Hitler and Carlyle's 'Historical Greatness'

History records no phenomenon like him. Ought we to call him ‘‘great?’’’ Thus began the 1973 biography of Hitler by Joachim C. Fest, the German journalist-historian. Fest's provocative introductory chapter usually springs immediately to mind when the words 'Hitler' and 'greatness' are used in conjunction. Fest clearly had no intention of exonerating Hitler of his crimes, nor of relativising the deeds of National Socialism. The book's introduction, titled 'Hitler and Historical Greatness', must be understood in its own historiographical context. It was a defence of the very genre of historical biography, published at a time when historians on both sides of the Atlantic were turning their attention increasingly to structures, social forces, and other impersonal causal factors. In that very same year, 1973, the influential German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler published his study, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918, which still stands as a classic application of structural analysis to history.