Despina Stratigakos. Hitler at Home.

Abstract

The historical literature on Adolf Hitler continues to fall into one of two categories: grand syntheses and granular case studies. The former has been well represented by Ian Kershaw’s recent multivolume study Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (2000), while the latter has found expression in works such as Claudia Schmölders’s Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image (2006), Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (2008), and Lothar Machtan’s The Hidden Hitler (2001). Despina Stratigakos’s engaging new book Hitler at Home follows in the tradition of these latter studies and examines a very specific topic—the Nazi leader’s interior domestic spaces—to arrive at larger conclusions about the workings of the Third Reich. Stratigakos pursues several goals: she seeks to expand our understanding of the Nazi regime’s architectural policies by focusing on the interiors rather than the exteriors of buildings; she attempts to show how the regime’s portrayal of Hitler’s domestic life served the propagandistic aim of humanizing him for skeptical German as well as foreign audiences; and she endeavors to explain why both groups initially embraced, but later abandoned, the official portrait of Hitler’s domesticity.