Hitler's Forgotten Library

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/05/ryback.htm>

The Atlantic Monthly | May 2003 
 
Hitler's Forgotten Library:
The Man, His Books, and His Search for God 
You can tell a lot about a person from what he reads.
The surviving—and largely ignored—remnants of Adolf
Hitler's personal library reveal a deep but erratic
interest in religion and theology
 
by Timothy W. Ryback 

[...]Hitler's habit of highlighting key concepts and
passages is consonant with his theory on the "art of
reading." In Chapter Two of Mein Kampf he observed, 

A man who possesses the art of correct reading will,
in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet,
instinctively and immediately perceive everything
which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering,
either because it is suited to his purpose or
generally worth knowing ... Then, if life suddenly
sets some question before us for examination or
answer, the memory, if this method of reading is
observed ... will derive all the individual items
regarding these questions, assembled in the course of
decades, [and] submit them to the mind for examination
and reconsideration, until the question is clarified
or answered. [...] 

By his own admission, Hitler was not a big fan of
novels, though he once ranked Gulliver's Travels,
Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Don Quixote
(he had a special affection for the edition
illustrated by Gustave Doré) among the world's
greatest works of literature. The one novelist we know
Hitler loved and read was Karl May, a German writer of
cheap American-style westerns. In the spring of 1933,
just months after the Nazis seized power, Oskar
Achenbach, a Munich-based journalist, toured the
Berghof—in the Führer's absence—and discovered a shelf
of Karl May novels at Hitler's bedside. "The bedroom
of the Führer is of spartan simplicity," Achenbach
reported in the Sonntag Morgenpost. "Brass bed,
closet, toiletries, a few chairs, those are all the
furnishings. On a bookshelf are works on politics and
diplomacy, a few brochures and books on the care of
German shepherds, and then—pay attention you German
boys! Then comes an entire row of books by—Karl May!
Winnetou, Old Surehand, Bad Guy, all our dear old
friends." During the war Hitler reportedly admonished
his generals for their lack of imagination and
recommended that they all read Karl May. Albert Speer
recounted in his Spandau diaries, 

Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply
impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection
that Karl May conferred upon his character Winnetou
... And he would add that during his reading hours at
night, when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he
would still reach for those stories, that they gave
him courage like works of philosophy for others or the
Bible for elderly people. [...] 

Among the piles of Nazi tripe (much of it printed on
high-acid paper that is rapidly deteriorating) are
more than 130 books on religious and spiritual
subjects, ranging from Occidental occultism to Eastern
mysticism to the teachings of Jesus Christ—books with
titles such as Sunday Meditations; On Prayer; A Primer
for Religious Questions, Large and Small; Large Truths
About Mankind, the World and God. Also included were a
German translation of E. Stanley Jones's 1931 best
seller, The Christ of the Mount; and a 500-page work
on the life and teachings of Jesus, published in 1935
under the title The Son: The Evangelical Sources and
Pronouncements of Jesus of Nazareth in Their Original
Form and With the Jewish Influences. Some volumes date
from the early 1920s, when Hitler was an obscure
rabble-rouser on the fringe of Munich political life;
others from his last years, when he dominated Europe.
One leather-bound tome—with WORTE CHRISTI, or "Words
of Christ," embossed in gold on the cover—was well
worn, the silky, supple leather peeling upward in
gentle curls along the edges. Human hands had
obviously spent a lot of time with this book. The
inside cover bore a dedication: "To our beloved Führer
with gratitude and profound respect, Clara von Behl,
born von Jansen von den Osten. Christmas 1935."
Worte Christi was so fragile that when the attendant
brought it to me, he placed it on a red-velvet pad in
a wooden reading stand, a beautifully finished oak
contraption with two supports that could be adjusted
with small brass pegs to fit the dimensions of the
book. No more than a foot wide and eighteen inches
long, the stand had a sacred air, as if it belonged on
an altar.
I reviewed the table of contents—"Belief and Prayer,"
"God and the Kingdom of God," "Priests and Their
Religious Practices," "The World and Its People"—and
skimmed the introduction; then I scanned the book for
marginalia that might suggest a close study of the
text. A white-silk bookmark, preserved in its original
perfection between pages 22 and 23 (only the portion
exposed to the air had deteriorated), lay across a
description of the Last Supper as related by Saint
John. A series of pages that followed contained only a
single aphorism each: "Believe in God" (page 31),
"Have no fear, just believe" (page 52), "If you
believe, anything is possible" (page 53), and so on,
all the way to page 95, which offers the solemn wisdom
"Many are called but few are chosen." 
On page 241 appears the passage "You should love God,
your Lord, with all your heart, with all your soul,
with all your spirit: this is the foremost and
greatest commandment. Another is equally important:
Love your neighbor as you would love yourself." Beside
this passage is one brief penciled line, the only mark
in the entire book.
Given Hitler's legendary disdain for organized
religion in general and Christianity in particular, I
didn't expect him to have devoted much time to the
teachings of Christ, let alone to have marked this
quintessential Christian virtue. Had this in fact been
made by the pencil of Hitler's younger sister, Paula,
who occasionally visited her brother at the Berghof
and remained a devout Catholic until her dying day?
Might some other Berghof guest have responded to this
holy Scripture? 
Possibly—but though most of the spiritually oriented
books in the Hitler Library were gifts sent to the
Führer by distant admirers, several, like Worte
Christi, were obviously well read, and some contained
marginalia in Hitler's hand that suggested a serious
exploration of spiritual matters. If Hitler was as
deeply engaged with spiritual issues as his books and
their marginalia suggest, then what was the purpose of
this pursuit?

[...] In the spring of 1943, while the outcome of
World War II hung in the balance, the U.S. Office of
Strategic Services—forerunner to the CIA—commissioned
Walter Langer, a Boston-based psychoanalyst, to
develop a "psychological profile" of Adolf Hitler. As
Langer later recalled, this was the first time the
U.S. government had attempted to psychoanalyze a world
leader in order to determine "the things that make him
tick." 
Over the course of eight months, assisted by three
field researchers and advised by three other experts
in psychology, Langer compiled more than a thousand
typewritten, single-spaced pages of material on his
"patient": texts from speeches, excerpts from Mein
Kampf, interviews with former Hitler associates, and
virtually every printed source available. Langer
wrote, 

A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude
that Hitler believes himself destined to become an
Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer
of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for
the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that
in spite of all the trials and tribulations through
which he must pass he will finally attain that goal.
The one condition is that he follow the dictates of
the inner voice that have guided and protected him in
the past.  [sounds a bit like Bush, Slayer of
Evildoers ...]

[...] One of the most heavily marked books is Magic:
History, Theory and Practice (1923), by Ernst
Schertel. When I typed the author's name into one
Internet search engine, I scored eight hits, including
sites on Satanism, eroticism, sadomasochism, and
flagellation. When I typed his name into Google, I
scored twenty-six hits, including sites on
parapsychology, astrology, and diverse sexual
practices. According to a Web site for Germany's
sadomasochistic community, Schertel wrote numerous
books on flagellation and eroticism, and was "a
central figure" in the German nudist movement of the
1920s and 1930s.
Hitler's copy of Magic bears a handwritten dedication
from Schertel, scrawled on the title page in pencil. A
170-page softcover in large format, the book has been
thoroughly read, and its margins scored repeatedly. I
found a particularly thick pencil line beside the
passage "He who does not carry demonic seeds within
him will never give birth to a new world."   [...did
somebody say Blicero...]

Among the numerous volumes dealing with the spiritual,
the mystical, and the occult I found a typewritten
manuscript that could well have served as a blueprint
for Hitler's theology. This bound 230-page treatise is
titled The Law of the World: The Coming Religion and
was written by a Munich resident named Maximilian
Riedel. [...] 

In this densely written treatise Riedel established
the groundwork for his "new religion," replacing the
Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with a new
tripartite unity, the "Körper, Geist und Seele"—"body,
mind, and soul." Riedel argued that traditionally
mankind has recognized five senses, which relate only
to the physical aspects of our existence, and that
this hinders our ability to perceive the true nature
of our relationship to God and the universe. He
offered seven additional "senses" that every human
being possesses, which are related to the subjective
perception of the world; among them Riedel included
our inherent sense of what is right and wrong, our
emotional sense of another person, our sense of
self-preservation. On a two-page centerfold he
illustrated his theory with a circular diagram in
which various concepts—"soul," "space," "reality,"
"present," "past," "possibility," "transformation,"
"culture," "afterlife," "humanity," "infinity"—are
connected by a spider web of lines. "The body, mind
and soul do not belong to the individual, they belong
to the universe," the author explained.
Riedel's "trinity" seems to have attracted Hitler's
particular attention. A dense penciled line parallels
the following passage: "The problem with being
objective is that we use objective criteria as the
basis for human understanding in general, which means
that the objective criteria, that is, the rational
criteria, end up serving as the basis for all human
understanding, perception and decision-making." By
using the five traditional senses to achieve this
"objectivity," Riedel declared, human beings exclude
the possibility of perceiving—through the additional
seven senses he identified—the deeper forces of the
world, and are thus unable to achieve that unity of
body, mind, and soul. "The human mind never decides
things on its own, it is the result of a discourse
between the body and the soul," he claimed. 
The sentence not only caught Hitler's
attention—beneath it is a thick line, and beside it in
the margin are three parallel pencil marks—but was
echoed two years later in one of his monologues. "Mind
and soul ultimately return to the collective being of
the world," Hitler told some guests in December of
1941. "If there is a God, then he gives us not only
life but also consciousness and awareness. If I live
my life according to my God-given insights, then I
cannot go wrong, and even if I do, I know I have acted
in good faith." [...] 






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