An illuminating view of the Führer’s nature and aims, well defended and very well illustrated.
Former American diplomat and cultural historian Spotts takes seriously Adolf Hitler’s claim that he made an art of politics and a work of art of the Nazi state.
“If I were to assess my work,” Hitler remarked in 1941, sounding the two overarching motifs of his regime, “I would first emphasize that in the face of an uncomprehending world I succeeded in making the racial idea the basis of life, and second that I made culture the driving force in German greatness.” Many historians have analyzed, to varying degrees of success, the role that Hitler’s supposed failure as an artist played in fueling his demonic rise to power. Spotts (Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, 1994, etc.), by contrast, notes that he actually did make a living, however unsplendid, as a painter and illustrator. More than that, and with considerable depth, the author shows Hitler orchestrating mass rallies as if staging them for the theater, designing battle flags and party standards, planning model cities that would serve as grand memorials to the German genius, drawing plans for a capital that would, he fully believed, last long after the memories of suffering and bloodshed had faded—the “thousand-year Reich” of his endlessly rehearsed speeches. The singer David Bowie once remarked without apparent irony that Hitler was “one of the first great rock stars”; Spotts lends considerable historical weight to this view and ably demonstrates that whatever else the Führer may have been, he was certainly an artist of a kind, dreaming of a retirement in the Italian countryside so that he could again take up painting. Moreover, Spotts argues, Hitler was one of the greatest patrons of the arts Europe had ever known (he personally exempted artists from the draft, a privilege accorded no other category of German citizen), even though his tastes were surely less than catholic.
An illuminating view of the Führer’s nature and aims, well defended and very well illustrated.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-345-5
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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