Nazis: The Road to Power - Conversation with author Jonathan Myerson
“Extracts from Nazis: The Road to Power by kind permission of Promenade Productions and BBC Radio4 (and BBC Sounds)”
The story of how in just 13 years, Hitler led a fringe sect with less than a hundred members and outlandish ideas to be the dominant force in German politics.
Jonathan Myerson talks to us at History Café about the challenges of bringing this extraordinary and shocking story to life through the eyes of the people closest to him. He tells us how every scene in a long series of 8 plays was based on a real event and that much of the dialogue including Hitler’s speeches comes from contemporary sources.
Jonathan Myerson’s Reading List
Fiction
We Are Prisoners by Oscar Maria Graf - a wonderful autobiographical novel set during the Munich Revolution
Success by Lion Feuchtwanger - set in Munich in the years after the Revolution
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis - a novel by the Nobel-winning husband of the New York Post’s woman in Berlin about the rise of an American dictator
Major biographers
Hitler by Iam Kershaw
Hitler by Volker Ullrich
Goebbels by Peter Longerich
Larger Picture
The Coming of The Third Reich by Richard J Evans
The Death of Democracy by Benjamin Carter Hett - an outstanding look at the mechanics of the slide into dictatorship
In Detail
Where Ghosts Walked by David Clay Large - why did it all kick off in Munich?
Hitler’s Piano Player by Peter Conradi - a marvellous biographer of Putzi Hanfstaengl
The Trial of Adolf Hitler by David King - how he was sentenced to six months for Murder and High Treason
Hitler and Geli by Ronald Hayman - what happened between Hitler and his niece before she committed suicide
Trail Sinister by Sefton Delmer - the Daily Express’s man in Berlin in 1932-33
Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power by Henry Ashby Turner Jr - a drill-down into the month that made him Chancellor
Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett - a really interesting new look at who started the fire