In November 1915 a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, two miles behind the front lines in northern France, and walked into town. Instead of enjoying the traditional soldiers’ comforts of visiting a brothel or purchasing cigarettes and schnapps, he spent four marks to buy a slender book about Berlin’s cultural treasures.(...)This withdrawn infantryman had denounced the Christmas Truce of December 1914, when British and German soldiers fraternized for a day. The only living being he reserved his affection forwas a white terrier that strayed across enemy lines and obeyed him unconditionally.(...)
For Ryback, the essence of Hitler is “a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which provided the justification for a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.” But there was more to it than that. While Hitler had no original thoughts, he wasn’t a primitive carnival barker. On the contrary, he championed notions that had percolated in Wilhelmine Germany and had been steadily gaining credence in intellectual and bourgeois circles. Hitler’s genius was to fuse German cultural nationalism with politics, allowing him to exert an aesthetic fascination on his contemporaries. As Thomas Mann unflinchingly and keenly recorded in his 1938 essay “Brother Hitler,” the Führer might have been “unpleasant and shameful,” but he was not someone whose kinship Mann could simply wish away. (JACOB HEILBRUNN - NYT)
'Hitler’s Private Library' - Timothy W. Ryback