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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative
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December, 1999
 
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Book Review

Methods/Theory



John Lukacs. The Hitler of History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1997. Pp. xiv, 279. $26.00.

Adolf Hitler's name carries a multitude of predicates: Revolutionary, Reactionary, Statesman, Strategist, Racist, Anti-Semite, Pan-German . . . In nine chapters, John Lukacs has covered most of them, though the one attribute of Hitler he clearly favors over the others is that of a revolutionary leader. It is not an easy task at all. How can historians standing on the right like Reiner Zitelmann (even the notorious David Irving) be allowed to speculate about the "Revolutionary Hitler!?" Lukacs, however, does not care. He is enjoying the challenge. His long footnotes with trenchant comments are often more interesting than the text itself—although American readers might find this arrangement inconvenient, as well as his peculiar system of referring to books and authors by capital letters only. 1
     Although Lukacs has treated Hitler in his earlier books (Historical Consciousness or the Remembered Past [1968], The Last European War: September 1939–December 1941 [1976], and The Duel [1991]), this time Hitler is the ultimate challenge for him, "the most extraordinary figure in the history of the twentieth century." Yet his book is not just another biography; it is more of a historiographical survey, explicitly inspired by the motto found in Gerhard Schreiber's Hitler: Interpretationen 1923–1983 (1988): "We are not finished with Hitler yet." . . .


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