Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life

A brilliantly original exploration of some of the formative influences in Hitlers life—the books he most revered, and how they shaped the man and his thinking.

Hitlers education and worldview were formed largely from the books in his private library. Recently, hundreds of those books were discovered in the Library of Congress by Timothy Ryback, complete with Hitlers marginalia on their pages—underlines, question marks, exclamation points, scrawled comments. Ryback traces the path of the key phrases and ideas that Hitler incorporated into his writing, speeches, conversations, self-definition, and actions.

We watch him embrace Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the works of Shakespeare. We see how an obscure treatise inspired his political career and a particular interpretation of Ibsens epic poem Peer Gynt helped mold his ruthless ambition. He admires Henry Fords anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew, and declares it required reading for fellow party members. We learn how his extensive readings on religion and the occult provide the blueprint for his notion of divine providence, how the words of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are reborn as infamous Nazi catchphrases, and, finally, how a biography of Frederick the Great fired the destructive fanaticism that compelled Hitler to continue fighting World War II when all hope of victory was lost.

Hitlers Private Library, a landmark in the study of the Third Reich, offers a remarkable view into Hitlers intellectual world and personal evolution. It demonstrates the ability of books to preserve in vivid ways the lives of their collectors, underscoring the importance of the tactile in the era of the digital.

"Hitler's personal library of over 16,000 volumes was picked clean by American troops. But Ryback found 1,200 of Hitler's volumes in the Library of Congress and other caches scattered through the U.S. and Europe. By looking at the books Hitler read (sometimes obsessively, judging from marginalia and other signs of wear and tear), Ryback paints an unusually vivid and nuanced portrait of the dictator. Among the authors and works Hitler was most interested in were Shakespeare (in translation), whose grand historical subjects, Hitler felt, made him superior to Schiller and Goethe; Henry Ford's anti-Semitic The International Jew; adventure novelist Karl May; Dietrich Eckart's interpretation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt; works of the occult and esoterica; and Thomas Carlyle, particularly his biography of Frederick the Great. Ryback (The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau) offers a unique view of Hitler's intellectual life. 47 photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Most of what remains of Hitler's personal library — 1,200 volumes out of the roughly 16,000 it once contained — can be found on the rare book shelves of the Library of Congress. Retrieved largely from a Berchtesgaden salt mine, many of these books contain fawning inscriptions to "Mein Fuhrer" from their authors and sometimes also display an oversized woodcut bookplate, consisting of a spread eagle... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and the name Adolph Hitler. Apart from the occasional ownership signature and date, the German dictator usually didn't scribble in his books, preferring to underline favorite sentences in pencil or to draw a vertical line or insert an exclamation point in the margin next to a significant passage. These markings alone hint at the nature of Hitler's engagement with any particular text, yet it is often impossible to be sure that they are even in his hand. There's also no way of telling whether these remnants of Hitler's library actually represent the titles that he most truly cared about. Odds are they don't. A good many of the volumes appear to be unread.

So what books did Hitler value and even cherish? According to Timothy W. Ryback's research, "he ranked 'Don Quixote,' along with 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and 'Gulliver's Travels,' among the great works of world literature. ... He considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller." Hitler, we are told, frequently quoted Hamlet and Julius Caesar, was well versed in the Bible (he had once hoped to become a Catholic priest or monk), and was passionate about the adventure novels of Karl May, many of them Westerns in roughly the style of Owen Wister or Zane Grey. Hitler once wrote: "The first Karl May that I read was 'The Ride Across the Desert.' I was overwhelmed! I threw myself into him immediately which resulted in a noticeable decline in my grades." How strange and sad it is to think of this evil, evil man as a wide-eyed schoolboy avoiding his homework in order to read one more exciting page about Old Shatterhand and the Apache chief, Winnetou.

Adopting the critic Walter Benjamin's arguable proposition that "a private library serves as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector," Ryback examines perhaps 15 or 20 representative works from Hitler's surviving books to illuminate their owner's thought and actions. These include guides to Berlin and Brussels (both studied at the front during World War I); Hitler's memoir, "Mein Kampf"; an edition of the philosopher Fichte (given to him by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl); selected works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; volumes devoted to weaponry, military strategy and great generals (Frederick the Great, von Schlieffen); several popular accounts of the occult; and numerous anti-Semitic tracts and works of pseudo-scholarship, including Henry Ford's notorious "The International Jew." Hitler once said, "I regard Ford as my inspiration."

While "Hitler's Private Library" is crisply written and covers the dictator's reading life from World War I to his suicide in 1945, Ryback could have dug a little deeper. For instance, we are told about Hitler's rabid devotion to Karl May several times — as an adult the dictator would apparently return to these adventure stories as others do to the Bible — yet one looks in vain for a sustained analysis of May's books and their appeal. Presumably, this is because none of Hitler's personal copies of the novels survive. Yet surely, given their signal importance to his subject, they should be covered in a study subtitled "The Books That Shaped His Life." Similarly, Ryback focuses one chapter on the vile Dietrich Eckart's German translation of "Peer Gynt," showing how Hitler's mentor in anti-Semitism transformed Ibsen's protagonist into a heroic Aryan ideal. But shouldn't Ryback have at least commented on the recent claims — by Steven Sage — that three of Ibsen's other plays provide actual blueprints for Hitler's vision of the Third Reich?

While thoroughly engrossing, like virtually all books about the Nazi dictator, "Hitler's Private Library" does sometimes leave a reader slightly annoyed or puzzled. Details are occasionally wrong or at least fuzzy and in need of clarification. "Peer Gynt" isn't an epic poem; it's a drama in verse. Is Eckart's last play, "Lorenzaccio," another reworking, this time of Alfred de Musset's dramatic masterpiece of the same name? When Ryback describes a Botticelli illustration for Dante — in which "a despairing figure clings to an angel as he is lifted from the Inferno" — he calls it "a powerfully emotive moment of salvation." In Catholic theology once you're damned to hell, you have lost the possibility of salvation forever. (To my eye, the so-called "despairing figure" looks like Dante.) And did Alfred Rosenberg really claim that "Saint Peter, working as a Jewish agent, changed his name from Saulus to Paulus?" Wouldn't that mean that Saint Peter was also Saint Paul? Listing some works from the National Socialist Institute that Hitler probably "devoured," Ryback mentions "anthologies of anti-Semitic remarks ranging from Martin Luther to Emile Zola." Zola? This last certainly merits explaining, given Zola's courageous "J'Accuse," his famous declaration that French anti-Semitism had led to the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of the soldier Alfred Dreyfus.

These are all relatively small matters, usually imprecisions rather than errors, but they gradually mount up and detract from the overall merit of "Hitler's Private Library." So, too, does the impression that Ryback is something of a glory hog: He never misses an opportunity to say "I." The Hitler books may have been cared for by the Library of Congress for the past 60 years, but you'd think Timothy W. Ryback was the first person ever to turn their pages. He refers constantly to himself: "I found," "I encountered," "I discovered," "When I first surveyed Hitler's surviving books," "By my count," "I was puzzled by," "In paging through this slender volume, I observed" and on and on. Arguably, such phrases are intended to make "Hitler's Private Library" more "personal," but they sound boastful and should have been discouraged by the book's editor. What does the otiose "I found" add to a clause like "a sentiment echoed in marked passages in Hitler books I found at Brown University"? Had those Hitler books been lost or misplaced?

But then Ryback is also repeatedly telling us that he interviewed this or that surviving member of the Hitler entourage, or making sure we know that he wrote to the aged Leni Riefenstahl to ask about the background for the filmmaker's gift of the Fichte volumes. Riefenstahl crisply replied that "she remembered the exact circumstances, which she had recorded in precise detail in her memoirs." Now, normally a scholar would check the published sources first, wouldn't he? And since the needed material does turn out to be in the Riefenstahl memoirs, what purpose other than vanity is served by mentioning this exchange of letters at all?

These gripes aside, "Hitler's Private Library" is still fascinating — and unnerving. Hitler, Ryback shows us, remained a serious reader all his life, spending much of his disposable income on books during the 1920s and regularly passing quiet evenings in his library during the 1930s and '40s, no matter how dreadful the orders he'd been giving during the day. Of course, he was often studying — studying! — such ranting works as Madison Grant's "The Passing of the Great Race," and yet he also dreamt over volumes devoted to art and architecture, read his adventure novels and world classics.

So the mystery remains: Just how does a man who appreciates "Don Quixote," "Hamlet" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" grow so monstrous? Wide reading is traditionally supposed to humanize and enlarge our hearts, to encourage empathy and allowance for differences among people. But the example of Hitler, like that of the concentration camp commanders who listened to Mozart to drown out the cries of the innocent, continues to give one pause. Certainly, art and books matter, just as political principles and religious convictions matter, but living, breathing human beings matter most of all.

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda(at symbol)gmail.com.

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Timothy W. Ryback is the author of The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, a New York Times Notable Book for 1999. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and lives in Paris with his wife and three children.