Foto av: Herman Seidl
Historikern och författaren Timothy W. Ryback är en mycket trevlig karl, till vardags verksam på The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation i Paris. Just nu är han högaktuell med boken “Böckerna som formade Hitler: Führerns bibliotek”. När Timothy fick höra talas om Stora Bokbytardagen blev han eld och lågor och ville gärna ställa upp på en intervju.
Och frågan, ja den var ju given.
Vilken bok skulle Timothy ge till Hitler om de sprang på varandra på Stora Bokbytardagen den 20 maj?
- What book I would give Hitler? Well, Hitler was, of course, more famous for burning books than collecting them, and yet by the time he died he had a personal library of more than 16,000 volumes. If I were asked to add one book to Hitler’s book collection, it would be Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz. Hitler never once visited a concentration camp, not Dachau, not Auschwitz, not Treblinka. The book would force Hitler to confront in the starkest terms the atrocities for which he was responsible, and most important would show him that not only did some individuals survive the horrors of the Holocaust but emerged with their humanity in tact, the ultimate triumph over Hitler and the Nazi ideology.
Och vilken bok skulle tror Timothy att Hitler skulle langa upp ur fickan i utbyte?
- Most likely, Mein Kampf, his two-volume autobiography. Hitler kept extra copies of Mein Kampf with him, even in the Berlin bunker where he committed suicide, and was invariably inscribing them to people even in the midst of the Second World War.
However, if Hitler knew that I was an American, I could well imagine him giving me a copy of Sven Hedin’s book about the outbreak of the war, “America in the Battle of the Continents.” In this book, Sven Hedin blames the American President Franklin Roosevelt for starting the war despite Hitler’s alleged attempts to keep peace in Europe. Hedin was a great admirer of Hitler and the respect was mutual. After reading “America in the Battle of the Continents” Hitler wrote Hedin a three-page letter praising him for setting the record straight. As they say, history is written by the victor. Had Hitler won the war, this is the account we would be reading today. Fortunately, the Allies won and, in this particular case, so did truth.
Men Timothy, hur får man idén att skriva en bok om Hitlers böcker?
My interest in Nazi Germany dates back to my days as a graduate student at Harvard University when I was a teaching fellow in a course called Weimar and Nazi Culture. The students used to ask, “Is there such a thing as Nazi culture?” Good question. In fact, many of the leading Nazis were obsessed by art, music and books, including Adolf Hitler.
After moving to Europe in 1990, I began writing for The New Yorker magazine about Germany’s complicated relations with its Nazi past . While researching an article about Hitler’s personal artifacts, I discovered 1,200 books from his private library in the US Library of Congress. I was astonished that no one had ever studied his collection, especially since he has been described, rightfully so, as one of the most impenetrable personalities of the 20th century. I was even more astonished to find not only that some dated back to his days as a frontline soldier during World War One, but that there were hundreds of marginalia, underlined passages, questions marks and exclamation marks in the margins, scribbled comments.
In Hitler’s Private Library, I attempt to “read” the books that Hitler read and to discover the man preserved in his collection.
