Kaiser and Führer: a Comparative Study of Personality and Politics
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514 | GEOFFREY COCKS Kaiser and Führer: A Comparative Study of Personality and Politics. By Robert G. L. Waite (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998) 511 pp. $50.00 Waite’s comparative psychobiographical study of Kaiser Wilhelm II GEOFFREYand COCKS Adolf Hitler seeks both the similarities and differences between the leaders of Germany’s last two empires. According to Waite, for each, rulership “served the therapeutic function of enabling him to avoid . psychic disintegration by indulging his need for grandiosity and power,” but “Adolf Hitler was fundamentally an evil person and the Kaiser, for all his faults, was not” (347). Waite, the hopeful rationalist, concludes that Hitler’s regime “could not endure because it was built on the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/30/3/514/1703130/jinh.2000.30.3.514.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 treacherous sands of duplicity, deceit, and degradation” (347). Waite builds his book on the basis of his earlier psychobiography of Hitler, The Psychopathic God (New York, 1977), and extensive primary and secondary source material on the Kaiser. For the latter, he is especially reliant on Thomas Kohut’s psychohistorical study Wilhelm II and the Germans (New York, 1991). As in his previous book on Hitler, Waite amasses an impressive amount of eclectic reading in the psycho- analytic literature. In this book, Waite attempts to combine the Freudian approach reproduced from The Psychopathic God with the self psychology of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. Although this pairing is generally effective (there is a helpful discussion of the relevant distinctions between narcis- sistic and borderline personalities), Waite does not address the differences between the two theories. For example, the Freudian link between homosexuality and paranoia upon which Waite founds much of his analysis is at a variance with the self psychological view of the psychody- namics of (homo)sexuality. Along the same lines, it is surprising that Waite cites Pºanze’s article on Otto von Bismarck, based on the “char- acter armor” research of Wilhelm Reich, but he ignores Pºanze’s com- plete reworking of the analysis on the basis of self psychology in the second edition of Bismarck and the Development of Germany (Princeton, 1990).1 ‘It is also troubling that on occasion, Waite has failed to correct earlier errors in his Hitler book. Once again, for instance, we read of “Max de Crensis” (263) and not Max de Crinis, the real Nazi psychiatrist who has been the subject of not inconsiderable mention in recent historical literature about Hitler and the Third Reich. Waite rightly decries reductionism in psychohistorical studies, and he by and large avoids it. There is also a nice ªt between the analysis of Hitler’s psychopathology and Waite’s argument for the mix of “per- sonalist” intention and “structuralist” indirection in Nazi governance and policy. Although Waite emphasizes biography, his work also occasionally addresses broader historical and historiographical issues in a way that 1 Otto Pºanze, “Toward a Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Bismarck,” American Historical Review, LXXVII (1972), 419–444. REVIEWS | 515 underscores the importance of taking the irrational, the subjective, and the unconscious in history seriously. It is all the more disappointing, therefore, that the structure of Kaiser and Führer sometimes tends to bury such nuggets instead of highlighting them. The book’s ªrst chapters start compellingly with historical material from its subjects’ adult lives, but the inclusion of much of the psycho- historical analysis in the last two chapters (“Psychological Dimensions”; “Kaiser and Führer: The Childhood Experience”) and in eight addenda scatters the material, lessens the reader’s attention, and reduces the book’s impact. Given his unique attempt at a comparative psychobiography using two major psychoanalytic approaches, combined with the work of other psychoanalysts and psychohistorians, Waite could have made Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/30/3/514/1703130/jinh.2000.30.3.514.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 an even greater contribution to the (psycho)historical literature through a comprehensive methodological introduction or conclusion aimed es- pecially at scholars and students. Geoffrey Cocks Albion College Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950. By Don Kalb (Durham, Duke University Press, 1998) 339 pp. $64.95 cloth $21.95 paper Kalb’s book is an attempt to revive mainstream labor history by applyingGEOFFREY COCKS sophisticated neo-Marxist analysis to a case study. The introduction is an impressive discussion of recent neo-Marxist debates in labor history. Kalb says that “the Marxist teleological theory of history is a corpse that must be buried” (6) and that the current shift away from social history to cultural studies, including the “anthropologies” of both Joyce and Reddy (14), is “misleading” (2).1 Instead, he believes labor scholars should “embrace complexity” by focusing on both class and culture and by describing their “dynamic intersections” (17–23). For his case study, Kalb examines workers in the North Brabant region of the southern Netherlands, where Philips, the giant electronics multinational ªrm, is based. Workers at Philips failed to unionize be- cause of the ªrm’s imaginative policy of “ºexible familism,” in which daughters were hired, migrant families brought in, and housing provided in order to ensure that working-class families remained docile (137). Kalb’s theoretical introduction, unfortunately, has little to do with the rest of the book, which is theoretically and methodologically unde- veloped. Kalb studied North Brabant because its workers displayed “an absence of dissent” (34). The only evidence for this claim, however, is that they joined Catholic unions. Because Kalb provides no statistics on either strikes or union membership, we do not know if workers were 1 Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, 1980); William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (New York, 1984)..