Hitler. Ascent 1889-1939 - Volume 0 (Hitler Biographies) - Tapa blanda

"A superb biography of the Führer’s pre-war years... It is a tribute to Ullrich’s absorbing biography that one contemplates its second volume with a shudder." (Miranda Seymour Daily Telegraph)

"In a most impressive and massive account, [Volker Ullrich] adds telling details and subtle nuances to the dictator’s portrait and provides a fresh perspective on his rise. The result is a must-read book that is bound to be a critical and commercial success." (Robert Gellately Times Higher Education)

"[Ullrich] does not go out of his way to belittle his subject and the vulnerabilities he calmly exposes heighten the power of this extraordinary portrait." (Sunday Telegraph)

"Fine biography... Where Ullrich adds greatly to our understanding is by making the mercurial, changeable and...profoundly unknowable Hitler believable... This is a major achievement... Impressive and revealing biography." (Nicholas Stargardt Literary Review)

"Volker Ullrich works like a master chef: he trusts his ingredients and uses them with great care. The Hitler that emerges is droll, clever, hysterical, and at the same time alarmingly pragmatic; the reader is able to follow his development from oddball to messiah, propelled forwards by the dynamics between the Fuhrer and his people. Ullrich describes what happened: nothing more, nothing less. And it is exactly this impressive restraint which gives the book its two important qualities: it is both reliable and enormously entertaining." (Timur Vermes, author of Look Who's Back)

Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the Führer had no private life.

Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the Führer. While charting in detail Hitler’s life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions.

Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the Führer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile ― and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the clichéd image of the monster.

This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss.