Among the authors who have most successfully tackled research on the European 20th century, the British Ian Kershaw (Oldham, England, 1943) stands out. He is a historian and, at the same time, a notable writer who focuses his attention not only on the events political and military, but also in the lives of ordinary citizens and the set of historical circumstances that led to catastrophes of biblical dimensions.
Kershaw is best known for his biography of Hitler, on whom he is probably the world's greatest expert. Hence his interest spans the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. To the collapse of that criminal regime he dedicated The End. Germany 1944-1945, the epic narrative of the last months of World War II, when those Germans who claimed to prefer “an end with horror than a horror without end”, were offered “an end with horror”. He continued that line of work with Hell Descent. Europe 1914-1949 and now publishes Personality and Power, a fascinating historical essay that, through the biographical profiles of twelve twentieth-century rulers, analyzes the positive or, more frequently, negative “greatness” of charismatic leadership.
Given the purpose of the work, these biographies are necessarily brief, but they encompass everything a person interested in history needs to know about their protagonists. Obviously, the profiles dedicated to Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin show Kershaw's absolute domination of those periods, and those referring to Churchill and Margaret Thatcher show the author's interest in the politics of his country, but none of the rest detracts . If anything, to raise the slightest objection, in the one dedicated to Franco the author refers to the class conflicts in Catalonia in the 1930s, omitting any reference to the powerful CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist union that had around a million members.
The chosen characters – both positive and negative, heroes and monsters, tyrants and democrats – somehow escape the general norm of the ephemeral role of the individual subjected to a set of forces beyond his control. In any case, Kershaw avoids incurring in a personalization of history, whose explanatory scope he considers very limited, unless it is presented in the overall vision of a deeper and more complex causal framework. Of course, Hitler was not interchangeable with any other Nazi leader, and without him things might have been very different. This does not mean that it is impossible to understand his trajectory without World War I and the Great Depression of 1929.
Hence the quote from Marx, in the sense that men make their own history, but not of their own free will, under circumstances chosen by themselves, but rather in those that touch them by lot and have been given to them as an inheritance. Kershaw warns that if these leaders did so, it was because they were the product of a unique set of circumstances that made their rise to power possible. Outside of that context, it is quite possible that they would not have left any special traces. Paradigmatic in this sense is the case of Helmut Kohl, a conventional politician who was confronted with the challenge of German unification by the very special circumstances resulting from Gorbachev's rise to power and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Only a challenge of these characteristics allowed him to become a historical giant.
An excellent, entertaining, revealing book with a sticking point where the author cannot avoid quoting Enoch Powell to state that, ultimately, "all political careers end in disaster."
