LONDON: It’s almost 70 years since the outbreak of the Second World War, but we are still picking over the Nazi experience like the scab on an old wound. This January, half-a-dozen films and books grapple with Hitler’s legacy. The Diary of Anne Frank plays on British television, a film of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader exercises the commentariat and Tom Cruise is starring as Von Stauffenburg in Valkyrie. For the tragicomic reality behind the 1944 bomb plot, look no further than Ian Kershaw’s Luck of the Devil (Penguin), a gripping off-cut from his great Hitler biography published to coincide with the release of the Hollywood version.

Shall we ever be released from the spell cast by Hitler and his gang of psychopaths? Probably not, because the Nazi story contains three potent narrative ingredients that combine to make Hitler’s malign power over our imaginations almost irresistible.First, there’s the universal hunger for closure: reconciliation for Europe; atonement for Germany; restitution for the Jews; and renewal for the world. When film-makers, scholars and novelists unite to say: “We shall never forget”, the desperate sincerity of the literary and historiographical effort involved in their consoling narratives is faultless. It’s the witches’ brew of mass murder, race hatred and popular hysteria that poisons the expression of those noble instincts and corrupts the best intentions into voyeurism.

Second, it’s difficult for artists and scholars to come to terms with the totality of evil embodied in the figure of Adolf Hitler. As Kershaw writes: “Hitler’s name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilisation in modern times.” Stalin was a far greater mass murderer, but Hitler’s programme was planned and executed in a hideous parody of organised government.

That’s still not the half of it. Finally, and most chilling, there’s what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”, the petit-bourgeois provincialism of the Fuhrer, whose astounding ordinariness, juxtaposed with the Nazi inferno, continues to mesmerise generations of biographers and historians.

You might think that there were no scoops left to be had in the field of Hitler studies, but consider the latest exploration of these interwoven strands of the monstrous and the mundane in Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W Ryback (Bodley Head). Ryback’s decision to immerse himself in the 16,000 volumes sequestered in the Library of Congress (collected from Hitler’s homes in Berlin, Munich and the Obersalzberg) turns out to have been a masterstroke.

Better known for burning books, Hitler was actually obsessed with them. Books, reported a Viennese contemporary, “were his world”. He collected lavish editions of Cervantes and Shakespeare, whom he considered superior to Goethe and Schiller. Hamlet was a favourite play. More bizarrely, he liked to say, misquoting: “It is Hecuba to me.”

When Hitler was alone with a book, the sign on his study door ordered “Absolute silence!” Even at the front line, his generals could hear him turn the pages through the walls of his quarters. In the final days, the Soviet troops who burst into the deserted bunker found nothing in his bedroom but a pile of encyclopaedias and an edition of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great.

Walter Benjamin said you could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps. Ryback shows that this autodidact’s library contained many of the raw materials for the Nazi programme. “Books that every national socialist should read” included Henry Ford’s The International Jew, Alfred Rosenberg’s Zionism as an Enemy of the State and Racial Typology of the German People by Hans F.K. Gunther. It was Hitler’s evil genius to animate some vicious subterranean currents in European consciousness, but there was a part of him that remains eerily domestic. On the shelf next to his edition of Clausewitz on war was a French cookery book inscribed to “Monsieur Hitler, vegetarien”.

This, you may say, is the stuff of fiction and it’s through fiction as much as film that we find the liberating metaphor with which to tackle the horror of the Fuhrer. There’s a famous passage in Heart of Darkness: “The thing was to know what he belonged to,” writes Conrad, describing the demonic figure of Kurtz, “how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own? It was impossible – it was not good for one either – trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land... how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude? By the way of silence – utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?”

Heart of Darkness was published, as a magazine serial, in 1899. Excluding Apocalpyse Now, there has never been a Hollywood version.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service