The Hitler of History: Hitler's biographers on trial John Lukacs Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 290pp, £25 ISBN 029764646X

It's a new century, but we still can't have enough of Adolf Hitler. Even if you followed the reporting of David Irving's trial of strength with Penguin Books, devoured the reviews of Ian Kershaw's latest volume of biography, watched the meretricious television series Nazi Women, and worry spasmodically about Nazi war criminals still in our midst, there remains an insatiable desire, not to know more details about the life of the Fuhrer, but to know what to think about it. Where do we locate Hitler? In what pantheon does he lie? With whom should he be compared?

These are all questions that will go on being asked, at school or over supper, until Hitler is counted with Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun among the distant ogres of the misty past, occupying a Valhalla from which there is no exit (except perhaps via the dubious route of a Reputations television programme).

So expect a round of applause for the latest offering from John Lukacs, a writer rather better known in America than in Britain. With a penchant for high-sounding philosophical statements and a mellifluous prose style that many novelists would envy, with an exaggerated belief in the old Wasp values and a pronounced hostility to all forms of modernism, Lukacs is the kind of liberal-conservative historian that many older Americans love and value. He is now in his seventies, and you would be right to feel that they they don't make them like this any more. Lukacs does not give you facts or even theories: he doles out ideas and opinions by the spadeful. He makes you think, and he tells you what you should think. He is an entertaining and loquacious guide through the ever-expanding minefield of Hitlerian and Nazi historiography. The end result, rather surprisingly, is hypnotic, revelatory and, ultimately, convincing.

Lukacs is unhappy about the current attitude of the Americans towards the Third Reich, and about the trend of American historical scholarship generally. (He is particularly scornful of psycho-history.) For the past two or three decades, American interest has focused on the Holocaust and the fate of the European Jews, to the exclusion of almost all other aspects of 20th-century German history. Lukacs wants to widen the agenda, or at least to return to the other intriguing (and in some ways dangerous) topics that have been pursued by historians in Germany itself.

In particular, he wants to recover the figure of Hitler from the mindless demonisation to which he has been subjected. Without in any way wishing to rehabilitate the Fuhrer, he seeks to locate him more accurately in his time and place. He argues provocatively (to an American audience, though not perhaps to a European one) that Hitler "may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history of the modern world". He echoes, with obvious approval, the suggestion first put forward by Joachim Fest, in 1973, that if Hitler had died suddenly in 1938, he would have been regarded then, and to this day, as one of the greatest Germans in history.

Part of the particular value of Lukacs's book is that he makes available the writings and opinions of several German historians who have never been published in English, although their ideas and the results of their researches may have been subsumed in the work of British historians such as Ian Kershaw and Michael Burleigh. Lukacs usefully explains the views of Werner Masur and Eberhard Jackel as well as the revisionist theses of Andreas Hillgruber and the ever-combative Rainer Zitelmann (the title of whose first book, Hitlers Erfolg, or Hitler's Success, is an indication of the thrust of his message).

To their credit, writes Lukacs, German historians and writers "have made strenuous, earnest and honest attempts to come to terms with this chapter of their history". While their researches may have been partially assimilated in some recent English books, it is good to be reminded of the harsh and divisive historical discussion about the Hitlerzeit that has been going on in Germany over the past two decades, a debate that has been almost entirely lacking in Britain or the United States.

In writing a book about what other people have published about Hitler, Lukacs wants to put Hitler back centre stage. He is not concerned with the historians who have written about the Third Reich or about Germany in the 20th century, he is only interested in Hitler's biographers (and there have been more than a hundred of them). This creates a convenient and manageable area of investigation, but many researchers might consider it to be a dangerously narrow focus. Have we not spent decades examining the social context, the international conjuncture, the economic and political background and the historical legacy? Must we go back to concentrating on the responsibilities of a single man? Lukacs says yes, and would encourage the rest of us so to do.

So what kind of a man was Hitler? Lukacs asks the questions and provides the answers. Did his ideology spring from Munich or Vienna? (Munich.) Was he a revolutionary or a reactionary? (The first.) A nationalist or a racist? (Both.) Could he be described as a hero or a statesman? (The latter.)

Each section of the book is devoted to one of these topics. Lukacs insists that Hitler's political formation derives from Munich. He argues that by 1919, when Kurt Eisner's "Soviet republic" in Munich was finally crushed, public opinion in Bavaria "turned out to be overwhelmingly radical, nationalist, populist, anti- cosmopolitan, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist and anti-Jewish". This, not effete prewar Vienna, was the rich stew in which Hitler found his ideas and his voice. (Lukacs wrote this book before he had read Brigitte Hamann's Hitler's Vienna: a dictator's apprenticeship (OUP), which might have led him to modify his view, although, in a footnote, he claims to agree with her conclusions.)

Lukacs follows Rainer Zitelmann in believing that Hitler was a revolutionary. Hitler described himself as such, and although he sometimes varied his rhetoric (notably in the years immediately before 1933), he had a great loathing for the German bourgeoisie, as much as any socialist. He was contemptuous, argues Lukacs, of "their caution, of their thrift, of their respect for the monarchy, of their social aspirations, of their desire for safety, of their class-consciousness".

Lukacs believes that Hitler cannot usefully be compared to Caesar, Cromwell or Napoleon, because he was so utterly different. Yet "more than any of them", he was able "to energise the majority of a great people, in his lifetime the most educated people in the world, convincing them to follow his leadership to astonishing achievements and extraordinary efforts".

It is easy to write about the horrors of the Hitler era. It is more difficult to know how much weight to give its achievements. Lukacs is well aware that weighing these two factors in the balance will continue to occupy the attention of historians and ordinary readers for many years to come. Which is why we continue to be mesmerised by the details of that disappearing epoch, and can never have enough of Adolf Hitler.

Richard Gott is working on a book about the British empire

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