Der Fuehrer goes digital
You may have seen reports that a consortium of German research institutions has set out on a seven-year project to compile, annotate and digitize every speech Adolf Hitler gave as chancellor of Germany. The effort is being led by the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte, or IFZ), a Munich-based German government research consortium founded in 1947 to preserve the various records of Germany’s experience under
National Socialism. Since that time, there has been a whole lot more zeitgeschichte in Germany, of course, so the IFZ also does a lot of work on communism, the Cold War and German reunification. It helps run important museums and historical sites, such as Hitler’s mountain retreat on the slopes of the Obersalzberg.
Canada doesn’t have anything like the equivalent, but, then, it arguably doesn’t need one. Historians of modern Germany understand that they have a special mission not shared by their colleagues in countries with, shall we say, less turbulent recent pasts.
English-language news reports on the IFZ project have naturally focused on the perceived danger of propagating Hitler’s oratory — the undisputed key to his unlocking of political power — in the 21st-century world. One can’t help having the thought that this is a bit like having a coronavirus research lab in a big Chinese city right near a meat market. But, of course, if we hope to achieve a full understanding of the Hitler phenomenon, the essential basis for this is a proper and complete scholarly edition of his speeches — incorporating sound and film recordings where possible.
At the moment, despite decades of effort, no such thing exists. The go-to source for students of Hitler’s technique has traditionally been the four-volume, 3,000-page Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, edited by the historian Max Domarus (19111992) and published in German beginning in 1962.
But, of course, you aren’t really getting the full effect of Hitler’s oratory from a book. And the Domarus volumes have the problem that their versions of the speeches are mostly taken from reprints in the Nazi official newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter (“People’s Observer”). Such a situation is never ideal for conscientious historians, but only in recent decades has it become apparent how far some of these official versions are from what listeners actually heard, thanks to endemic Propaganda Ministry rewriting.
The co-head of the new project is Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the IFZ and author of a landmark 2017 biography of Hitler’s pet architect and economic manager, Albert Speer. In January, Brechtken gave an absorbing German-language interview explaining the need for a contemporary, digital Hitler edition. Run that puppy through Google Translate and you’ll see that it commences amusingly with the question, “So do you have Adolf Hitler’s voice running through your head all the time?”
(This probably wouldn’t be as hellish as it sounds. Hitler didn’t really bellow like a rabid animal at his audiences for hours on end, contrary to the image of him that you and I have in our heads, and he spoke with a low, musical
Austrian accent that German speakers like Brechtken seem to appreciate.)
Brechtken observes that in writing his Speer book, he spurned Domarus and went to the Sisyphean trouble of running down primary versions of relevant Hitler speeches himself. Hundreds of audio recordings of Hitler have survived in the German Broadcasting Archive in Frankfurt, and the project team has computer scientists and even linguists on board to help integrate text, sound and historians’ notes on persons, events and the context of the speeches.
No doubt the finished product will be consumed by the uglier parts of today’s German political right, and its reaction is fully predictable. Some will say, “At last, the real Hitler!”; and an equal number will say, “This whole project is a parcel of falsehoods — it’s fake Hitler!”
HUNDREDS OF AUDIO RECORDINGS OF HITLER HAVE SURVIVED.