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Bodley Head buys Hitler biography
The Bodley Head has acquired a "landmark" two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler. The book, by historian Volker Ullrich, has been a bestseller in Germany.
World English language rights were acquired pre-emptively from the German publisher S Fischer Verlag, represented in the UK by Sylvie Zannier-Betts.
The first volume of the biography, Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, is more than 1,000 pages long. Published in Germany in October, it will be out in English translation in late 2015.
The Bodley Head’s publisher Stuart Williams said: “This is a landmark work of scholarship, and certainly the most important biography of Hitler by a German writer in a generation or more.”
In the book Ullrich sets out “to correct our perception” of Hitler.
The Bodley Head said: “While charting in detail Hitler’s life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times—the collapse of Imperial Germany in 1918, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the radical transformation of German politics and society from 1933—Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions.
“In the process he corrects many of the myths about the Führer, particularly with regard to his private life and his relationships with women.”
The first volume ends with Hitler’s 50th birthday in April 1939. The second volume, covering the eve of the Second World War to Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker, is due to be released in Germany in 2017.
US rights have been sold by The Bodley Head to Carol Janeway at Alfred A Knopf. Additional foreign rights sales so far include France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.
