Wolfgang Wippermann, Der konsequente Wahn

Summary

A new book on Hitler has to compete with many predecessors. It also raises expectations, particularly if the author has recently published a long critical essay on the theme of biographies of Hitler (Kontroversen um Hitler (Frankfurt am Main, 1986) ). In his new book, Wippermann consigns biographical details to an introductory chronological table, and then progresses to the serious business of demonstrating how Hitler's ideas related to Nazi policy in action. The fifteen selected themes range from women, Fascism, power and Prussia, to foreign policy, race, terror, and resistance. These are treated in alphabetical order, an arrangement that is not entirely successful. Sometimes, for example, one is left with the impression that Hitler's efforts to instrumentalize parts of Prussian/German history were as significant as his obsession with the verities of race. The prophylactic function of bad history, as a means of rendering the regime's ahistorical, racial vision normative, could have been stated much more explicitly. A few of the chapters, particularly those on the seizure of power and on the economy, are also rather slight, but the book as a whole is an impressive demonstration of how to relate ideologies to political consequences by one of the leading scholars in the field.

Wippermann gives a convincing account of how Nazi propaganda came to be all-pervasive, beginning modestly with the purchase of an Adler typewriter for the NSDAP's early propaganda office, and ending with control of the mass media and a Volksempfanger in every factory, bar, and home. He then discusses in greater detail three examples of Nazi propaganda in action: the alternative Nazi festive calendar; photographs of the Fuhrer; and the poster cartoon figure of Kohlenklau ('Coal-snatcher’) making off with a sack of coal. Many photographs of Hitler, who carefully censored his own image, show him putting his pet Alsatian Biondi through her paces. Despite the ever-present dog-whip, Hitler enjoyed the reputation of being an animal-lover. Inevitably, in his case, this laudable sentiment had its sinister side. Alsatians were bred in Germany from the late nineteenth century as a deliberate throwback to an aggressive and absolutely obedient dog-cumwolf. For the Nazis, the Alsatian became an example of the triumph of breeding over nature, the canine analogue of what they envisaged for the human race.