Klara's Visitors

A private journals kept by Adolf Hitler reveals him as a figure of farce. Wessel Ebersohn imagines these diaries, and shows Hitler’s arrogant blustering and self deception from boyhood through the First World War and the rise of the Nazi Party during the twenties and the thirties. The tone is bitingly satirical. Even as a small child, Hitler has his screaming rages. In his game he is Bismarck, killing Frenchmen; or the Pope, being infallible. At school he sells his pornographic drawings to the teachers, and then blackmails them for better marks. He works on his voice (he aims at a rich basso) and his handshake (which must reveal the iron of his will). He has great plans for his moustache (“the biggest and broadest in Germany”). He discovers astrology. He experiences abject poverty. In the war he rises only to the rank of corporal. His Lieutenant tell him he lacks the qualities of a leader: “I can scarcely believe my ears; I, who have earned the Iron Cross, 2nd class.” Then in 1919 he takes over the Workers’ party, which has a membership of nine, and is on his way. Among the early recruitsis Rohm, “not afraid to crack a few skulls”, and Goebbels, who “envies my clear blue eyes”. The Swastika as symbol, the founding of the storm troopers, the writing of Mein Kampf, each step in the party’s development ia someone else’s idea, initially pooh-poohed by Hitler, but quickly claimed as his own. The suspicion of a Jewish grandfather is instantly suppressed. But his anguished sense of sexual inadequacy is more difficult to ignore . . . It’s all a farce that illuminates, in an extraordinarily effective way, the monstrous tragedy that was Nazism.