Eva Braun: Life with Hitler
Heike B Görtemaker
Eva Braun: Life with Hitler
"I want to be a beautiful corpse, I will take poison". (Eva Braun, 1945). Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler were together for fourteen years, a relationship that ended only with their marriage and double suicide in Berlin. Braun was obsessed with sport, fashion, photography and films, and seems to have had no real interest in politics. She and Hitler were unmarried and they had no children. And so, at the heart of the Nazi regime there was an odd paradox: the leader of a ferocious dictatorship, himself obsessed with imposing an idea of the 'German family' on an entire nation, who chose to spend much of his adult life with a woman 23 years younger than himself in a way that was unideological and bohemian. So who was Eva Braun? Heike Gortemaker's book is the first to take Braun's role in the Nazi hierarchy seriously. It uses her to throw light on a regime that prided itself on its harsh, coherent and unsentimental ideology, but which was in practice a chaos of competing individuals fighting for space around the overwhelmingly dominant figure of Hitler.
3.3 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, History |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
336 |
| RRP |
£25.00 |
| Date of Publication |
October 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1846144899 |
| Publisher |
Allen Lane |
| |
"I want to be a beautiful corpse, I will take poison". (Eva Braun, 1945). Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler were together for fourteen years, a relationship that ended only with their marriage and double suicide in Berlin. Braun was obsessed with sport, fashion, photography and films, and seems to have had no real interest in politics. She and Hitler were unmarried and they had no children. And so, at the heart of the Nazi regime there was an odd paradox: the leader of a ferocious dictatorship, himself obsessed with imposing an idea of the 'German family' on an entire nation, who chose to spend much of his adult life with a woman 23 years younger than himself in a way that was unideological and bohemian. So who was Eva Braun? Heike Gortemaker's book is the first to take Braun's role in the Nazi hierarchy seriously. It uses her to throw light on a regime that prided itself on its harsh, coherent and unsentimental ideology, but which was in practice a chaos of competing individuals fighting for space around the overwhelmingly dominant figure of Hitler.
Reviews
The Independent
Hester Vaizey
"Heike Görtemaker's meticulous book (translated by Damion Searls) is not a sensationalised tell-all account of Hitler and Braun's love life. It cannot be, for so much of the evidence was destroyed in the final days of the Third Reich. The book reassesses the sources that remain. It explains what we can and what we can't know about Hitler's girlfriend, and dispels the many myths pedalled by the surviving members of the Nazi elite."
07/12/2011
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The London Review of Books
Bee Wilson
"[A] superbly measured biography ... Görtemaker argues that the presence of this young, blonde, movie-obsessed and sporty woman in Hitler’s life gives a fresh perspective on the Nazi regime. Braun’s frivolous persona was a negation of the Nazi ideology of womanhood ... In and of itself, this is perhaps less surprising than Görtemaker wants us to think. We don’t need Eva Braun to tell us that the Nazis didn’t live up to their own advertising. The larger question is just how important Braun was to Hitler and his worldview. Görtemaker argues that her ‘normality’ is like ‘an anachronism’ bringing Hitler’s evil ‘into relief’, showing it ‘in a new light’."
05/01/2012
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The Scotsman
Michael Pye
"She hasn’t much to work with, but she works it with forensic dash ... Görtemaker is no apologist, and she knows the dangers of emphasising what’s human about a genocidal tyrant like Hitler, but her meticulous work uncovers something disconcerting — a love story that would be moving if it was all we knew."
19/11/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Nigel Jones
"... about a quarter of the way in, she abandons the idea of plodding through Braun’s sparsely documented early life in favour of opening her book out into a group portrait of what passed for Hitler’s intimate circle. And it is precisely at this point that her book becomes an utterly compelling portrayal of the weird hidden life of the dictator."
23/10/2011
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The New York Times
Dorothy Gallagher
"… a highly readable and consistent portrait of an ordinary woman who loved sports, fashion and jazz; and who was, without a doubt, utterly devoted to the man history has seen as “evil incarnate.” … But knowing that there was genuine love in Hitler’s life, even a sort of domestic existence, do we see Hitler’s “evil” in a new light, as Görtemaker suggests we will? Or do we know, as we have always known, that evil walks among us; that no monster (or his friends and lovers) thinks himself monstrous, no madman thinks himself mad; and that, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir once said: “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.”"
16/11/2011
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The Literary Review
David Cesarani
"Mercifully, Görtemaker avoids probing into the bedroom and settles for the aggregate of testimony that indicates ‘their relationship was basically like a marriage’. Nevertheless, she cannot resist sliding into soap opera when she muses what Eva thought or felt at moments of crisis. Her assessment of what she actually knew, along with other women of the inner circle, is better founded and more significant."
01/12/2011
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The Financial Times
Tobias Grey
"Sadly, a paucity of new information means that Görtemaker fails to dispel the opinion of Hitler’s acolyte and chief architect, Albert Speer, that “Eva Braun will prove a great disappointment to historians”. Instead, the author relies on dubious postwar testimonies of Nazi higher-ups, or tenuously addressing the question of what attracted Hitler to Braun by examining his behaviour with third parties."
16/12/2011
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