A novel dealing with one person’s early life and development.
What an arduous, Germanic sounding word, this bildungsroman.
A memorable bildungsroman I read was contained in the early chapters of John Toland’s biography of Hitler, a book I was reminded of recently when I saw it in a picture of an apartment I lived in many years ago.
That Toland book still sits on my shelf but I have not read it since shortly after college.
One of the most mystifying elements of Hitler is his path from legitimately elected office to the most despised criminal of modern times. No one, it seems, could have seen it coming, and the root sources of Hitler’s anti-Semitism remain a mystery.
That mystery is what made those early chapters of Toland’s biography so tantalizing. Mining for clues as to where Hitler came from I was left with a feeling of emptiness and noise, and a sense that lives are random and the paths followed are unpredictable.
