Word: hitler
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Role Playing. Such self-conscious role playing was the very fabric of Hitler's life, says Fest. The book, not surprisingly, often presents the Führer in the ebb and flow of rich personal melodrama. Early on, the reader meets the "idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves," and the proud, self-pitying, angry young would-be artist in Vienna, suing his dealer over an imagined embezzlement. After the abortive beer-hall putsch in Munich in 1923, Hitler scurries to safety-and to despairing Hamletesque thoughts of suicide. After he had won the Reich...
...book's best chapter, "View of an Unperson," Fest explores the ways in which Hitler's own mesmerizing public spectacles-especially the death-heavy memorials to Nazi martyrs -were grand variations of the Wagner operas he admired so much. Indeed, concludes Fest, Hitler was neurotically fearful about being caught offstage-or off guard: he covered his mouth when he laughed. "He had scarcely any but staged relationships," writes Fest. "Everyone was either an extra or an instrument...
Fest punctuates his chronological drama with a kind of intermission-"interpolations," he calls them-in which he examines such historical topics as the "great dread" that afflicted Germans during the chaotic Weimar era. Hitler's foolish and criminal rush into war ("War is life," he said), and the Führer's relationship to the forces of German history. The author rejects the line of thought that explains Hitler by tracing the Führer's philosophical antecedents back through centuries of Teutonic mysticism and blood-dimmed sense of divine mission. He also rejects the simple-minded...
...Artist. Fest's Hitler is less the traditional devil than the mad artist-close to but much deadlier than the maniacal globe juggler in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator. Hitler sought power not for power's sake, Fest argues, but to accomplish his own grandiose vision of reordering the world. He trained like a messiah: he became a vegetarian, for instance, not on principle but to cheat the early death he expected and thus gain more time for his mission...
...virtually lifelong refusal to take a wife was transformed into an almost wedded passion for the crowd. Fest subscribes to the idea that Hitler's speeches were a conscious wooing of the masses-to the point of emotional orgasm. The adoration of the crowd in turn would send the Führer into rapture. "What would my life be without all of you!" he once shouted at a meeting, like a rock star stirring up his fans. Indeed, without a crowd to please, he often sank into the kind of moody lassitude that sometimes plagues out-of-work actors...