Hitler

by Joachim Fest

Book Overview

A bestseller in its original German edition and subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages, this book has become a classic portrait of a man, a nation, and an era. Index. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151416508
• ISBN13: 9780151416509
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 844 Pages
• Weight: 2.76 lbs.

Customer Reviews

the ultimate biography

Joachim Fest's book "Hitler" is a rare pleasure to read. His words create an atmosphere and a world that we can understand. Fest manages to step into the shoes of Hitler -- we sit and day-dream with that man and build castles in the air. More than that, he manages to bare Hitler's mind and soul to the reader. We learn how and why Hitler acted as he did. His actions that are so vile that we absolutely condemn them, suddenly become clearer. We begin to understand and are warned of the power that one single man can usurp, even though he is penniles, without education and friends. Fest does in no way justify Hitler or his tyranny. On the contrary, he does open our eyes so that we see how actions of such brutality are possible. He makes us understand that they can happen again, but also how they can be avoided. It is an in-depth study of a strongman--strongmen by the way come in all sizes; we encounter them in our daily lives. Since Hitler's demise, half a dozen countries have suffered strongmen as heads of state, and it is vital that we understand and recognize a tyrant before it is too late. None better to learn from than Fest's Hitler, one of the shrewdest and most ruthless strongman of them all. Roswitha McIntosh, author of "The Madman & His Mistress"

the best

I'm certainly not an expert on WW2, and I know that there are other books out there (such as Ian Kershaw's) on Hitler that are very good. But several avid readers and history buffs told me that Fest's book was the best, so I read his first. It's true that he does not devote a lot of content to the Holocaust, but he is very graphic and adamant about what happened with that. He is harldy an apologist for Hitler, as one reviewer seems to say. In any case, the fact that he is German and lived through WW2, plus a terrific writer cinched it for me. It's a little dense at times, but if you stay the course, it's well worth it.

No other biography comes closer to the subject

As a devoted reader of history, especially of the early 20th century period, I probably have gone through every popular and even arcane book on Hitler and National Socialism. I've read Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich," Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reach," Alan Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives," . . . yet, these books, while informative, lack the depth of understanding of the horrible phenomenon of Hitler that Joachim Fest brings to his biography. Maybe because Fest himself is German and is therefore closer to his subject. Yes, the style is dry, and the book is indeed rather biased at times--the preface is titled incredibly "Hitler and Historical Greatness!" Yet, within that preface, you will find insights and observations that are lacking in all other biographies on the Fuehrer. I myself was riveted from page one all the way to the end. So, if you want to really understand Hitler, read this book. If you want to read a lighter biography, read the sections on Hitler in Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives."

Still the best bio of Hitler

Historian John Lukacs, who has just come out with "The Hitler of History", an analysis of Hitler's hundred or so important biographers, says Fest's bio is the "best long biography" of Adolph Hitler. Fest fleshes out the young Hitler in fascinating detail. Especially interesting is Fest's account of Hitler's political rise in Weimar Germany from being a member of a minute political party which held its meetings in the back of a beer hall to a dynamic leader of a strong poltical party by the end of the 1920s. Fest is very interpretive and analytical. Typical is his suggestion that Hitler was an artist mutated into a politician. For an American like myself, Fest is weak in explaining how the Nazi's, who never achieved more than fifty percent of an honest vote, was able to dominate the apparatus of government so thoroughly and so fast upon joining a governing coalition in 1933. It has never happened in America even if America has had pols with tyranical personality traits- Wilson, Johnson, Nixon, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and, to a small degree, FDR. If the amateur historian has time for only one biography of Adolph Hitler, this is the one to get.