The Inner Life of Hitler.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JANUARY 27, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 012701np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Ian Kershaw
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

A new biography of Adolf Hitler is framed by this question: how do we explain how someone with so few intellectual gifts and social attributes; someone no more than an empty vessel outside his political life; someone without the background that bred high office could have had such an immense and destructive historical impact?

My guest is the author British historian Ian Kershaw. His book, the first in a projected two volume biography, draws on primary sources only recently made available, including the complete published editions of Hitler's early speeches and the diaries of his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

Kershaw has written extensively on the Nazi era, including the book, "The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich." He agrees with historians who say that in Hitler's private life he was a blank -- a non-person. I asked Kershaw if Hitler was merely secretive about his private life or if there was something else at work.

IAN KERSHAW, HISTORIAN; AUTHOR, "HITLER: 1889-1936: HUBRIS": He certainly was secretive about every aspect of his private life and tried to prevent access to it, but I think it goes beyond that. I think it really is the case that outside his political sphere there is very little there of moment which can be discovered.

And his private existence, therefore, has an element banality attached to it. And there's this massive discrepancy between this -- between the private sphere, which really doesn't exist for the biographer, and the public sphere which is of such an immense impact. And that creates, of course, a problem for a biography which has something of a black hole at the center.

GROSS: Do you think Hitler was what we would now describe as a sociopath, someone who is basically imitating life and lacked the empathy of ordinary people?

KERSHAW: He certainly lacked empathy with ordinary people and that goes right back from his early period where he scarcely had any friends -- probably the only person that he loved in his life was his mother. And that meant that he saw society in more or less an abstract fashion.

And it made it very easy for him later on to dispatch millions to their deaths without ever really confronting the stark reality of that in terms of individual relations.

GROSS: Hitler's first ambition was to be a great artist. Do you think he had grandiose ideas of his worth as an artist?

KERSHAW: Yes he did. He was egomania on practically everything he did. And the -- it rings true when those around him say that from an early stage he had notions of himself as the heroic artist figure. Somebody who would rise to become a great artist.

And it was a tremendous blow to his esteem, therefore -- to his self-esteem -- when he was rejected for entry to the Academy School of Fine Arts in 1907. And this was a shock to his system, and very difficult for somebody of that -- of that narcissistic temperament to accept.

GROSS: I found it interesting -- you write that although he saw himself as a potential great artist and as somebody really immersed in the arts, he was never interested in the contemporary art of his time. Certainly not a part of the avant-garde -- not at all interested in avant-garde art. His tastes were more 19th century.

I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit more, and also say if you think that that related to his later decrees outlawing what the Nazis described as "degenerate art," and much of that art contemporary art of the time.

KERSHAW: Yes -- absolutely certain that it did relate to that. And he, both in Vienna in these formative years, and then later on in Munich, he was interested in and attracted by the grandiose aspects of classical and neo-classical art. So he looked backwards to his -- for his artistic tastes.

And the great figures around him in Vienna and Munich -- people such as Klint (ph) in Vienna -- of course a disputed figure, not just by Hitler. And then later on in Munich the expressionist art which was taking Munich by storm at the time.

These were nothing much to Hitler, and he retained, therefore, his strong classical tastes -- his taste for realism in art and rejected utterly the forms of modern art. And that continued later on, and as you say, it led in 1937 to the banning of what was then called "degenerate art" where some of the leading artists in the country found their works on the banned list.

GROSS: You describe him as something of a dandy in his art school period. And I was interested in your use of that word because, you know, gay people were put in the concentration camps and killed. And "dandy" implies a certain kind of gay sensibility, that word.

KERSHAW: I wasn't -- I suppose it does. I wasn't referring to any sort of gay sensibilities by using the term "dandy," but rather the toffing himself in his fineries and going off to the theater. I didn't think it had any particular sexual connotation, certainly, at the time.

But it is interesting to see Hitler getting dressed up in that way -- top hat and cane and so on. And going off -- a very -- imitating a very bourgeois style of life, I suppose. And going off with his friend Kubizek to the opera on a nightly basis and, as I said, dressed in his fineries. That was my use of the term "dandy." It didn't have any sexual implications at all in the way I was referring to it.

GROSS: It was certainly a change from his, you know, military image that he carried with him.

KERSHAW: Yes, well, this element of the artistic figure -- the artistic -- in his own sense artistic hero -- of course that did stand in stark contrast throughout, in a way, to the military figure. And later on we have Hitler still poring over the plans for the redesigning of his hometown, Linz, at the time that the Red Army were more or less at the gates of Berlin.

So, the two things went hand in hand. And the fantasy is the thing that links them together, perhaps. The -- the incredible fantasy that he had in architectural terms along side the extraordinary fantasy -- the increasing fantasies he had towards of his life about the -- about the military events when he was sort of dispatching non-existent armies to different points of the front.

GROSS: I think you need to elaborate on those fantasies for us.

KERSHAW: Well, I mean, even as a youth walking through the streets of Linz, his hometown with his one boyhood friend August Kubizek -- he was talking, according to Kubizek's very plausible account of life at time in the company of Hitler, the young Adolf was talking about rebuilding Linz and pulling down this building here and putting up a new one. Tearing down the bridge and replacing it with another more grand bridge.

And so everything was in terms of this grandiosity of architectural design or architectural fantasy, I think we should say. And this fantasy element ran through, also, his approach to music. When Kubizek and Hitler were together in a little flat in Vienna -- the little apartment in Vienna -- Hitler even talked about the Wagner -- Wagner fan of course -- talked about composing an opera.

When he could barely understand a -- barely write a note of music. And he thought between them, he and Kubizek, who was a music student could compose a new opera. He had another fantasy about winning the state lottery and so on. So he lived in a type of fantasy world even at this early stage.

And later on, towards the end of his life, the fantasies reappeared when the whole -- he saw the whole of his entourage deserting him and yet was, as I say, commanding armies around which by that time no longer even existed.

GROSS: By that you mean they were decimated already.

KERSHAW: Yes.

GROSS: Hitler had these images of himself as a great artist, and yet he didn't get into the art academy, which he wanted to get into, in Vienna. What impact did that failure have on his view of himself as an artist and visionary?

KERSHAW: Well, I think -- as I said, I think this was a serious -- a serious blow to his self-esteem. He never doubted that he would get into this art academy, and when he failed to do so the bottom had dropped out of his world. He had no future plans. He'd taken no exams. He'd left school without qualifications.

And now his one aim, which he had taken for granted, that he would succeed in becoming an artist had fallen into dust and ashes. So he had no future in store for him. And that was the beginning of a descent in Vienna. He was so appalled by this he didn't tell his friend Kubizek even that he failed to get in. He hid that fact for many months from the boy he was sharing -- the young man he was sharing the apartment with.

So this was the sense of the loss of self-esteem that he suffered by that. And as I said, it was the beginning of the descent there into considerable poverty -- into distress, into the gutter, effectively, by 1909 in Vienna. And you can tell that descent into the gutter there where he ends up living in, for a short time, in a dust house (ph) in Vienna.

GROSS: That's a shelter for men, basically.

KERSHAW: Yes. Yes. That's right. Dust house is the English term for it, yes. A shelter for men. Where he descends into that and he's in the company of tramps and alcoholics, and winos and so on. And so for somebody with the self-esteem that Hitler had with the high faluting image of his own importance, what that must have done for his own -- for the way in which he viewed not only himself but the world around. And the hatreds began to well up almost certainly in this time.

GROSS: If you're just joining us my guest is the Ian Kershaw, the author of the new book "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris." It's the first of a projected two volume biography of Hitler. Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: I'm speaking with Ian Kershaw about his new biography of Hitler. Hitler was born in a small town in Austria. He moved from that town to Vienna as a young man hoping to get into the art academy, but he failed to do that. Let's talk a little bit about how he was shaped by the years that he spent in Vienna. Was Vienna the first place he actually saw Jewish people?

KERSHAW: No. No. he saw them in Linz where he grew up. He wasn't born in Linz, but he was born in Branau Am Inn, and was only there as an infant for a very short time. He grew up mainly in Linz and there were Jews in Linz, and it was a very nationalist town and he would have unquestionably encountered anti-Jewish sentiments in Linz.

He was also a follower, at that time, of the Schoenerer Movement (ph) -- a movement attached to George Schoerner (ph) who was a racist anti-semite Pan German politician. So Hitler would have encountered Jews and also the resentment against them in the Linz period. But he's adamant that -- that at that time it was no more than a conventional feeling that he wasn't -- he wasn't so paranoid or pathological anti-semite by the time he went to Vienna.

GROSS: Hitler had to flee Vienna -- had to flee Austria -- because he had evaded military service and the authorities were after him. Why had he refused to serve?

KERSHAW: He detested the Hapsberg Empire (ph) -- the Austrian -- the Austrian-Hungarian empire. This goes back to the period I was talking about in Linz where he was in this very nationalist town, he associated himself with the propaganda of George Shoener which saw Austria's future as being part of a German empire and shedding its various ethnic -- non- German ethnic areas.

And Hitler didn't like this multiethnic empire one little bit. He associated himself therefore with the imperial state in Germany itself, and this was the very strong current of his fitting in at the time. And therefore he rejected service completely rejected the notion of service of the Austrian empire. Of course he was very happy and delighted to serve when he got the chance in the German army in August 1914.

GROSS: Right. And he moved to Germany from -- and settled in Munich in 1913 when he was 24. And soon after, World War I began. And as you say, he was fanatical about fighting for his new country.

KERSHAW: Yeah.

GROSS: When he got into the war he experienced things he never experienced before like, comradeship and a sense of belonging. What impact did that have on his development do you think?

KERSHAW: He -- he -- later on in his life he kept harking back to this period in the trenches. That was his, in a sense, his ideal era. And later on he always -- he can't speaking about it as the happiest time of his life.

So he did encounter there a sense of, as you put it, a sense of belonging which he never had before. He drifted through the first 20 odd years of his life. He never felt at home anywhere. He liked Munich when he get there, but he never felt happy in Vienna. He never had any real sense of purpose or family feeling at any time there.

When he got into the army he found that that was his home, something that he could believe in. The sense of elation in 1914 -- in August '14 -- was genuine. He now had a cause to work for. He had a sense of comradeship with those around him. And he found some purpose in his life. And that, of course, was completely destroyed by the end of the war.

GROSS: So that's why he was -- I mean, he was shaken not only by the fact that his country lost but this era of his life had ended.

KERSHAW: Well, that's it. Because his own -- he associated himself so strongly with what he encountered in the war -- was a very good soldier. Won the iron cross first class and so on. And at the end of the war the bottom fell out of his world.

This -- the cause that he had fought for for four years was now at an end it seemed. He was one of those who shared the views that he had been betrayed by enemies within. He found those enemies in the Jews primarily -- the Jews and the Socialists who he associated with each other -- and that if Germany's defeat in the war and the revolution which immediately followed was an absolutely traumatic phase for him.

And it's in that period and the period immediately afterwards where he experienced it first hand, the radical descent into near anarchy in Munich, that the Hitler that we know was really formed. And that the anti-Semitism which had been there in the Vienna period was now turned into a fully- fledged ideology at center of which lay the notion of removing the Jews altogether.

GROSS: He was also temporarily blinded by tear gas toward the end of the war. He went through a long period of convalescence. That probably -- or that perhaps even increased his obsession that they should have won the war; that this was a tragic defeat; that he had to do -- that he had to take some kind of action. I mean, he was personally wounded too.

KERSHAW: Yes he was. And, as you said, the -- when he lay in the hospital in Pasabak (ph) in Pomerania (ph) and experienced the end of the war, this was unquestionably the most serious trauma that he'd been through until then. And in a way one can see the entire career that follows that with all its consequences being the attempt by Hitler to reverse the defeat and the revolution of November 1918.

So you can't emphasize those feelings strongly enough. Just one other point, though, to add to that which is that Hitler's own story that at that moment he decided to enter politics has to be seen as one other example in "Mein Kampf" of the fall of exaggeration and the dramatization of his own life. In reality he returned to Munich with no obvious change to his circumstances to before he couldn't decide to go into politics -- didn't belong to any party.

He had no future, obviously, before him in politics. His future seemed to be a return to the beer halls and cafes in Munich to sell -- to try to sell his postcards and little paintings. And what happened, in the next months, was that -- as I put it in the book -- somewhere politics came to him into the barracks. He was singled out as a particularly gifted speaker and that gave him the opportunity to begin then what turned out to be this so-called political career which took Germany into the depths.

GROSS: Had he made his living before the war selling his postcards and paintings?

KERSHAW: Yes he had. In Vienna that was the period where he was to eek out a living painting -- selling these paintings around the cafes of Vienna. And incidentally, with the help of some Jewish associates at the time.

GROSS: Speaking of Jewish associates, the person who I think recommended him for the iron cross was Jewish.

KERSHAW: That's true. And it is the fact that despite his anti-Semitism, which unquestionably was there before 1918, we don't have a single authentic anti-Semitic statement by Hitler before the start of his political activities in 1919.

So I think that hobbles the argument to suggest that its 1919 which turns the Hitler into the pathological Hitler and anti-semite that we know, although the resentment has been there long since.

GROSS: Before we get more into the pathological Hitler, I'm wondering if you saw any of the paintings and postcards that Hitler made and sold as a young man.

KERSHAW: Yes, I have seen some of them. And I have to say he certainly paints a lot better than I can. And the paintings aren't all that bad, they're just a bit desiccated. There's no life in them. They are very stylized and exactly the sort of thing that you might find amateur painters doing. Not too bad, but certainly not of a caliber where they could be sold -- where the could really be sold professionally or where you could rank this person as an artist of some caliber. But on an amateur level they're not too bad.

GROSS: If you're just joining us my guest is Ian Kershaw. He's written a new biography of Hitler called, "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris." It's the first of a projected two volume biography.

Hitler's first anti-Semitic tirades, you say, were linked to attacks on Jewish war profiteers and racketeers who he blamed for exploiting the German people and for causing them to lose the war.

KERSHAW: Yes, that was a very commonplace sentiment in the last years of the war. The resentments against the Jews were building up in the big cities and quite especially so in Munich. Which Hitler experienced these resentments against the Jews in his short periods of leave during the last years of the war.

And the Jews were now being increasingly blamed for being shirkers, utterly untrue of course, they're all (unintelligible) these things are. But Jews were being blamed for being shirkers for not being at the front and rather hiding in -- back at home. They were also blamed for fomenting unrest and causing -- causing the industrial unrest which was also associated then with weakening Germany's ability to fight.

So the notion of the stab in the back legend, which became a key element that the war had been lost by virtue of the front being stabbed in the back by unrest at home. That was, of course, a legend. But the roots of that legend go back into the last years of the war and the resentments against the Jews of being racketeers and profiteers and benefiting disproportionately from the war. These were all there -- Hitler picked them up and exploited them in his propaganda in that early period immediately after the war.

GROSS: Ian Kershaw is the author of Hitler, a biography covering the years 1889 to 1936. Volume two is in the works. Kershaw is a professor at the University of Sheffield in England. He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with Ian Kershaw, the author of a new biography of Adolf Hitler. It covers Hitler's life from his birth in 1889 to 1936 when he triumphed by leading Germany's reoccupation of the Rhineland. Setting the stage for Germany's future invasions and World War II. Volume two of this biography is in the works. Let's continue our talk about Hitler's political development.

A lot of Hitler's early speeches were given in beer halls. Would you set the scene for us? What were these beer halls speeches like? Who was he talking to? What was the atmosphere like?

KERSHAW: Yes. The attendances in these beer halls -- these beer halls are quite big places, and if you go to Munich now you can still get a little bit of the sort of atmosphere that could prevail in them.

A couple of thousand people were there sitting at big tables. All of them with liter mugs of beer. A very rowdy, raucous atmosphere. People prepared to listen to a speech not because of its intellectual content, but because of the way in which the speaker is able to fire up the masses. And by this time many of them, of course, have drunk several liters of beer probably.

So the scene is one which -- where a really talented demagogue such as Hitler can whip up the sentiments of the people who go there. And when -- already in the first months that he was in this very tiny Nazi party, Hitler was able to build up the reputation for himself as a top star speaker.

So people would go to these meetings because Hitler was speaking. He could speak the language of the common man -- of the ordinary person. So in this atmosphere he was already attracting the people who were at least already semi-converted to the type of message that he was going to preach.

But also it was -- the more he went on the more he is notoriety attracted -- attracted Socialists and Communists -- his opponents. Therefore, there would be a lot of trouble in the beer halls as well with beer mugs being thrown -- very rowdy scenes.

Hitler didn't mind this, on the contrary, he liked it. He had his own strong arm man there to deal with it. But from the point of view of publicity this was magnificent, because it was making the Nazi party into something which was newsworthy.

GROSS: So would he just take the mike, so to speak, or were there like featured speakers or was this already a practice that people spoke at the beer halls?

KERSHAW: Well, usually the political -- all the major political parties would hire the beer halls out for their big speeches and so on. There was nothing unusual in that about the Nazi party.

GROSS: I see.

KERSHAW: And usually there were one or two warm up speeches before the main event. But this was just a commonplace thing. Every party did it. So when they started off, the Nazi party was just one of its early -- it's early meetings there were -- really little notice was taken of them. They were just one amongst the crowd.

When Hitler came on the scene, increasingly, he was able to stamp his own impact -- his own personality -- upon it. And people started to flock into the meetings because of Hitler. And that gave him an increasing position of strength within the infant Nazi party to the extent that by 1921 they could not dispense with this service. He was the one real star attraction they had.

So in 1921, when it came to a crisis within the party leadership, Hitler was able to play on this and to really give them an ultimatum: either I take the party leadership or you lose me. And of course they couldn't afford to lose him, so they gave him the dictatorial control over the party.

GROSS: What was the crisis within the party?

KERSHAW: The crisis was that this sort of politics on the extreme right then, subsequently, in other countries -- in other political movements -- these right wing politics tend towards fragmentation and tend towards breaking up.

And at that time the Nazi party, although it had picked up some members, it hadn't gone far enough. And there were those within the party that thought what it should do was to try to unite a number of these different and warring factions. All of which had more or less the same message, but were, as organizations, separate.

And for Hitler that was enough. The notion that his own little movement which he dominated could then be associated with other movements and blended into them so that he might actually lose his centrality was so -- that was such horrendous thought for him that he was prepared to quit the Nazi party altogether.

And that crisis about amalgamation or going a separate way came to a head in July 1921. And as I said, Hitler was at that stage prepared to quit and in his usual type of prima Donna style then, pranced offstage and said: I will resign if we don't prevent this merger going ahead with this other faction of the extreme right. And they had to give way to Hitler because, as I said, he was the one star that existed in that small party.

GROSS: So Hitler assumed leadership of the Nazi party in 1921. What direction did he take the party in?

KERSHAW: Well, he took it in the direction of -- which I've already touched upon -- of increasing publicity through speeches, tirades in the Munich beer halls. Through brushes with the police. Through attempting to gain maximum publicity.

But we have to remember that this is still a small scale affair. The Nazi party is not the mainstream of Bavarian politics or even of Munich politics. So Hitler is making as much noise as possible. And he's gaining increasing numbers of members. But it's still not in the mainstream.

Now what he does in the -- in the rapidly growing crisis -- Hitler needs crisis for his political oxygen. And in the rapidly growing crisis of 1923, when the inflation collapses and you had this hyper inflation with the currency total ruined, politics are polarized.

And in that year Hitler moves into -- in quite a big way -- into paramilitary politics where these armed bands -- really political armies -- roaming the streets Hitler is able to bring his own paramilitary unit -- the storm troopers -- who had been responsible for defending him in the beer hall turmoil and so on.

He's able to incorporate those now in the paramilitary scene in a big way in Munich and in Bavaria, generally. And this paramilitary scene is -- we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people here -- Hitler's group in the storm troopers are only a small fraction. Hundreds of thousands of people in the paramilitary scene where the crisis is building and where there's increasing talk of a putsch attempt against the government in Berlin against the Reich government.

So Bavaria has become now the stronghold of right -- extreme right-wing, racist, nationalist politics which sees itself as challenging Berlin. And Hitler is able through help from the paramilitary leadership and particularly from Ernst Rohm, the later storm troopers leader, to gain prominence within that movement to become one of the spokesman for the right overall in Bavaria at that time.

GROSS: And "putsch" is German for "coup d'etat."

KERSHAW: Coup d'etat, yeah.

GROSS: And Hitler tries a putsch himself.

KERSHAW: He does. In November 1923 the culmination of this year of political -- increasing political mayhem in Bavaria, where the leading Bavarian authorities themselves flirted with the idea of a coup against Berlin on and off throughout the year. Eventually in the autumn of 1923 they got cold feet because it becomes plain that the Reichswehr -- the German army -- in Berlin is not prepared to support a coup from Bavaria.

Hitler, by this stage, has whipped his own men up into such a frenzied expectation that he can't lose face and pull back. So he goes ahead with the coup attempt in the beer hall the (unintelligible) in Munich on the 8th of November 1923. And for a time it looks as if that might succeed.

But as soon as these people are released, they rat on the coup d'etat attempt and within hours the coup has failed. And what lingers over from that is the next morning Hitler and his men decide to march through Munich and at the end of that march they encounter police of in the center of Munich -- guns -- shots are fired. And 16 of the Putsches are killed and four policeman as well. And for that, Hitler is then arrested and put on trial. And that's a crucial phase, I think, in the development -- the failure of the putsch and the lessons that Hitler learns from them.

GROSS: Well, Hitler was then banned from public speaking for three years.

KERSHAW: Yes. That's when he comes out of -- out of prison. And of course in prison he'd been sentenced through the leniency of the judicial authorities in Bavaria. He had been sentenced to the slightest period of imprisonment possible. And even then, really, certainly, should have been -- should have disappeared from the scene altogether by that stage -- put away for a number of years and that ought to have been the last we saw of him.

Instead, he's able to come out of prison, re-found the party. And although he has this ban on public speaking -- and it's a ban which extends from other states as well -- the crucial thing is that he's not banned from speaking in closed party meetings. And therefore it's still possible for him to speak and for him to build up the party again.

And now under much tighter control than had existed before the putsch now as a leadership party with total obedience to him and he's able, as a result of that, to crush factionalism within the party. And to become more and more the spokesman for the entire party. The center of its ideology. The combination of its organizational fulcrum and at the same time the fountain of its ideological orthodoxy.

GROSS: When he emerged after prison and started speaking again -- first to his party and then after the speaking ban, speaking in public. Was his anti-Semitism more virulent than it had been before?

KERSHAW: No. It was equally virulent. But he could turn it on and turn it off depending on the audience. So, for example in 1926 -- in February '26, I think it was -- he gave a big speech to a relatively well to do audience of businessmen and so on in Hamburg.

And there he gave a long speech -- didn't mention the Jews with a single syllable. As soon as he got back a couple of days later in the Munich beer halls back amongst his own type, he gave an absolutely virulent hate tirade against the Jews once more.

So his views hadn't changed. He certainly tactically amended them according to the audience he was speaking to. And here -- now what we find and that period after 1925 is that although he speaks in exactly the same horrendous tones about the Jews, the frequency with which he does that is diminished to some extent and it becomes replaced more and more by an emphasis, at that point, on living space. Hitler hasn't changed his views in any way, but he's widening his ideological propagandistic targets to some extent.

GROSS: What do you mean by "living space?"

KERSHAW: Living space was -- the German term "Lebensraum" was a term that Hitler, again didn't invent and there's nothing original about any point of his ideology. But the notion was there which had been part of imperialist ideas going back in to the time before the First World War that Germany's future as a country depended upon acquiring extra space.

That they were too many people. Too many mouths to feed. And what was needed was more space -- more living space as the term had it. And by the middle of the 1920s, Hitler was convinced that Germany's future as a country depended not upon the acquisition of imperial territories at the cost of let's say, Britain or France and rivalry with the former enemies, but rather through a continental policy which would acquire space in Eastern Europe. And that became from then on an absolutely central and unalterable element of his political ideology.

GROSS: So did this translate to Germans thinking that if Germany invaded other countries the Germans would have more room -- more living room?

KERSHAW: Yes. What you have to remember constantly in all of this, since we're talking about Hitler and those around him, what we have to constantly bear in mind is that down to 1928 this was an absolute minority taste. Remember that in 1928 at the general election that year only 2.6 percent of the German voters voted for the Nazi party.

So this was very much an acquired taste on the fringes of politics. Most people did not think in those terms -- think we've got to prepare to go for a war and to obtain living space in the East.

GROSS: My guest is Ian Kershaw, author of a new biography of Hitler. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: If you're just joining us my guest is Ian Kershaw the author of a new biography of Hitler called "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris." Hitler seemed to know, judging from your book, that part of what he needed to do to succeed was to build himself up as a cult figure. Not just to build up his politics but to build up himself up.

And he did kind of create a Hitler cult around him. And through a lot of propaganda and, I guess, Goebbel's has a lot -- gives a lot of help in this regard. Can you describe some of the things that Hitler did in creating this Hitler cult, including -- there was a publication of 88 photos of Hitler in picturesque settings. There were postcards of Hitler showing him as an animal lover where he's, you know, feeding young deer.

What are some of the other things he did to build this personality cult?

KERSHAW: Well, much of this was, as you say, on the propaganda side was taken over increasingly by Joseph Goebbel's, who later on became the Reich Propaganda Minister and before that was the party propaganda leader. But Hitler himself was, unless it went to the most ludicrous excesses, very happy that this cult around him be built up.

And he did everything he could to encourage the mystification of his own figure, to encourage the outright obedience to introduce even things -- superficial things such as the "Heil Hilter" greeting. So that in every way the party became, from 1925 onward, from after its re-foundation following the failed putsch, became increasingly centered upon this figure.

And everything within the party was linked to Hitler. And later on therefore, as you said through the variety of various forms of propaganda output through -- even through things like postcards that were sold with pictures of him on the way in which he was portrayed in the Nazi press. It was always as a great coming leader of Germany.

And therefore you have a gradual process in which the leader is built up above the party. He's not just the sort of chairman of the party or the head of the party or the spokesman of it, but he towers above it, increasingly, as this almost deified figure.

Now, that is a long process. It takes a long time to develop. But the seeds of it certainly go back to the period where he is imprisoned in Landsberg in Bavaria following the failed putsch in 1924.

GROSS: Hitler was -- represented a minority movement for many years. What shifted in German culture -- what happened that enabled him to reach the majority?

KERSHAW: Well, what happened, I think, were two things. One, was that in the wake of the depression -- the economic collapse -- the slump which set in in 1930 politics started to fall apart. So that no political party was able to hold the ground there. And you had a growing political stalemate.

And in that the resentments of increasing numbers of people against a democracy that seemed to have let them down, that seemed to fail, grew almost by the day. And Hitler, who never made the slightest compromise with this system -- with this democracy, was the profiteer from that.

So his party was now with relentless, absolutely unceasing propaganda, able to recruit many of those who were simply disenchanted, who were protesting in their own way about the failed democracy. And they flocked to Hitler.

A second thing which happened was that the leaders -- the establishment, the upper echelons of the ruling class or however you want to describe them -- these elite groups -- could not find a political solution. They didn't want a solution of course on the left, they wanted to destroy socialism, destroy Marxism and they, therefore, looked to an authoritarian solution on the right.

Well, they couldn't find one which suited them because they didn't control the masses. And therefore what you had in this process, was in the growing political stalemate, Hitler emerging as the one person who controlled the masses, who could control the streets, who could speak to the nationalist masses.

And on the other hand the groups who needed this in order to get what they saw as their own solution, an authoritarian Germany. And after that, Hitler needed them to get to power. They needed him to control the streets. And after that, emerged then the agreement which led to Hitler becoming Chancellor on the 30th of January 1933. And after that began the real conquest of Germany of those groups who he had not been able to attract before that time.

GROSS: Now you say that you think Hitler got his power through charisma as opposed to getting it through the power of institutional politics.

KERSHAW: Yeah. Well, when you see that Hitler, it's an extraordinary fact, that Hitler didn't have a single political office in that state before he got the highest political office -- that of the Reich Chancellor or the head of the government. And it is a, by any standards, an unusual development that somebody can have no political office at all and be an absolute outsider on the political scene and get to the highest point of the government.

So he certainly doesn't come up through an institutional route, and within the party increasingly from this -- on the basis of this cult that we've talked about, you have the notion of a party leader who is not a conventional politician, but he stands for national redemption -- national salvation.

And people associate with him heroic qualities of a great leader who will bring this about. Who will bring about the reversal of national humiliation. The reversal of economic bankruptcy. The reversal of political ineptitude and so on and so forth.

And in the notion of charismatic leadership -- I'm using this in a somewhat technical sense -- that doesn't mean to say that Hitler actually necessarily has such wonderful heroic qualities in him, it is that other people project these qualities on to him. And he's such a, as I said before, a narcissistic and egomaniac personality that he is of course extremely happy to accept this adulation. And starts to believe, increasingly, in his own myth -- in his own charismatic -- his own heroic qualities.

And so you have the emergence then of this leadership figure and of a leadership cult of extraordinary potency. And that, I think, is something we should call charismatic leadership. It arises only in conditions of crisis and a continuing series of defeats and that's of course what happened in this case.

GROSS: This is -- the book that you just completed is volume one of a projected two part biography of Hitler. Can you give us just kind of a preview of what you'll be looking at in volume two, what kind of questions you'll be examining?

KERSHAW: Yes, well volume one ends with Hitler having taken over -- consolidated his power internally, but on the threshold of external expansion. So what I'm now going on to show in volume two is how this system cannot settle down, but a continuing radicalization -- a ceaseless radicalization -- partly driven on by Hitler himself, partly by forces outside himself. Pushed this now into external expansion, into increasing radicalization and racial issues, into war, and then into genocide. And that has to lead Germany into the abyss and into the total collapse of 1945.

So we have in the second volume the apotheosis of this regime now in war and genocide which are its very essence.

GROSS: Ian Kershaw, thank you very much.

KERSHAW: Pleasure.

GROSS: Volume one of Ian Kershaw's new biography is called "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris." Kershaw is a professor at the University of Sheffield in England.

This is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

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Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Ian Kershaw
High: Historian Ian Kershaw. He's written volume one of a new biography of Hitler, "Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris." It's being said that the new book will, "become the standard Hitler biography for the next generation." In it Kershaw blends biography social history to understand how Hitler was able to obtain power over the German power. The book draws on new sources: a new edition of Hitler's speeches and writings, and the recently discovered diaries of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Kershaw teaches at the University of Sheffield in England.
Spec: Entertainment; Profiles; War; Europe; Military; Culture; Adolf Hitler; Ian Kershaw

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Ian Kershaw

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JANUARY 27, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 012702NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Maureen Corrigan
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:52

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Novelist Oscar Hijuelos grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the son of Cuban immigrants. Book critic Maureen Corrigan says judging by his novels, like the Pulitzer Prize winning "Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" and his latest "Empress of the Splendid Season," Hijuelos hasn't forgotten a thing about his background.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BOOK CRITIC: I happened to be in New York City last Friday, and one of the places I wandered into was the Lower Eastside Tenement Museum. The museum consists of an actual tenement building built in 1863. The buildings landlords, not surprisingly, never did much to improve the property beyond installing a couple of toilets in the hallways around the turn of the century.

So when the tenement was condemned in the 1930s and sealed up, it became a veritable King Tut's tomb of immigrant life on the Lower Eastside. I took a tour inside this building where the huddled masses yearning to breathe free had been squeezed into dark airless three room apartments.

Towards the end of the tour an old man, who was obviously moved by the grimness of it all, turned to me and said, "it's the greatest American story. Doctors, lawyers, politicians so many of them came out of this."

That old man could well be right about immigration being the greatest American story. It's certainly one that's inexhaustible in its variations. Novelist Oscar Hijuelos, in his exuberant breakthrough book "The Mambo King Play Songs of Love," told a poignant story about Cuban immigration to New York in the 1940s.

In his latest novel, "Empress of the Splendid Season," he tells another. This time about a beautiful young woman named Lydia Espana. Lydia arrives in New York in 1947, eventually marries and works as a cleaning lady. For the next 40 years or so, the novel's narrator tells us that Lydia and her waiter husband Raul live the kind of life that nobody really notices.

But thanks to Hijuelos' finely detailed, funny and very sweet style of storytelling I could no more tear my eyes away from the unfolding of Lydia and Raul's everyday life together, then I could from those dingy Lower Eastside tenement apartments.

Lydia, we learn, was not one of those immigrants who came to America motivated by high minded ideals. No, she was booted out of Cuba by her strict, wealthy father who learned she'd been doing the hoochie-coochie with a seductive orchestra leader. Her early days in New York were a harsh lesson, the narrator recalls, in how life really works for people without money and connections.

Lydia was rescued temporarily through marriage to Raul, motherhood and the camaraderie of Cuban friends in her Harlem neighborhood. But Raul suffered a heart attack in his 40s, the result of overwork and over indulgence in booze. Out of necessity, Lydia transformed from the empress of the splendid season, as a besotted Raul once called her, to Lydia the Spanish cleaning lady.

A rich and radiant Park Avenue couple, the Osprey's whom she works for for nearly 20 years, become almost like family; intervening to send Lydia's son to private school. But Hijuelos is so attuned to the gnarled connections between class and self-worth, he doesn't sentimentalize their relationship.

We know the Osprey's will always loom much larger in Lydia's life than she will in theirs. Hijuelos scrupulously imagines the texture of Lydia's days. Her exchanges with Fuentes, the neighborhood butcher. Her celebratory lunches of baloney sandwiches and ballantine. He also dramatizes how the larger forces of history, like the 1968 Columbia student protests, jolt the lives of Lydia and her family.

"Empress of the Splendid Season" is fashioned not as a single flowing narrative, but as a retrospective series of very short stories with subtitles like "A Few of Her Jobs" and "Thank God for Mr. Osprey." Out of such deliberately simple material Hijuelos crafts a rich story graced with the power of the ordinary.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan reviewed "Empress of the Splendid Season."

I'm Terry Gross.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 888-NPR-NEWS

Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Maureen Corrigan
High: Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Empress of the Splendid Season," the new novel by Oscar Hijuelos
Spec: Entertainment; Lifestyle; Culture; Oscar Hijuelos; Maureen Corrigan

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Maureen Corrigan
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.