.  (Housemaid’s Knee an honourable but unsurprising omission given the preternatural levels of feckless, narcissistic inactivity that according to Kershaw characterised much of his private life).  Bainbridge seems to me to get closest to a plausible psychological necromancy while avoiding the trap – just - of archly anachronistic anticipation.  Vermes’ satire plays very clever games with first-person voice, asking the reader whether they think they’re clever enough to see through the comically re-animated monster and therefore ‘in’ on the joke, or actually complicit.  Even before the events of 5^th November 2024, it’s a deeply uncomfortable read for all its comic frisson.

If you want to follow this up by reading any of the books we discuss or refer to, you can find them here:

Hitler, by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 2013);

Young Adolf, by Beryl Bainbridge (Abacus, 2010);

Look Who’s Back, by Tibur Vermes, trans by Jamie Bulloch (MacLehose Press, 2014);

The Danzig Trilogy, by Gunter Grass, trans by Breon Mitchell (Vintage Digital, 2017).