The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler

By Robert G. L. Waite. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977. 482 pp.

ADOLF HITLER: A FAMILY PERSPECTIVE. By Helm Stierlin. New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1976. 163 pp.

The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler is an important book. The author, a distinguished historian well versed in scholarly research

and analytically-oriented thinking, has been largely successful in elucidating Hitler's personality, "at once so banal and so terrible."

In view of the paucity of factual material regarding Hitler's early life and family background, the wealth of pertinent data which Professor Waite's book provides and evaluates is indeed notable. The author probes into his subject's personal history as a determining factor in his later ascent to pernicious leadership, but he also delves deeply into "the image and the man," his career, pathology, successes, failures, monstrous actions, and catastrophic influence on the history of our century. Waite prudently considers virtually everything that is authentically known (or consistently reported) about Hitler's mental and physical characteristics and combines this material with his own findings, achieving a multidimensional, horrifying, but believable psychological portrait.

Some examples: It is well known, of course, that Hitler cherished Wagner's operas, both as a young man in Vienna and later as chancellor in Berlin. His favorite was Lohengrin, the story of the immaculate and heroic knight who rescues the virginal maiden Elsa from her lecherous suitor, Telramund. The oedipal meaning of this theme is of course obvious, and Waite correctly points to it: Hitler saw himself as the immaculate knight who rescued his mother Klara from his evil, lecherous father. But Waite also discusses Hitler's identification with Wagner's anti-Semitism, an identification based on a common dread of a "part Jewish" origin. There is reason to believe that Wagner was the son of Ludwig Geyer, at that time generally thought of as having been a Jew, whil