The Greatest Warlord

David Blackbourn

• Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw
  Allen Lane, 1115 pp, £25.00, October 2000, ISBN 0 7139 9229 8

Every reader of Don DeLillo’s White Noise remembers the academic niche that the main character has carved out for himself. As Jack Gladney tells it, ‘when I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success.’ Others were equally impressed by the Department of Hitler Studies. ‘You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler,’ says Gladney’s colleague Murray Siskind, visiting lecturer in living icons. ‘I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly pre-emptive. It’s what I want to do with Elvis.’ It’s also what the tabloid magazines once did, with their periodic reports of new Führer sightings. Like Elvis, the man had never died: he had only slipped away to Bolivia.