ABSTRACT
Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich addressed a question of particular and enduring concern to practitioners of the new "contemporary history" in West Germany. By addressing the problem of Adolf Hitler's rise and reign from the perspective of popular opinion, rather than taking the dictator himself as his starting point, Kershaw was setting The "Hitler Myth" up in opposition to what is known as the "Hitler Wave" of publications in the 1970s, which included a number of biographies and "psychohistorical" studies of Fuhrer. Kershaw's focus was necessarily influenced to some degree by his appointment as a researcher on the Bavarian research project at Munich Institute for Contemporary History, and by the close contacts and friendships that he forged with other historians there. Kershaw saw the intellectual jigsaw puzzle as illuminating key interpretative problems of the Third Reich that Broszat's monumental book on The Hitler State had been unable to handle in any systematic way.
