I am always interested in the way reading affects people, and also in the psychology of the German people in the build-up to the Second World War. Timothy Ryback has studied the remnants of Hitler’s private library, some 1200 books, which occupy shelf-space in the rare book division of the Library of Congress in Washington. In his new book, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, Ryback describes the original collection of 16,000 books, and how as the sub-title suggests, they “shaped his life”.
I am used to hearing how books educate, inform and enlighten and it was a surprise to read that the wholly unenlightened Adolf Hitler was “possessed by a voracious appetite for reading”. From his earliest years after returning from the First World War battle-front in France, Hitler scoured the book-stalls of Munich to fill two book cases in his rented rooms. He read “intently, even fiercely”, usually late into the night, and Ryback records an occasion when Eva Braun interrupted a reading session and was “dispatched with a tirade that sent her hurtling red-faced down the hallway”.
Associates recalled, “I can never remember Adolf without books”, and “books were his world”, with reading being a “deadly serious business”.
A list exists of Hitler’s borrowings from a right-wing lending library in Munich and shows that between 1919 and 1921, he borrowed over a hundred entries ranging from early church history to first-hand accounts of the Russian revolution. The list includes an large number anti-Semitic texts such as “The International Jew – The Worlds Foremost Problem”, “Luther and the Jews” and many others.
Timothy Ryback explains that Hitler was never open to alternative views of life. Hitler had a “theory of reading” which precluded this, comparing the process of reading to “collecting stones to fill a mosaic of preconceived notions”. He studied books to support his ideas and to provide further evidence for the conclusions he had already drawn. I am so used to thinking of reading as enlightenment that Hitler’s approach is somehow shocking: it is almost an “anti-reading”, the object of which is to slam the doors on new thoughts rather than to seek the widening of perspectives which “real” reading brings.
It is almost terrifying to read of the books Hitler collected. Every theme of those years was covered in great depth, whether eugenics, anti-Semitism, military strategy, Germanic myths, occultism. The library abounded with title such as “Teachings on Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene”, “Terminating Reproductive Capacity for Racial-Hygiene and Social Reasons”, and “The Racial Typology of the German People”. Clearly Hitler found a considerable amount of pseudo-scientific support for his theories.
Ryback found that many of the books in the Library of Congress collection had pencilled annotations with under-linings and double margin scores. Some books fell open at favourite passages and have signs of frequent of sustained study. The book “Racial Typology of the German People” shows signs of “frequent or sustained study” and “opens effortlessly to reveal worn pages and a ragged tear along the inside cover where the spine has begun to come apart”.
Many of Hitler’s books were gifts, presented with adulatory messages inscribed on the title page: “in loyalty and reverence”, “to our beloved Fuhrer in celebration”, “my Fuhrer in gratitude and loyalty”, and the combination of these messages with Hitler’s hideous ex libris plate is genuinely chilling. We read of the publisher J F Lehamnn Verlag who’s fifty-odd titles provided “the building blocks of Nazism”, some of which seem to have been specifically published as educational primers for Hitler himself. A book containing harrowing illustrations on sterilisation are inscribed to Hitler “in great friendship”.
Among this horrific collection of volumes, we occasionally catch glimpses of Hitler’s lighter reading – Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Don Quixote as well as most of the adventure stories of Karl May, whose adventure stories of the American West were a life-long favourite.
A fascinating Afterword describes what happened to Hitler’s library after 1945, ending with an indication that inheritors of books containing the Hitler Ex Libris plate (some of which were taken as souvenirs after the war) have found them to be a malign influence who’s effect can only be expunged by donating them to a library.
In finishing this review I will quote Alberto Manguel who in his book, The Library At Night, writes of Hitler’s library,
not all our libraries come from dreams; some belong to the realm of nightmares. Among the volumes kept in the Library of Congress are a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed by its author “to Monsieur Hitler”, and a 1932 treatise on chemical warfare explaining the uses of prussic acid, later commercialised as ZyKlon B. Let there be libraries that the imagination condemns simply because of the reputation of their reader.
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