College and Research Libraries
September 2004, Vol. 65, No. 5
Book Review
Miskolczy, Ambrus. Hitler’s Library. Trans. Ridey Szilvia and Michael Webb. Budapest: Central European Univ. Pr., 2003. 164p. $39.95 (ISBN 9639241598). LC 2003-12659.
The "library" in question is housed at the Library of Congress, having been rescued from a salt mine at the end of World War II. This is some part of a library alleged to have been 6000 volumes strong, but, oddly, Ambrus Miskloczy never tells readers how many volumes it now comprises. It is commonplace to analyze the influences on historical figures by scrutinizing their reading matter, largely, if necessarily indirectly, by looking at whatever records survive about the holdings in their personal libraries. Sometimes this procedure is used to assess the independent value of historical sources; if X could have known about Y because information on Y was contained in books in X’s library, the probability that X corroborates information on Y is diminished by virtue of the fact that X had access to such information.
In this multimedia age, this would be bad method and, even under the best of circumstances, leaves a lot of loose connections. This procedure can never be probative because it is indirect in at least two significant ways: it does not account for all the matter these figures might have read, and owning a book does not imply reading that book. Although not evaluating Hitler’s writings as historical sources, Miskolczy is not unaware of this and divides his study into chapters that assess the influence of Hitler’s library in diminishing degree. Thus, a chapter deals with works in which Hitler penciled his own notes, which seems a bona fide way to measure intensity of interaction. Following chapters deal with books that Hitler "read into" and books that Hitler "did not read (in depth)." This latter taxonomy is based on the absence of evidence; that is, Hitler left no physical traces behind, leading to the assumption that he spent less time on these books, which might or might not be true.
When Miskolczy leaves those works in Hitler’s library that contain Hitler’s notes, he is forced into mounting speculation. Of this there is perhaps too much, frequently punctuated by the usual "must haves" and "could haves." At times, Miskolczy indulges in acts of psychoanalysis not really justified by the evidence. The result is a text that is overwrought and overlong, with its interest declining in direct proportion to the author’s need to rely on his own intuition rather than Hitler’s extant notes.
The jacket blurb asks rhetorical questions: "How and why did such rabble obtain such immense power? How did the cult of the self and the cult of the individual become indivisibly intertwined with an exalted death cult and the fear of death simultaneously?" This work does not answer these barely intelligible questions. In his turn, Miskolczy promises "new insights," but these are largely a matter of added detail because the analysis breaks no new grounds but, rather, tends to confirm conventional wisdom about those figures and ideas that influenced Hitler. Thus, eleven pages are devoted to discussing how Hitler saw Richard Wagner as a major intellectual ancestor.
Nonetheless, at least in its first half, this is an interesting, occasionally provocative work, not least for the fact that, with all that has been written about Hitler, so little use has been made of these materials that, whatever their limitations as sources, deserve at least some of the treatment that Miskloczy finally accords them here.—David Henige, University of Wisconsin—Madison.