Sunday, December 31, 2017

Thomas Weber

Thomas Weber is the author of Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi. From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to focus on Hitler's life between 1918 and 1926 in your new book?

A: Despite all the books written on Hitler, I felt that we still didn’t understand how Hitler became Hitler. So I decided that I would try and look with fresh eyes at the year that followed World War I. I would dig deeper than other scholars before, and I would dig at different places.

Once I had found what I was looking for, I realized that I had been wrong in my previous assumptions about how Hitler had become Hitler and that I had to take my story forward to the mid-1920s.

Q: What influences shaped his ideas during that period?

A: The starting point of his politicization and radicalization was to figure out why Germany had lost World War I and, more importantly, how Germany had to be recast to survive for all times in a rapidly changing world.

He was shaped here by...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue