Writers and Directors: Claus Bredenbrock and Jascha Hannover
Offering insight and some uncomfortable truths, the documentary The Books He Didn’t Burn, examines the reading habits of Adolf Hitler.
The film’s directors, Claus Bredenbrock and Jascha Hannover, follow academic Timothy Ryback as he tracks down Hitler’s books, a collection which was up to 16,000 volumes at the time of his suicide in 1945. The revelation that Hitler was an avid reader will come as a surprise to some. After all, isn’t reading supposed to broaden the mind? Ryback diplomatically suggests that there are indeed “different ways of reading”. His aim is to find clues among the books for how and why Hitler was able to lead Germany into a war that killed 70 million people.
Ryback starts out at the Library of Congress, which houses 1,300 titles. What is uncovered is an eclectic taste: Hitler said that “I take what I need from books” and this what Ryback finds. Hitler’s copy of Ernst Junger’s World War One diaries, Fire and Blood, has passages underlined. Hitler’s mentor, Dietrich Eckart, implanted the idea of global supremacy in the young politician with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – again a selective reading. Eckart confidently asserted that his protege was “the future of Germany”.
This is, as you might expect, a no-holds-barred documentary, with some very difficult scenes. But the trajectory of the film’s argument, held together by Ryback plus other academics and historians, is what steers us through. Pulling apart the contortionist thinking of the Nazi Party, and highlighting the ever-present danger of the “political radical”, The Books He Didn’t Burn presents Hitler’s pre-occupations – anti-Semitism, eugenics – as being part of a more sustained historical framework.
The documentary’s final and resounding note nullifies the idea that Hitler was somehow unique, a one-off. The man who cultivated his image so carefully every Nazi photograph of him was personally approved, reinvents himself while in prison, after an attempted coup in Munich. Reading books on mysticism and the occult, along with gifted biographies of Julius Caesar and Frederick the Great, Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), lists no footnotes or references. He presents himself as an architect of fate. He does not follow a long line of chancers; he is exceptional; a child of destiny. Uncovering his reading material, Ryback pores over what Hitler has read, and the marked passages depict a reader of limited skill. Despite being surrounded by books, there is no intellectual advancement. Hitler did not read to explore; he read to reaffirm his insecurities and prejudice.
It is the ‘Hitler as Monster’ motif that the film, at its centre, seeks to address. No-one exists in a vacuum, and by understanding Hitler’s influences, we are able to see the conditions that build to produce instances of extremism. The Books He Didn’t Burn doesn’t so much explore unknown aspects of Hitler’s character, but contextualises a man who wanted to be myth. On the surface, it may seem that reading didn’t do a great deal for Hitler, but decades on, the books that survived tell their own story.
The Books He Didn’t Burn is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023.
The Reviews Hub Score:
Fascinating insights
