Hitler Biography

I've begun a large and long biography of Adolf Hitler, by Pulitzer Prize winner John Toland. It's an extraordinary book. It is subtitled "The Definitive Biography," and with good reason. Nearly every year of Hitler's life is given detailed attention--in the audio version I'm listening to, each year is roughly an hour long (more or less). I think I will give periodic reflections during the course of the book, and one final review at its conclusion, in order to capture my thoughts along the way.

Hitler, I'm finding, was a truly remarkable man. Very little about him was ordinary, even from childhood. I knew previously that he was a painter, but I didn't realize that art and architecture were his passions as a boy and a teenager. He nearly went to a fine arts academy, but they rejected him. He spent his late teens in abject poverty, splitting profits as a street painter 50/50 with a Bohemian who hawked his art to rich tourists. He joined the Bavarian army and volunteered consistently for the hardest and most dangerous missions. He is described over and over in the book as "fanatical," an extreme German nationalist whose goals were always with Germany and Germanness at the head. He hated Marxism, Communism, and Jews; a trio that he frequently conflated together, and whom, along with many Germans in the aftermath of the first World War, he blamed for the humiliating defeat and post-war national turmoil that engulfed the country. You can start to see the threads coming together to form the man who, arguably, was the most influential person on the century.