Cataloguing the Third Reich

...The Party's organizational structure, jerry-built at best, would have counted for nothing without the motivating force of Adolf Hitler at its center...

...There are also occasional references to Hitler's "unquestionable genius for mass persuasion," but the overall impact of Hitler's personality is not given anywhere near the emphasis it deserves...

...It is on the second count that, it seems to me, Karl Dietrich Bracher fails almost totally...

...He is Professor of Political Science and Contemporary History at the University of Bonn...

...It would appear virtually impossible to write an unrelievedly dull chronicle of the terrible and tumultuous times that produced Adolf Hitler, but Bracher has managed it...

...Should you wish to know what happened in the Kapp Putsch, or at the Reichstag Fire, he has nothing of interest to say...

...One wonders, at the end, for whom The German Dictatorship was designed...

...Indeed, despite his reluctance to come to grips with them, Bracher cannot avoid conceding that "Hitler was the only one who could have brought [the tenets of National Socialism] to their terrible logical fruition...

...How Hitler Made Revolution" A natural and becoming diffidence inclines a reviewer who lacks academic credentials to go along with the judgment of such redoubtable authorities as Leonard Schapirc, Harold C. Deutsch, Peter Gay, the Times Literary Supplement, and the History Book Club, all of whom have hailed this work as "masterly," "a crowning achievement," and a landmark in its field...

...He points out that the Federal Republic has already endured half again as long as Weimar, and has moreover elected a Social Democrat to head the government for the first time in 40 years...

...Surely this is a rather lame and shopworn summation for an author whose insights and analyses are purported to be "masterly" and "superb...

...Bracher brings his story up to the present by discussing the emergence and activity of the radical-Right NPD, with its Nazi-like manifestations and implications...

...Similarly, while Bracher refers in passing to "the terrible memories of inflation," he does not explain that crucial and calamitous event...

...And he concludes this phase of his story with the following: "The reality and irreality of National Socialism were given their most terrible expression in the extermination of the Jews...

...He begins by saying that "it will not do" to stress "only his innate oratorical and propaganda talents, to imbue them with an almost demoniacal quality, as some are wont to do...

...Their stacks of file-cards on the voting in Mecklenburg in 1924, the effect of Luther on the German psyche, and the socio-economic factors in history turn out to be inadequate for understanding how an Austrian upstart could come down the pike out of nowhere and shake the world...

...But perhaps diffidence is not the most becoming trait in a reviewer, after all, and this one can only report that he found The German Dictatorship very hard going...

...Should you wish to know, for example, the results of the elections in Mecklenburg in 1924, or the increase of Nazi deputies in the Reichstag in 1930, Bracher will tell you...

...Bracher goes so far as to argue that the "main strength" of the early National Socialist party "lay in its organizational structure...

...This signaled the end of the postwar era, says Bracher, but the new leadership still "faces the long-delayed task of mastering the heritage of the German past...

...It is only curious that, knowing his subject so well, he is almost never able to bring it to life in the 500-odd pages of his book...

...No serious writer has ever singled out those talents alone, but they were of immense significance...

...Though he mentions both events repeatedly, he describes neither of them...

...Conventional, academic historians tend to shy nervously away from the phenomenon of Hitler's personality...

...At other times he indulges in laundry-listing, stringing out names for no other apparent purpose than to satisfy his feeling that they ought to be mentioned somewhere...

...No one with any background in the subject will rum to Bracher for, say, his account of the early days of the Party, or the Rohm purge, or the July 20 bomb plot...

...But hardly a dazzling reward for a reader to come upon at the end of 552 pages of dense, colorless and uninspired prose...

...There are errors of fact, too, but perhaps no more than could be expected in a book of this size and scope...

...And his portrayals of the chief personalities of the Third Reich--Heinrich Himmler, Paul Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann--are strictly commonplace, mere encyclopedia entries...

...He seems to have an invincible aversion to dealing with anything that is not abstract, statistical or theoretical...

...This makes scholars uneasy...

...Scholarly restraint and a lack of sensationalism have their merits, yet there is a difference between keeping one's voice down and droning...

...the next to be interesting...

...Sometimes he doesn't get around to the identification (who was Gienanth...

...He has written extensively on Weimar and its collapse, and is an acknowledged authority on the origins and structure of National Socialism...

...Karl Dietrich Bracher's credentials, of course, cannot be disputed...

...Even his pages on the mass murders by the SS in the East, and on the extermination camps, read about as they would in the World Almanac...

...He has no narrative gift at all, and he has a maddening habit of plumping names onto the page--Stauffenberg, Rossbach, Ehrhardt, Gienanth--well before he is ready to identify them...

...he has nothing new or striking to offer, either factually or analytically...

...In the second instance, he will tell you twice within 10 pages...

...The first quality of an historian," said David Hume, "is to be true and impartial...

...The young reader, to whom the whole story may be new, will find Bracher's exposition a rocky road to travel...

...The reader learns Kapp's first name from a footnote supplied by the translator but never finds out who Kapp was or what he was up to, except for the meager fact that he was "counterrevolutionary...

...It contains an enormous bibliography...

...A true saying...

...Sound, no doubt...

...He is not unduly optimistic: "The German dictatorship has failed, but German democracy has not yet been secured...

...So Bracher's treatment of Hitler in The German Dictatorship is predictably vague and uncertain...