Books like From Hitler to Heimat — picked by fans

I love this book by the late and much-honored Professor of Early Modern European history for its clarity, concision, elegance of expression, and boldness of interpretation.

It focuses on five outstanding films about slavery beginning as early as the 73-71 BC revolt of soldiers against ancient Rome led by the famed gladiator Spartacus and ending with the United States, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries in the late 19th century.

The author even insists, in a chapter on the film made from Toni Morrison’s ghost story novel, Beloved, that it is possible that some written historical fiction can teach us much about the past as traditional scholarly works of history.

There is no better or more incisive scholar writing on American historical films today than Robert Burgoyne.

Making use of both social and film theory, his books, including this latest one, are elegantly written and sharply focused. Less interested in its historicity than in the way a film reflects the shifting values of our rapidly changing society, this book analyzes nine works made during this century, including important films such as Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, and The Hurt Locker.

Among many insights the work contains, the most important is that the changing nature of warfare exhibited in our recent “partial” conflicts has been a major factor in helping to reshape American notions of both war and those who defend us.

When I first read this book, the only one on my list to deal exclusively with documentary film, I was knocked out by the brilliance of the author in locating, describing, and naming a new genre of historical film, which he calls the Microhistorical. The name is chosen as a parallel to a written genre with the same name that some historians have been writing in the last fifty years.

Such films are unique in both their sources and subject matter. Based almost exclusively on the lives of ordinary people or small forgotten incidents, the sources for such films rely largely on home movies; films never meant to be shown to the public. Remarkably, these microstudies contain important insights into the public’s beliefs about and reactions to the social conditions and movements of the past.

I love this book for two special reasons: it was written by a scholar who doubles as a film director and thus understands both media from the inside and it is the first work to elaborate on the meaning of “historiophoty,” a word coined years ago by the famed historian, Hayden White, that means “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images.” 

In clear and compelling prose, Nelson undertakes the enormous task of consolidating several decades of scholarship in diverse fields (history, film, philosophy) to create five principles that allow you and I to think more clearly about the real contributions of historical films. Her work allows you to better understand the explicit and implicit meanings of historical films.

As the title suggests, this is a compendium of American visitors’ impressions of Nazism in the 1930s. Their reactions varied from confusion to rage to applause, but Nagorski notes that, sooner or later, most came to the realization that Germany was “a society undergoing a horrific transformation in the name of a demented ideology,” and feared the implications for humanity. Another useful reminder of the essential role of solid, independent journalism, and of the methods by which seemingly decent people and entire societies can be devoured by hatred and tribalism. It seems, sadly, that we need a lot of reminding about such things…

If you only have time to read one book on the Nazi leadership, it should be this one. It is not the lightest of books (and it has two volumes), but it is well worth your time. Adolf Hitler was obviously central to the Nazi dictatorship and the number of books written about him reflects that. There are lots of biographies on Hitler – even a lot of good ones – but Ian Kershaw’s two-volume life of Hitler remains unsurpassed in my view. Kershaw skillfully combines his biography of the dictator with a wider social and political history of the Nazi dictatorship, so readers learn a great deal about both the man at the top of the regime and the ways in which the Third Reich functioned.

There have been more recent accounts of Hitler’s retreat to the bunker in the last weeks of his life. But even if some new information has surfaced since Britain’s H.R. Trevor-Roper wrote his report, the vividness is hard to match. Trever-Roper recorded his thoughts on Hitler’s end before the rubble of war had been cleared away. It was almost on-the-scene reporting.

In my view, this is the most readable and persuasive of a number of new biographical treatments that have appeared recently. In terms of interpretation, largely Ullrich confirms the line offered in an older two-volume biography, the equally magisterial account by Ian Kershaw published at the turn of the century. Like Kershaw, Ullrich is concerned to explain Hitler’s power in terms of charismatic authority, and not just dictatorial terror. But whereas Kershaw was of the view that Hitler had comparatively little personal hinterland, foregrounding instead his career as a public figure, Ullrich pulls out a remarkable range of often tiny, seemingly insignificant personal details or anecdotes to generate a compelling view of Hitler’s own interior landscape – it is all the more impressive for the fact that he uses this to explain better Hitler’s political outlook and actions.  

As in the case of Joachim Fest, it is impossible to read this book without having some sense of the author’s own autobiography. Haffner was an emigré who had left Germany for Britain in 1939, was briefly interned in the war, and became a correspondent for The Observer. The essayistic reflections offered in this short book are not so much biographical as a set of attempts to place Hitler within the wider context of German history and to understand Hitler as a historical phenomenon. Readable, astute, and thoughtful, they are an engaging introduction to his life-long attempts to make sense of the regime from which he had fled.

If Hitler had obtained a nuclear weapon, it would have had a dramatic geopolitical impact on world history. Hitler is poorly understood, especially in the United States, and is often miscaricatured as Charlie Chaplin, or brushed off superficially as evil, mad or sick.

John Toland’s definitive account, based on over 150 interviews with persons who had known or worked with Adolf Hitler, puts into sharp focus Hitler’s energy and tremendous memory, his high emotional quotient, manipulativeness, his doubts, and consequently the danger he posed in a far more vivid and creditable manner than are achieved by cosmetic popular accounts.

It is an important text because Hitler’s fantasies and mistakes are predictably reproduced by so many other dictators, especially those who find themselves among vulnerable people who share those fantasies.