Hitler's Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man in Vienna Brigitte Hamann

(I.B. Tauris), 2010   482pp., £12.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-84885-277-8

First published in 1999 and reissued with a short forward by Hans Mommsen, Brigitte Hamann considers the formative years that Hitler spent in Vienna as a means of trying to explain what turned a relatively normal and generally unexceptional individual into the personification of evil.  For those interested in the nature and impact of urban growth, then the book provides a vibrant account of fin-de-siècle Vienna with its artistic creativity, prosperity and liberalism and also, like all large cities, its poverty, deprivation and squalor. 

If you want to understand Hitler, then the book will of intense interest to you providing a more detailed account of his Vienna years than Kershaw but broadly covering the same ground.  Hitler was on the cusp of respectability and poverty but was more often poor and dejected.  His bitter failure as an artist and his experience of fear, anti-Semitism, racialism and conservatism, Hamann argues, is the key to understanding the rest of his life.  The book was originally published to great critical acclaim and remains the best study of the young Hitler.

Richard Brown