Personality, Ideology and Politics of Hitler

The scholarly debate over the authentic character of Adolf Hitler and the clues that it may yield for the understanding of the rise to power and Hitler's exercise of it in Germany has resulted in a host of theories. Although analysis of the rationale behind Hitler's actions differs from scholar to scholar, commentators appear to agree, on the whole, that the two principal expressions of Hitler's rise to power were his aggressive expansionism (i.e., the war in Europe from 1939 to 1945) and his programmatic extermination of Jews. The expansionism may be usefully characterized as foreign policy, while the wholesale murder of the Jews can (broadly) be seen as a formal domestic policy.

Bracher emphasizes the ability Hitler had to as it were invent himself in Mein Kampf, showing the discrepancies between his self-proclaimed development as a politician and the facts of his biography. He cites, for example, Hitler's story of being kept out of the Vienna Academy of art by the Jews in cha

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Parkinson's disease and progressive arteriosclerosis, as well as plain old psychosis. He does not accept uncritically the thesis that Hitler was a psychotic, although it is plain he accepts that Hitler was mentally disturbed. In any event, he sees that social forces of postwar Germany and to some degree the social structure of Hitler's personal history as far more decisive for Nazi policies than individual psychosis. This may be distinguished from the analysis of Waite, who views Hitler as a functional borderline psychopath, whose symptomology would have included his infantile perception of the world, his rigid prejudices, and his dreams of Teutonic glory. Further to this point, Carr terms Hitler's dreams of a hegemonic Germany as adolescent fantasy, inflected by Germany's humiliation after the Great War and his own infantile ideas of authoritarian rigidity, and "incorrigibly optimistic about final victory, impervious to ominous signs and portents of war weariness and defeatism" (3:157). The infantilism that other commentators cite as basic to Hitler's failure is a springboard for Waite's approach to explaining Hitler's policies in terms of his personality. Basically, Waite psychoanalyzes Hitler, diagnosing him as a border
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Approximate Word count = 3386
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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