Political Galvanist, Still Flawed

Throughout Kershaw’s writing, there’s a recurring emphasis on circumstance and structural historiography, that as much as the persona of the ‘Führer’ could be attributed to Hitler’s own personality traits, the socio-political environment of post-war Germany and Bavaria provided a path for Hitler to ascend to the top of the NSDAP. And even categorizing such a viewpoint through a causal sentence is an oversimplification. For one, we’re not even considering the people who had to buy into Hitler, let alone the political framework that had to support him. Nevertheless, I think it’s telling that when Kershaw dwells on Hitler’s talent of public speaking, he maintains focus on Captain Mayr, who gave Hitler this inlet into politics initially as an educational officer and the fact that Hitler’s rhetoric needed an audience. The simplicity and repetition of his speech, nor his anti-Semitic views held any importance on their own because each of these followed the precedence that “Hitler did not come to politics but that politics came to Hitler” (Kershaw 128).

Yet what’s most revealing isn’t so much that Hitler’s speech wasn’t a novelty, (in other words Hitler needed specific situations, party settings, and people he addressed to exploit his native talent), but it’s that if we try to interpret Hitler’s greatness through this quality, his speech, his rallying distinction, this attribute was in and of itself flawed. As Kershaw notes, despite Hitler’s ability to rally the masses as a so-called ‘beerhall agitator’, the greatness of his speech was combated by his political insecurity—“the hypersensitivity to personal criticism, the inability to engage in rational argument, and instead, rapid resort to extraordinary outbursts of uncontrolled temper” (162). Although these shortcomings weren’t only detrimental to Hitler’s speech but his overall personality, it’s clear that Hitler’s character was one of a dichotomy, one of good and bad. In effect, for the effective propagandizer he was, there’s a plausible counter argument to interpreting Hitler’s greatness through his character traits. In other words, biographical historiography as applied to Hitler ends in an inconclusive dualism, where the psycho-analytical debate over how Hitler, the individual, came to be the leader of the NSDAP from non-political aspirations is hardly an unbiased reflection.