Wow. If only Hitler had read some more Engels!
-B.
^^^
Yikes !
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008812180458
Reading list reveals Hitler, down to the mustache Westerns were among favorites BY MANUELA HOELTERHOFF ● BLOOMBERG NEWS ● December 18, 2008
It's hard to imagine Hitler curling up with a book, but for most of his life he did just that, reading voraciously and indiscriminately into the morning hours. He kept nasty fairy tales on his bed stand in Berchtesgaden and loved hokey stories about cowboys and Indians.
Some 1,200 books from vastly larger holdings ended up in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., testimony to his chaotic interests: nutrition, demographics, history, culture, biography, sentimental novels. While he hardly read every volume, he picked his way through quite a number, often leaving behind scribbles and other souvenirs of his presence.
Timothy W. Ryback went through them to write "Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life" (Knopf, $25.95), an absorbing account of a reader who professed to love books but burned them anyway.
He spoke to me from his home in Paris.
QUESTION: What was behind this nonstop reading?
ANSWER: Hitler never completed the equivalent of a high school education, so he tried to quell this raging intellectual insecurity he never overcame. He knew he was undereducated.
Q: He tells his baffled generals to read Karl May, a 19th-Century German novelist of American Western tales. His taste seems so juvenile. How many adults keep reading Max and Moritz -- sick kids who torture old ladies?
A: And he kept that book on his bedside table at the Berghof.
Q: And at the same time, he seemed to remember everything he read. His range of references impresses a lot of people.
A: One of the surviving books in the Library of Congress is the Brockhaus, a German Encyclopedia Britannica and one of his favorite books. His mind was encyclopedic in the worst and best sense. His was not an integrated or nuanced understanding.
Q: What other books?
A: Some of the most destructive ideas came from the heartland of America: Henry Ford's "The International Jew," he thought it was a book every National Socialist should read.
Q: Among the books that survive is a Berlin guide he bought as an impoverished message runner during World War I. It's interesting that the author Max Osborn, despite his name, was Jewish. Yet he treasured the book.
A: Yes. Osborn was on the list of authors whose books were burned in Berlin. Osborn exemplifies the tragic aspect of this history. He was Jewish, German and a great patriot. He believed in things German.
Q: Reading "Berlin" you made a startling discovery.
A: I found this gritty dirt -- it was trench dirt -- and paraffin wax, so Hitler must have been reading by candlelight.
And yes, I did turn a page, and there was this black mustache hair which fell out -- very eerie and chilling.
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