If anything, and see my first comment, Kershaw would be more aligned with Mommsen than any intentionalists. In my own efforts, I went back to a different tradition which was more prominent in the 1930/40s than later though de Tocqueville prefigured it. But don’t bother with that since it took me a thousand pages to cover the thousand year Reich. The aim was to kill off any interest in it. It didn’t, except in the case of the author himself!
Kershaw’s bio is a polo mint of a book. Nothing on architecture, music, history, history reading habits etc etc. My old friend and mentor Bracher(an Afrika Korps veteran who his Yank captors sent to Harvard) was not really a structuralist but a classic historian of ideas. A better example of a structuralist would be the younger Hans Mommsen who is often accused of diluting Hitler’s demonic will into the ambient bureaucracies.
fascinating and I know what you mean about the hole at the heart of the Kershaw. The book I loved as a student was Karl Dietrich Bracher's The German Ideology, though I have no real idea how that now stands up.
He was incredibly kind to the forty something me. The book holds up alright. Oddly enough my favourite bio of AH was the reporter Konrad Heiden’s Der Fuehrer (he wrote it in English). It stops in 1934 after Heiden fled abroad. But it got H totally right. You can see the evolution of the rest. My other mentors were Fritz Stern who was married to my YS editor Elizabeth Sifton and Saul Friedlaender whose short Kitsch and Death is a classic. His autobiography When Memory Comes is very good too.
Caro - just start reading at JfK ‘s assassination. The days that follow are Caro at his best (and LBJ also) Incredible stuff.
If anything, and see my first comment, Kershaw would be more aligned with Mommsen than any intentionalists. In my own efforts, I went back to a different tradition which was more prominent in the 1930/40s than later though de Tocqueville prefigured it. But don’t bother with that since it took me a thousand pages to cover the thousand year Reich. The aim was to kill off any interest in it. It didn’t, except in the case of the author himself!
Kershaw’s bio is a polo mint of a book. Nothing on architecture, music, history, history reading habits etc etc. My old friend and mentor Bracher(an Afrika Korps veteran who his Yank captors sent to Harvard) was not really a structuralist but a classic historian of ideas. A better example of a structuralist would be the younger Hans Mommsen who is often accused of diluting Hitler’s demonic will into the ambient bureaucracies.
fascinating and I know what you mean about the hole at the heart of the Kershaw. The book I loved as a student was Karl Dietrich Bracher's The German Ideology, though I have no real idea how that now stands up.
He was incredibly kind to the forty something me. The book holds up alright. Oddly enough my favourite bio of AH was the reporter Konrad Heiden’s Der Fuehrer (he wrote it in English). It stops in 1934 after Heiden fled abroad. But it got H totally right. You can see the evolution of the rest. My other mentors were Fritz Stern who was married to my YS editor Elizabeth Sifton and Saul Friedlaender whose short Kitsch and Death is a classic. His autobiography When Memory Comes is very good too.