Hitler and Stalin Lives of Fantasy
Uploaded by baadasskid69 on Oct 27, 2011
This essay discusses the fact that both Hitler and Stalin, as young men, constructed fantasy lives.
I Introduction
Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin tried to make the world over to suit themselves, and in so doing, caused the destruction of millions of lives. But when I began to read Alan Bullock’s book about the two Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives) I was struck by the similarity in their home lives, particularly in their relationships with their fathers. Of course attributing their brutality to an unhappy childhood is a vast oversimplification of complex personalities, but the parallel is striking. Furthermore, it seems as if both men took refuge in a sort of “fantasy” life to help them deal with an unpleasant reality.
. Whenever we see photos of videos of these men, they’re usually in uniform, reviewing their troops or watching a party rally. It’s almost impossible to think of them as ever having been young, or having ambitions to do anything except rule. And yet Hitler desperately wanted to be a painter; Stalin studied theology with the idea of entering the priesthood. Both the artistic world and the theological seminary exist outside of the more “normal” pursuits most people follow. They are generally considered to be career choices that people make because they feel a special “calling” for them; in other words, they are fantasy lives, in the sense that artists and priests move in a different world from most people.
This paper looks at the tyrants as young men, and the ways in which they sought to escape from their ugly realities into fantasy.
II Stalin
We don’t know as much about Stalin as we do about Hitler for the simple reason that it is (or was) much harder to get information out of the USSR than it was to examine the records of Nazi Germany. We know that Stalin’s parents were both peasants, and that his father drank heavily and beat both his wife and son. His alcoholism made it difficult for him to hold a job, and he finally took a job in a factory 40 miles away, but his legacy was profound: “Undeserved and severe beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father was.” (Bullock, p. 5).
With his father gone, Stalin’s mother went to work as a housekeeper to an Orthodox priest, and decided that the...