Hitler-biografie en psychologische duiding: evolutie en problemen van een discipline

With the revival of the Hitler biography, an evaluation is appropriate of the way Hitler's personality is treated in recent historical research. This essay firstly discusses the way present-day biographers tend to deal with the fundamental problem of determining the significance of Hitler's personality on the one hand and structural elements on the other, in the analysis of Hitler's role as Führer. In integrating both intentionalist and functionalist interpretations, recent Hitler biographies achieve a more balanced account of Hitler's position in the Third Reich than was ever accomplished during the first Hitler-Welle in the nineteen-seventies. Secondly, and more specifically, this paper explicitely considers the psychological assessment of Hitler's personality itself, as it appears in Hitler biographies and psychobiographies. With the emergence of a new type of Hitler biography, the question has to be addressed whether the stepmotherly treatment of Hitler's psychological make-up in Hitler biographies - both old and new can be supplanted by a more profound psychological approach. However, biographers - and historians in general - seem very reluctant to apply psychological concepts to the study of Hitler, mainly due to the problematic academie status of the 'classic' psychohistorical treatises on Hitler. At least six different principal difficulties can be identified as inhering in these Hitler psychobiographies of the nineteen-seventies: reductionism, disparagement, determinism, constructivism, contradictory theorising and inflated expectancies. According to the traditional biographers these difficulties bring about methodological trickery and speculation in content, that mystifies rather than furthers our understanding of Hitler. Finally, ways of minimizing these difficulties are suggested, in an attempt to give an outline of a psychological approach that could be valuable to historians and psychohistorians alike.