Hitler + Geli - Softcover

Ronald Hayman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747535124 ISBN 13: 9780747535126

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1998

Synopsis

Few people knew about the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal, when he was 38 and she was only 17. Geli came to live with Hitler in his house in Berchtesgaden with her mother, Angelika Raubal - his widowed half-sister and the only one of his relatives he was on good terms with. The couple shared a strangely intense passionate relationship in the early years they spent together, but it was always dogged by Hitler's hopeless intolerance, chauvinistic attitude to womanhood and his perpetual possessive jealousy. Later, the significant weakening of the bond between Hitler and Geli coincided with the phenomenal rise in the popularity of the Nazis. On 14 September 1930, nearly six-and-a-half million people voted for the party that was, by then, virtually Hitler's personal possession. He had achieved unchallenged supremacy as leader, and this idolization by his public lessened his need to idolize Geli. His tenderness became twisted and his behaviour even more oppressive. In 1931, aged 21, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Hitler; his revolver on the floor and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was absolutely shattered by his niece's death.

About this title

Review

Accomplished playwright and biographer Ronald Hayman has written an imaginative account of the tormented affair between Adolf Hitler and his niece, Geli Raubal, in Hitler and Geli. Contending that historians have not adequately explored "the most important relationship in Hitler's life," Hayman argues that Geli's mysterious death in 1931 fully unleashed the Führer's hunger for power and destruction. He maintains that the connection between Hitler and Geli was characterized by Hitler's sadomasochism, a perversion that drove the dictator toward extremes of jealous cruelty (in addition to arousing within him a desire to be urinated upon, kicked, and verbally abused). Geli indulged his appetites, but she also soothed his loneliness: "She could give him something that no other man or woman could ever offer--the opportunity to relax. She was his only friend." With Geli's death, Hayman concludes, Hitler couldn't find the release he craved, and his sexual preoccupations, no longer confined within his relationship, began to define the authoritarian structures of the Reich.

Hitler's life seems to beg for a psychoanalytic explanation. Indeed, when he boasts about himself, as in the following passage, it is difficult not to draw the same psychoanalytic conclusions as Hayman:

I never feel tired when my storm troopers and soldiers march past me and I stand at this salute. I never move. My arm is like granite, rigid and unbending. But Goering can't stand it.... He is flabby. But I am hard.

Although readers will find a more comprehensive social, medical, and psychological portrait in Fritz Redlich's Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, Hitler and Geli nevertheless examines a strange part of Hitler's life that has been largely neglected.

About the Author

Ronald Hayman is a celebrated playwright, and biographer of Nietzsche, Brecht, Sylvia Plath and Thomas Mann.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0747535124
• ISBN 13: 9780747535126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 251