Book description
DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR and BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK
CLUB title
'I want to be a beautiful corpse, I will take poison' Eva Braun, 1945
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler were together for fourteen years, a
relationship that ended only with their marriage and double suicide in
Berlin. Braun was obsessed with sport, fashion, photography and films,
and seems to have had no real interest in politics. She and Hitler
were unmarried and they had no children. And so, at the heart of the
Nazi regime there was an odd paradox: the leader of a ferocious
dictatorship, himself obsessed with imposing an idea of the 'German
family' on an entire nation, who chose to spend much of his adult life
with a woman 23 years younger than himself in a way that was
unideological and bohemian.
So who was Eva Braun? Heike G rtemaker's highly praised new book is
the first to take Braun's role in the Nazi hierarchy seriously. It
uses her to throw fascinating light on a regime that prided itself on
its harsh, coherent and unsentimental ideology, but which was in
practice a chaos of competing individuals fighting for space around
the overwhelmingly dominant figure of Hitler. Braun had a special
place 'at court'. She was both marginal and exceptional: a more
powerful figure than 'the First Ladies of the Third Reich' such as
Magda Goebbels and Margarete Speer, but someone who almost never chose
to use that power.
Braun's life tells us a huge amount about a particular, catastrophic
era in German history, both in her role as Hitler's companion and as
the hostess at Nazi social events at the Berghof. Heike G rtemaker's
book allows Braun to step out as much as possible from the shadows and
fully inhabit her strange role at the heart of a terrible regime.
Heike G rtemaker is a German historian and author. She was born in
1964, and studied Economics and German literature. She is currently
working on a project on the legacy of Hitler's inner circle in post-war
Germany.
