16924

SoSe 22: Reading Hitler: (auto)biography as history

Daniel Louis Nethery

Kommentar

Subject: Biographer Ian Kershaw argued that the legacy of Adolf Hitler ‘belongs to us all’, and that ‘part of that legacy is the continuing duty to seek understanding of how Hitler was possible.’ For that purpose Kershaw saw a biographical approach to Hitler as indispensable. But he also warned that biography ‘runs the natural risk of over-personalizing complex historical developments, [and] over-emphasizing the role of the individual in shaping and determining events’. Biography, then, poses dilemmas which we face whenever we seek to understand human affairs, past or present. Program: We will draw on several biographies of Hitler, and of those close to him, to study important episodes in his personal and political career. We will discuss his childhood, his experience of war and peace, and his accumulation of power, first in the Nazi party, next in the German parliament, then in Europe. We will study his role in the sequences of events which culminated in the anschluss or annexation of Austria and in the Munich agreement. We will confront the inadequacy of biography in relation to his personal responsibility for the war and for the holocaust. And we will see that even the circumstances of his death gave rise to a debate over the role of government in the spread of news and other knowledge, and which reappeared in a different aspect when historians came to edit his autobiography, Mein Kampf, seventy years later. By the end of the semester you will have gained a broad outline of German history from unification in 1871 to defeat in 1945, and of the enduring significance of Hitler in the study of the humanities. Is this course right for me? The course is open to students in the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. There are no prerequisites. Workload and assessment: To qualify for 5 ECTS points you will need to attend the course regularly, engage with the course materials, and pass the final written examination. Schließen