Reviews for Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life

The average rating for Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-06 00:00:00 Sebastian Weiner Hitler was a terrible person, but there's a lot I identify with him as a reader. The nightly marathons. The need to read daily. The accumulation keeping pace with the disposable income. The TBR mountain. The pencil-studded dialogue with the opinions on page. The autodidact itch scratched by encyclopedias. The "If I have money, I buy books. If I have a little money left, I buy food" mentality worded by Erasmus. To have multiple non-partisan observers verdict his used collection as "a comprehensive military history library" is of course an aspiration for a WW buff. I'm up to serveral "you have more books than anyone I know" comments. My copy has 20 spine cracks for 200 pages, dog-ears, coffee & bolognaise stains, travel wear ... It has annotations for 30+ books that I feel I should read myself, such as Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great or Der Untergang des Abendlandes * Also, it was a gift from my father. In short, with a R. Lee Ermey chorus, "there are many like it, but this one is mine". Is Timothy Snyder being too self-centered ? If trench dust or a moustache hair fall from between the pages while you are browsing books which librarians have kept in storage for decades, you are allowed to call that "a discovery". Does he do anything wrong ? Yes, his methodology runs on peacetime signs of use, so he runs out of identifiable material when the war breaks out. What did Hitler read between 1940 & 1945 ? *2016's deluxe translation.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-02-05 00:00:00 Narinde Mafzi You could judge a collector by his collection! Hitler was a man better known for burning books than collecting them and yet by the time he died, he owned an estimated 16,000 volumes - Ironic eh?! [He read voraciously]. Walter Banjamin once said that you could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interests, his habits. The books we retain and those we discard, those we read as well as those we decode not to, all say something about who we are. Quoting Hegel, Benjamin noted, "Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight," and concluded, "Only in extinction is the collector comprehended." Benjamin proposed that a private library serves as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector, leading him to the following philosophic conceit: we collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector. "Not that they come alive in him," Benjamin posited. "It is he who lives in them.