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Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich
Robert GerwarthHow much do you like this book?
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How does one write the biography of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the key players in the most murderous genocide of history, a historial figure the Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann famously referred to as Hitler’s ‘hangman’?
This is the question I have been asking myself from the moment I first decided to embark on this book project. It was always clear to me that the writing of a Nazi biography would pose a specific set of challenges, ranging from the need to master the vast and ever-growing body of literature on Hitler’s dictatorship to the peculiar problem of having to penetrate so the mind of a person whose mentality and ideological universe seem repellent and strangely distant, even though the Nazi dictatorship ended less than seventy years ago. But the major challenge lay elsewhere: namely, in the fact that any kind of life-writing requires a certain degree of empathy with the book’s subject, even if that subject is Reinhard Heydrich.
Biographers often use the contrasting images of autopsy and portrait to describe their work: while the autopsy offers a detached, forensic examination of a life, the portrait relies on the biographer’s empathy with his subject. I have chosen to combine both of these approaches in a third way best described as ‘cold empathy’: an attempt to reconstruct Heydrich’s life with critical distance, but without reading history backwards or succumbing to the danger of confusing the role of the historian with that of a state prosecutor at a war criminal’s trial. Since historians ought to be primarily in the business of explanation and contextualization, not condemnation, I have tried to avoid the sensationalism and judgemental tone that tend to characterize earlier accounts of Heydrich’s life. Heydrich’s actions, language and behaviour speak for themselves, and wherever possible I have tried to give space to his own characteristic voice and choice of expressions.
This is the question I have been asking myself from the moment I first decided to embark on this book project. It was always clear to me that the writing of a Nazi biography would pose a specific set of challenges, ranging from the need to master the vast and ever-growing body of literature on Hitler’s dictatorship to the peculiar problem of having to penetrate so the mind of a person whose mentality and ideological universe seem repellent and strangely distant, even though the Nazi dictatorship ended less than seventy years ago. But the major challenge lay elsewhere: namely, in the fact that any kind of life-writing requires a certain degree of empathy with the book’s subject, even if that subject is Reinhard Heydrich.
Biographers often use the contrasting images of autopsy and portrait to describe their work: while the autopsy offers a detached, forensic examination of a life, the portrait relies on the biographer’s empathy with his subject. I have chosen to combine both of these approaches in a third way best described as ‘cold empathy’: an attempt to reconstruct Heydrich’s life with critical distance, but without reading history backwards or succumbing to the danger of confusing the role of the historian with that of a state prosecutor at a war criminal’s trial. Since historians ought to be primarily in the business of explanation and contextualization, not condemnation, I have tried to avoid the sensationalism and judgemental tone that tend to characterize earlier accounts of Heydrich’s life. Heydrich’s actions, language and behaviour speak for themselves, and wherever possible I have tried to give space to his own characteristic voice and choice of expressions.
Categories:
Year:
2011
Edition:
1
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Language:
english
Pages:
432
ISBN 10:
030011575X
ISBN 13:
9780300115758
File:
PDF, 3.13 MB
Your tags:
IPFS:
CID , CID Blake2b
english, 2011
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