A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness by Nassir Ghaemi

Author:Nassir Ghaemi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

It was 3 a.m. The friends departed and never discussed that night again until over thirty years later, when, in 1939, the Führer invited his old friend to see a Wagner opera in Bayreuth, the site of the composer’s annual festival. Kubizek recounted that special night in their youth. Hitler was moved. Later, when they both visited Wagner’s widow in her home, Hitler took a turn retelling the story, concluding, “In that hour it began.”

I THINK there can be little doubt that these behaviors represented manic episodes, and if someone ever has a manic episode, it is 90 percent likely that he will also have depressive episodes. Hitler too had periods of behavior that meet our current definition of clinical depression, especially when he would suffer setbacks in life, such as being turned down twice by the Vienna Academy of Arts. At that time, Kubizek recalls:

His mood worried me more and more as the days went by. I had never known him torment himself in this way before. On the contrary! In my opinion, he possessed rather too much than too little self-confidence. But now things seemed to change round. He wallowed deeper and deeper in self-criticism. Yet it only needed the slightest touch . . . for his self-accusation to become an accusation against the times, against the whole world; choking with his catalogue of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted. I see him before me, striding up and down the small space in boundless anger, shaken to his very depths.

Hitler himself admitted some of the depression in Mein Kampf: “As the Goddess of Misery took me in her arms and so often threatened to break me, the Will to Resist grew, and in the end the Will triumphed.”

Kubizek notes one more significant personality trait in Hitler: obsessionality. While this trait is unrelated to his bipolar disorder, it’s worth mentioning here because we can use it to mark his later decline. This obsessionality was reflected in Hitler’s attention to personal hygiene and correct behavior. Even when he was poor, as he was when Kubizek knew him, he was always well groomed and fastidiously dressed. At night he placed his trousers under his mattress to give them a sharp crease the next day. He also was polite in social situations and had good manners.

His obsessive rigor went well beyond personal appearance and cleanliness. Kubizek recounted that “the most outstanding trait in my friend’s character was . . . the unparalleled consistency in everything he said and did. There was in his nature something firm, inflexible, immovable, obstinately rigid, which manifested itself in his profound seriousness and was at the bottom of all his other characteristics. Adolf simply could not change his mind or his nature. . . . I remember what he said to me when we met again in 1938 after an interval of thirty years. ‘You haven’t changed, Kubizek, you have only grown older.

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