Analysis Of Ian Kershaw's Hubris

Ian Kershaw’s biography on Adolf Hitler 1889-1936 Hubris is a very comprehensive account on his rise to power. Ian Kershaw in his book pursues to put Hitler in his applicable historical context, including the wider history of the formation of the Third Reich as well as Hitler’s life and rise to power, allowing Hubris to be read as a history of both.

In Hubris, Kershaw reconstructs the situations that allowed Hitler’s rise; his education in anti-Semitism in his youth, the destruction of Germany in the First World War, racial nationalism which consumed Bavaria (which his hometown Braunau am Inn shares a border) and the weakness of the Weimar Republic.

Kershaw utilises Hitler in order to create a wider analysis of socio-political factions preceding and ensuing the First World War in Germany. For example, within Hubris, Kershaw utilises secondary sources such as Goebbels’s journals to shear serious insights into Hitler’s deeper thinking; the impetus behind his actions. Moreover, Kershaw comes to the conclusion that although the events of the First World War had an effect on Hitler’s

Kershaw presents his structuralist views in Hubris. As a structuralist, Kershaw contests the intentionalist discourse that Hitler was in complete control over his Germany, methodically executing his ideological goals. Kershaw does not argue that Hitler was not central to the Nazi regime, however he focuses on the structural context of control and implementation in Nazi Germany alongside Hitler’s incapacity to copiously regulate such bedlam. Kershaw’s thesis of working towards the Führer is fundamental in his approach. Kershaw reasons that the supporters of Adolf Hitler interpreted his general ideological courses of action in order to fulfill his will throughout the Third Reich without Hitler having to be directly