An authoritative and engaging political biography of one of the most important, yet largely unknown, leaders of the German revolution.

"An intriguing view of a historian's journey through the last century... a pleasure to read. With this memoir, von Klemperer joins the ranks of other historian memoirists such as Peter Gay, Felix Gilbert, and Werner Angress. It is a thoughtful and interesting account of what it was like to be a conservative historian of Germany in the decades after 1945." · Catherine Epstein, Associate Professor of History, Amherst College The account of the author's life, spent between Europe and America, is at the same time an account of his generation, one that came of age between the two World Wars. Recalling not only circumstances of his own situation but that of his friends, the author shows how this generation faced a reality that seemed fragmented, and in their shared thirst for knowledge and commitment to ideas they searched for cohesiveness among the glittering, holistic ideologies and movements of the twenties …

Few other historians have shaped our understanding of the Third Reich as Joachim Fest. Fierce and intransigent, German-born Fest was a relentless interrogator of his nation's modern history. His analysis, THE FACE OF THE THIRD REICH, his biographies of Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer and his descriptions of the last days in the Fuhrer's bunker have all reached a worldwide audience of millions. In NOT I, the memoir of his childhood and youth, Fest provides an intimate portrait of those dark years of conflict.

An odd and rather intriguing search for the unconscious determinants of Hitler's beliefs and policies. Self-punitive guilt, enthusiasm for "mercy killing," and a compulsive quest to "poison the poisoners" resulted, Binion finds, from Hitler's orders to the Jewish family doctor in 1908 to treat his mother's terminal malignancy with extremely painful iodoform, a circumstance also cited by John Toland in Hitler (p. 835) without emphasis on the son's role. A second focus is Hitler's treatment for mustard gas poisoning in 1918; he went into Pasewalk hospital devoid of leadership ability, Binion claims, and came out with mesmeric talents; this supposedly involved an hysterical collapse and hypnosis by the doctor, but since the doctor in question tended to diagnose all patients as hysterical shirkers, by Binion's account, the question of Hitler's "hysteria" remains moot. More broadly, Binion sees Hitler's push for Lebensraum as a neurotic expression of "aggressive orality" as well …